One of the first things I always cover in my marketing workshops and consultancy work is the need to define your perfect client or customer.  No product or service has ever appealed to everyone and it is far easier to define your perfect client or customer and then build your product and service to meet their needs and design your marketing to appeal directly to them than it is to develop and promote a generic product or service.  The advantage of the first approach is that it also helps differentiates you from your competitors who offer a generic service or product to everyone.

There are numerous steps to defining your ideal client or customer (which is just the first step in the SMART marketing process) but a basic knowledge of DiSC profiling will help you get the people you want.

DiSC defines 4 sets of characteristics and, through its survey, it measures the level of these characteristics in the participant.  Everyone has a different mix of these characteristics (for example a lot of business people are D/Is meaning they have a mix of both of these styles) but for marketing purposes we take a simple approach and split our prospects into these 4 sets and say they are a high “D”, or high “S” and ignore the other components.

But why is this useful?  Well, different styles respond to different messages and require different levels of information and time to make decisions.  If you just want to work with one or two styles (one of my clients for example only wants to work with high “I”s) then you can tailor your marketing to them.  If you want to attract the spectrum then you need to direct the various personality styles to additional sources of information tailored just for them.

Let’s take a look at these four styles:

D: Dominant Style

These people are:

• Extrovert
• Facts focused
• Task Orientated
• Demanding
• Decisive
• Self-confident
• Want results
• Fast at making decisions
• Dislikes details

Examples include Simon Cowell and Alan Sugar.

I: Influencing Style

“I” style people are:

• Extrovert
• Relationship orientated
• Enthusiastic
• Optimistic
• Friendly
• Want to have fun
• Get on well with people
• Buy people first
• Fast at making decisions
• Dislike being bored

Examples include Richard Branson, Jonathon Ross and Graham Norton.

S: Steadiness Style

These people are:

• Introvert
• Relationship orientated
• Calm and Steady
• Good Listeners
• Careful and patient
• Slow at making decisions
• Fond of stability and dislike change

Examples include: Mother Teresa and Princess Di.

C: Compliant Style

This style of people are:

• Introvert
• Fact focused
• Task orientated
• Precise
• Follows the rules
• Logical and careful
• Wants details
• Slow at making decisions
• Dislikes disorder

Examples include Gordon Brown and The Queen.

So how can you apply this to your marketing?  

Well is there a style you want to deal with or a particular profession you prefer to work with?  For example, accountants, solicitors and engineers tend to be “C” types; not all are by a long stretch but they are more likely to be this type than another.  So when you write a piece aimed at them you need to include lots of details about your business, procedures, how you work with clients etc.  You know that they will take a while to make a decision so you need to keep drip feeding them information and not try to rush them.

On the other hand, if you want to work with “I” types then your marketing should contain plenty of photos of people smiling, lots of testimonials from satisfied clients and you should adopt a friendly and informal tone of voice.  These people will make a fast decision about if they want to work with you or not and this will mainly be based on how much they like you.

But what happens if you want to appeal to all styles

There is a simple solution and that is to write your marketing pieces for “D” styles and provide links to web pages (either on a web site or in an e-mail) or to other pieces included in a direct mail pack that satisfy the other styles.

Why write for “D”s first?  Simply as they like things short and direct with headlines and bullet points.  Write your e-mails or landing pages like this and include links that satisfy the other styles such as a link to a testimonial page for “I” styles, a link to in-depth “case studies” for “C” styles and a detailed piece on how your service or product is tailored for “S” styles.

Ultimately if you work on a one-to-one basis with someone then you need to decide which style(s) you work best with and where this is not the case, e.g. selling products or mass-used services then you want to use the above strategy to attract them all.

If you would like more information on marketing strategy and articles then please visit my marketing strategy web site.

SEO is so important and critical for any website and if you’re reading this blog you are probably researching what is needed to get your site noticed with the search engines. There are so many conflicting ways to do SEO’s and so many experts claiming certain techniques will get you more traffic and decent rankings.

So how to get started with SEO?

SEO is very complicated we’re not going to kid you… and there are many different elements to SEO and so many different approaches.  SEO isn’t cheap, as often much research, analysis and content needs to be written.  However many small businesses simply just don’t have the budget to get the high rankings, particularly if they are going up against “Blue chip” companies. However there are ways to help your site get on the right track for more traffic and a higher search engine ranking.  We’re going to give you three areas where you can do “SEO yourself !!!”

Onsite Page Optimisation

This is critical to get your website on the right track to rank highly and to keep users on your website.  A website which is poorly constructed with a small amount of content will not do well in the search engines.

The structure of an ideal website page:

• Title Tag: – This should have relevant keywords and should be no longer than 70 characters long.  i.e. Basic SEO | Onsite Page Optimization | The Brand

• URL – the page URL should mention at least the primary keyword.  i.e. http://www.thesite.com/onsite-page-seo.html.   A bad example would be http://www.thesite.com/title?1234a

The Page Content:

The wording on the site is the meat. If it’s well written and informative it will keep users on the site.  Google particularly looks at the time spent on a page.  If a user goes to a page and comes straight off the site, as there is no meat and a confusing layout, then Google will measure “The Bounce Rate”.  If it’s a high percentage you’re site will not score highly on Google.  We recommend that the text should be at least 300-400 words with images and video.  The primary keyword should be mentioned at least 4 times.  You often see websites stuffed with keywords either within the main body of the text or in the footer. For example “web design Tamworth”, “web design Staffordshire”, “web design Sutton Coldfield”.

The content must be unique and must not be a duplication of another webpage or site. For example if you have an article don’t submit it to an article submission site.  This will syndicate your content across multiple sites in which Google will down grade your site as it will be seen as spammy.

If you can regularly blog on your website about interesting topical subjects this will help your users.  Again these need to be written well and be structured correctly.  Video is very important for a blog and can really help your site.

Images/Video Alt tags

A page often tells a thousand words but search engines cannot really see what’s in the image. So we need to tell the search engine what the image is really about. The easiest way to do this is give the picture a proper name i.e. not “DSC10002.jpg” but perhaps “church-in-tamworth.jpg”. However you need to add a small description into the ALT tag of the images. (Most CMS systems allow you to add this). For example:  <img src=”church-in-tamworth.jpg” alt=”St Ediths Church in Tamworth” /> this tells the search engine the image is of a church called St Edith’s and it’s located in Tamworth.  Remember to keep the file sizes small as search engines hate slow loading images and websites.

Conclusion:

All of what we mentioned will not get you an instant page 1 ranking.  As you can see this is pretty straight forward, a web page which has decent content, is well structured, easy to read and informative will help your website get on the right track.

So the growth of the internet has seen many changes to the world and how we operate. We don’t find the news these days, it finds us and the influx of social networking sites over the years means we don’t have to travel far to learn what is happening the big wide world.

So with all the social media noise going on, and don’t get me wrong, I contribute my fair share, how can you stand out as a new business or one wanting a fresh approach ?

The answer is simple – use of video!

My embroidery and print business uses social media with regular updates on both Facebook and Twitter, but one small change to the way we market our business and “bang”, we have over 400 page views within an hour of a simple post to our Facebook page.

How, I hear you say… well we decided to introduce a simple video on our Facebook page outlining what we do, samples of our work and our philosophy of how we operate our business. We didn’t include testimonials of what our customers said about us, we didn’t include “Buy now, pay later” or “established in 1999 etc”, we simply focused our video clip on samples of our work and what we can do for our customers.

Scribble Video – what are they!

A five minute video needs to be engaging to the viewer otherwise they will quickly close the clip and away they go, so how did we decide to get round this and keep our viewers attention ? We used a very engaging method through a product called Scribble Video. The feedback we had was extremely positive as 100% of our viewers viewing the video were thoroughly engaged for the full five minutes and five seconds that the video runs and it allows us to stand out for the crowd – something our business advises of our own clients! So what is Scribble Video ? Well the simple answer is see for yourself!

With the increasing demand of iPhones, Tablets and iPads, video marketing is here to stay and Scribble Video will help you be different from the crowd and could win you more business!

Author: Simon Cox simply loves helping people starting up in business. With over 20 years of SME business experience, managing staff, finances, marketing and overall entrepreneurship, he has a lot to offer. Follow him on Twitter – @simoncox73 – there’s always something going on!

© Simon Cox 2013