Throwing spaghetti against the wall?

Something that I've been encountering lately are clients and other businesspeople who try anything and everything that is new in the hopes that it will bring in more business. That never works. The metaphor I like that describes that approach to marketing is "throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks."

Do you know if your customers even like spaghetti? The point here is that you need to know your clients and their business as well as they do. Who are the people who make the decisions about your product and service? What are your objectives?

An interesting story from a job I was in about ten years ago: we were looking at website redesign and what products to show and what features to have on the website in order to make things easier for our customers to order. Turns out, most of the actual buyers didn't have regular internet access, nor were they even at a computer most of the day. A website wasn't the best way to reach them.

Sit down, write a profile of your ideal buyer. Include as detailed a description as you can including industry, geography, size of company, title of the buyer, preferences gained through customer surveys or website statistics. Realize, too, that the industry your client knows they are in may not be the industry they are actually in. One example is a large manufacturer of pacemakers and other health devices. They know they are in the health care industry. You may think they are in the manufacturing industry.

The more you know about your buyers, the better you can communicate the value of your product or service.

Signing off for now. PJE