In prior posts I’ve talked about defining your perfect guest or target audience, so that your communications and offerings will get better results. By marketing and designing for a defined group, you’ll meet their needs, attract their interest and get their business.

 

What People Want from You Differs Across Their Raw Food Journey
People’s needs usually change at different stages in their evolution to raw. So how you can best help them changes, too.

Someone new to considering raw needs info to get excited about all the possibilities. When deciding and acting, people want information on the how – recipes, dealing with social situations, traveling raw and so forth. And for some, the maintenance phase may require help on how to keep up their enthusiasm, diagnose where they’ve fallen short and figure out how to stay on track.

When people first look at a behavior change, they focus on the positives, often around why they should take the next step. How many of us have gotten excited about the benefits of working out, saving money, engaging in environmentally friendly practices, etc. But as we move along the path from awareness to interest to decision to action, we often start focusing on the negatives: too hard, too expensive, inconvenient, negative reactions from others, and more.

Sound familiar? Maybe you faced some of these challenges when becoming raw. Or maybe you’re up against them in some other aspect of your life.

Designing for People Where They Are
So take a look at your business and how people move from awareness to interest to decision to action to maintenance.

• Can you effectively serve people at every stage of the process? Or should you focus more narrowly with people at specific points.
• If you’re helping people across the spectrum do you have the right offerings and communications to meet their evolving needs?

This discussion has covered using the awareness to maintenance spectrum to consider who’s your perfect guest. You can also apply the same thinking to evaluate where people are as your clients and whether you’re doing everything you can to move people along to action and repeat business. That will be a topic for another day!

In my post “How to Turn Up The Volume on Your Message,” I talked about how defining your target audience or perfect guest would help you get better results by aiming your message at a more select group of potential clients. In this post and the next, you’ll learn more about different ways to define who’s in that special group.

Demographics
One of the easiest approaches is based on demographics, or simple descriptive elements. Examples include age, gender, ethnicity, occupation, income level, education, family status, sexual orientation or geographic location.

Continue reading Who’s the “Perfect Guest” to Make Your Business the Biggest Party Ever?

Next Friday (8/28), I’ll be speaking on “Avoiding Costly Marketing Mistakes: Essential Ideas to Grow Your Raw Business” at the business dinner at the Raw Spirit Festival outside Washington, DC. The presentation will show you how to maximize your results by steering clear of three common and disastrous errors.

Find out what these problems are and how you can attract more customers or clients by taking the right approach to marketing. You’ll see how to apply the results in communications such as your web site. Expect interactive elements in to keep the energy and learning levels very high!

The presentation will be based on my over 15 years in marketing strategy for organizations ranging from start-ups and grassroots groups to the Fortune 500 and leading nonprofits. I’m known as a popular, dynamic speaker at conferences including Taking Action for Animals, Animal Rights and the Humane Society of the United States’ Expo.

I would love to share this valuable information with you. I know you can use these ideas to help make your business as amazingly inspired as your raw lifestyle! To purchase tickets for the dinner, please visit the Raw Spirit Festival site at http://tinyurl.com/cb2qgy.

I’m also looking for someone to video my talk in exchange for a free dinner ticket. If you’re interested, please let me know ASAP at Caryn [at] InspiredRaw.com.

Hope to see you there! And please spread the word.

As a small business in a big world, getting out your message can feel like broadcasting an iPod with cheap speakers in a huge concert hall or sports stadium.

So what can you do? It’s important to send the right message, but if no one can hear it, it doesn’t matter. Effective social networking can ramp up your volume a bit, but you still may be lost in the all the background noise. And unfortunately, you just don’t have the resources to buy the advertising equivalent of a gargantuan amplifier.

Talk to Your Perfect Guest

The answer is to find a section of the audience and then get close enough that they can hear you. And that’s exactly what you want to do with your business. Whether you call it segmentation, or target marketing, or ideal client, the idea is that by defining a subset of people you want to serve, you’ll be able to make your message heard. Since your communications can make your business the biggest party ever, how about thinking about this ideal target person as your “perfect guest?”

Not so long ago, defining your target market as people interested in raw foods would have been enough to focus you on a small group of potentially like-minded people. But as the interest in raw foods has grown – along with the number of coaches, chefs, programs, etc. competing with you to serve them– you need to refine your target market further.

There are now raw foods businesses addressing the special needs of brides, families with children with autism spectrum challenges and people looking for gourmet international recipes. These businesses can craft a more compelling answer to “what’s in it for me” by understanding in detail their more narrowly defined perfect guest.

So who’s your perfect guest? In my next posts, I’ll talk about different ways to decide, so that you can broadcast loud and clear to get results.