Customers Archives - Thoranna.is

The Marketing Process

It is important to understand the process your prospective customers go through before they are ready to buy from you. If you understand that process, you are better equipped to put in place marketing activities that support it, and help lead people through it and towards buying from you.

The first step is for people to know you exist, so awareness is the first thing. I don’t just mean people seeing you once or twice, but actually noticing you. Actually registering that you exist. It’s pretty hard to get people to buy from you if you don’t exist, right? ;)

But even if they know you exist, they may not be in any way interested, and if they are not interested, the process stops there. You must gauge their interest in order for them to be open to what you have to say. Only if they find you interesting will they move on to check you out by, for example, coming to your website or checking you out on social media, or popping into your store the next time they are in the neighbourhood.

What if they don’t like what they find when they check you out some more? Then you’re dead in the water. [Read more…]

Branding: What Is Your Brand?

There is one important aspect of your marketing that you always have, whether you are aware of it or not, whether you consciously create and manage it or not and whether you care or not. You always have a brand. You may want to check out this blog post on what a brand or branding is, but basically a brand is is everything that comes into people’s minds and all the emotions that are evoked when they come across an entity, whether the entity be a company, product, service or person. There is always a brand, because the mere mention of the entity will always conjure some thoughts and emotions with people, however little they know about it.

Think about it – even just hearing a name will give you ideas straight away. A name that may include as few as three letters. Who hasn’t heard someone say something like, “He doesn’t look like a Joe” or, “Josephine – that sounds like an old lady!”. Even abstract words conjure mental and emotional images. Mere sounds that have no intellectual meaning. That’s kind of the whole thing about onomatopoeia. The feelings and thoughts that a sound evokes. Therefore, however little people see, hear or experience of your business, product, service or yourself, they will always have some thoughts and emotions attached to it.

Are You In Control?

The question then becomes: Do you just want to cross your fingers and hope that the branding that people have in their minds and their hearts for you is a brand that will help you in business and will make them buy from you? [Read more…]

How Do You Monitor Your Business Competition?

In a previous blog post we have established that you can’t ignore your business competition. But putting them under the microscope once and then just leaving it is not enough. Things change and develop very fast in today’s world, so you always need to keep your finger on the pulse.

Analysis of the business competition varies greatly between businesses and markets but there are always basic things to consider such as: [Read more…]

Why You Need To Analyze Your Business Competition

Recently I met with the CEO of a promising Icelandic startup company. When I asked him how their competitors did things, he said he didn’t care that much about their business competitors, he just wanted to focus on what they themselves were doing. I get it. Don’t get sucked into focusing too much on the other guys. However, here’s the problem:

In your marketing, you are trying to convince people to buy from you rather than someone else. [Read more…]

Sometimes You Should Fire Your Customers!

It is important to find your ideal target group, the people you should be selling to. A way to do this is to find your dream customer, those you absolutely love to work with and for. But have you ever thought about this?: It is equally important to know who you don’t want to work with. As much as you should work on your marketing to attract the customers you want, you may also need to fire some of your existing customers!

Bear with me. Some people may think I’m crazy, but the thing is, a customer is not the same as a customer. Not all business is good business.

As a rule of thumb, you should fire about 20% of your customer base. Hear me out on this one. [Read more…]