Being in the right place at the right time

Grant Leboff: So Bryony, one of the things that’s always important in marketing is obviously to be where your customers are and to be there when they are …

Bryony Thomas: Yes.

Grant Leboff:… When they’re looking. How does one go about making sure, as a business, that you achieve those things?

Bryony Thomas: Yeah, I mean it’s what everyone thinks marketing is about isn’t it? Showing up at the right time, in the right places, getting your business noticed. The first thing I’d say is, it’s the last thing you should do. You really do have to make sure that you have a compelling proposition, that you have the aftercare in place, that you have the proof and the sales tools to make sure that when you do spend time and money on showing up, that the next step is in place. Definitely put a kind of little health warning on this part of the process. It’s what in Watertight Marketing we call “taps” and if you have a leaking bucket then taps are the last thing you want.

That said, then let’s say you have those wonderful things in place, how do you sensibly turn your taps on? These days it’s getting increasingly easy. You used to have to kind of cast the net quite wide, buying an ad-spot in a paper that might have a circulation of millions and then getting to the right people through the relevance of the headline or whatever that might be. These days it’s increasingly easy, the data giants that are Facebook, LinkedIn and many of those things do allow you now to put quite a focused message in front of precisely the right people. Whether that’s people who visited your website earlier and, therefore, through re-targeting you know that they were interested in something or in fact you know they were interested in something particular on your website. You can be quite scientific about it.

You can also just be quite smart and approach it from more of a kind of attitudinal demographic, good quite old-fashioned customer persona perspective. Map out their lives, map out their route to work, think about what they do in their hobbies and the really important piece here is to bring those things together. Do all the good old-fashioned stuff that any marketer will walk you through, in creating a persona, looking at their media consumption, interests, hobbies. Overlay that with some of the really quite sophisticated material that’s available to us now through all these data giants and then find messages, create material that is highly relevant because the most important way of getting people to come to you is putting something in front of them that they actively choose to engage with.

Grant Leboff: So, all the things you’ve said sound sensible. It presupposes one thing, which in my experience of working with customers is not always the case, which is they actually have identified who their customer is in effective way. Let’s say they’re going to do all those things, how do they ensure that that “Who”, that identification at the top if you like, is correct?

Bryony Thomas: Well they map it based on who’s at the bottom. I work with step-up businesses rather than start-up. So if you were coming to me for start-up advice and you’re starting with a blank sheet of paper that is really tough and you do have to test and model and iterate, put products out there, test to see who buys, do focus groups, all those good things.

Most people that we work with have been in business for a little while, so you absolutely can model the ideal customers that you do have and you can model the ‘less than ideal customers’ that you do have. Look at what are the common features of the people that aren’t right for your business and what are the common features of people who are right for your business. Essentially work it, as I say in Watertight Marketing all the time, “Do it backwards.” Take a look at the people you do have, interrogate who they are, where they hang out and reverse it up through the process.

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