Defining Your Marketing Assets

In this article, I will show how you can maximize profits by matching your marketing assets to each of your buyer stages.

Doing this will allow you to give the proper marketing materials to the proper person, matching their current needs and interests and automatically building confidence and trust.

There are three major steps to defining and creating your various marketing assets. The rest of this article will discuss each step in detail.

Refining Your Target and Niche Markets

The easiest way to begin defining your primary, secondary and niche markets is to look at your past clients. Create a spreadsheet of past customers by creating column headings. You can start with customer name, business name, industry type, products purchased, and total amount spent over a particular time period.

As you go through your data, look for common customer patterns that will allow you to start creating definable data on your main target market as well as any secondary markets or niche areas.

Maybe you uncover a group of customers that tend to purchase low-cost impulse-type products. Maybe there is a certain niche segment where the buying process is long because all purchases must go through an approval committee.

Work to define the following three areas:

1. Main Target Market - Use your customer data to reinforce and further define this main category of customers. Remember, size of your main market is not important. What is important is that the customers in this group all have similar wants and needs.
2. Secondary Markets - As you look at your past customers, you may find you can group some into their own areas. For example, a roofing company that targets commercial buildings may find they have a secondary market in residential roof repairs.
3. Niche Markets - A niche market is a small segment of customers that have a set of needs no one else is currently providing. As with secondary markets, don't force the creation of a niche area if nothing comes up in reviewing your customers.

Once you have a good feel for your various target markets, it's time to go one level deeper.

Creating Your Buyer Personas

The idea behind creating a buyer persona is to understand the wants and needs of a specific demographic. Once you understand what's important to your Buyer Personas, you'll stand a better chance of persuading them to take specific action.

You will want to identify any physical or emotional characteristics within your target groups. For example, you may uncover certain buying habits or needs based on any one of the following:

• Gender
• Level of Education
• Income Range
• Marital Status
• Occupation
• Employment Status

If you're a BtoB, then it may make more sense to create Corporate Personas instead of Buyer Personas. A Corporate Persona can be segmented based on type of company, employee size, total revenue, and so on.

The process of developing your personas is simple even if it does take some time. Just follows the below steps.

1. Define your distinct target market areas - You did this in the previous step.
2. Within these defined target markets, look for distinct ways to group customers with similar buying patterns, demographics, personalities, needs, goals and motivations.
3. Create short Buyer Persona Biographies for each of these customer groups.

If you would like to learn more about creating your Buyer Personas, please read The Buyer Persona.

Next, we come to the main theme of this article - how to create and define your various marketing assets.

Defining Your Marketing Assets

I recommend defining marketing assets for your suspects, prospects and customers. Suspects are people that have never contacted your business while prospects have made some initial company contact (but have not yet made their first purchase).

Let's look at a specific example. Say your business sells science equipment to schools and your major target market is the elementary school system.

Below is the chart you would create to help define and build your various marketing assets.

So what exactly is a marketing asset? It's the set of fliers, letters, downloads, brochures, websites, folders, etc., you give to a particular buyer persona at a specific buyer stage.

Here are the marketing goals for each buyer stage.

1. Suspects: The marketing assets you develop for suspects must educate them on how your products and services will solve their problems. Do not sell to your suspects - it's way to early in the buying cycle to sell. Instead, think of the various materials you can generate and give away to suspects that will help build trust and confidence.
2. Prospects: The marketing assets you develop for prospects must continue to nurture and presell until the conversion process is complete.
3. Customers: Because customers have made at least made one purchase from you, marketing assets developed for this buyer stage should focus on adding additional value by upselling, cross-selling and increasing retention.

By creating a market asset matrix (like the figure above) for all your major target markets, you can work to develop the best marketing collateral for each buyer stage.

So, here's an example of marketing assets that might be developed for the elementary science teacher at the suspect stage. Remember, a suspect has made no contact with your company so the main marketing goal is to educate and to build the trust required for conversion to a prospect. Here's a list of materials one might develop for a fictional company named "HyTech Science Supplies."

• Brochure explaining benefits and advantages of working with HyTech
• Free web download "How to budget your science equipment needs"
• Testimonials from other science teachers
• Case studies showing how HyTech has saved schools thousands of dollars
• Free monthly teacher newsletter "The Science Revolution!"

As you can see, all the above marketing pieces are designed to educate and create trust. Once the science teacher has registered for the newsletter or otherwise expressed interest, they move themselves from the suspect stage to the prospect stage, where they will continue to be nurtured with additional marketing material until they make their first purchase.

For each of your major target markets, spend the time to develop your own marketing asset matrix and watch your level of buyer engagement improve dramatically.