Tech-Savvy Customers

This is the final and part eight in our series on how to start thinking about marketing. To see our previous articles, check out:

Product or Service
Strong Company Brand
Strong Personal Brand
Established or Create the need
Long or Short Sales Cycle
Known Industry
Established vs. Startup

The final, and yes, it is last on purpose, is to start looking at your customer base.   The first question is, are they tech-savvy?  It makes no sense to put efforts into Twitter if your customers or prospects aren’t there. Period.  On the other hand, you can’t assume you know. Age is NOT a determining factor in technical ability. Part of it has to do with defining technical.  If you ask the average person “how technical are you” they will say they aren’t. However if you start asking do they use Facebook, Skype, Twitter, a computer, excel, etc. you will get a better handle on what they do and don’t do.  A great way to start the conversation is to ask how they find a new business they didn’t use before.  Do they open the phone book or go online?   Non-tech savvy customers mean they are not going to find you on the web no matter what you do so putting your time there is a waste.  However, if they do anything on line, there is a good chance you could direct them to where you want to be.

There are many ways to get yourself on line and able to be found.  The best way to start is to Google and Bing your company, your name if you are in sales, and then keywords used to find your products or services.  Typically when you Google or Bing those keywords you will want to include a geographic area. Use these as your starting points to determine where you should be and also make sure all the information is correct.  You want to do this with both search engines because otherwise there could be information you missed.  The good news is Yahoo now uses Bing as its search engine so you no longer have to check there as well.

Once you have a handle on their ability on line, you will know how much effort to spend there vs. other marketing avenues.  In the course of those discussions you should also learn where they look for information and what information they need so you can target your efforts.