Follow the Customer (one of my values)

Why is it so important to follow the needs of your customers?

We made several changes to our business just before the pandemic changed the way business works in 2020 that were almost prescient.?

We’d already been using zoom for our sales meetings and had started pushing to get people to work with us via zoom or at our offices to help maximize everyone’s time and deliver better results to our clients without making someone pay for all the extra travel time.?

Several years ago we created an online marketing school that people paid a small monthly fee to join. In January 2020 I started to feel an urgency to make this platform completely free, and to give it away as a gift that had no upsell to it.?

This felt completely counterintuitive, but was to help address the growing needs of potential customers who came to work with us, and found they could not afford to. I hated sending these people away with nothing and wanted to help them grow their business to a point where they might be ready to work with us one day.

We were also struggling to keep our school updated with all the digital marketing changes along with our current client work, and weren’t able to release me to create updated content all the time.?

Making it free helped us follow a need in customers / potential future customers and served them better.?

Little did we know the world was about to change and this free tool would then be used by hundreds of stressed business owners, suddenly with plenty of time to work on their business, but little money to pay for it!

We promised anyone who joined that we would not use it as a lead generation. It was a gift, and we would not barrage them with upsells and cross sells. We did offer them to join our Facebook group, and from building relationships there we gained more paying clients than I ever expected.

We’ve recently recorded an updated version of the course (and renamed it "My Map It Marketing". It's built the way we now work with our one-on-one clients.

This new course launches Jan 24, 2022, and comes with a promise of free quarterly digital marketing updates. We've moved to new ways to offer our free, and this time following the customer meant putting a price on it to help us have the capacity to serve those who buy it better. (You can register your interest in it here - there will be a launch week discount)

This week we sent out an email to all our past enrolled students, who'd had our free Toolbox. We gifted them this upgrade free - because that fits our values.?It was us listening in to what we knew would suit them best.

Another area we identified for our clients was the plans we provided often left them with more questions and sticking points than we felt comfortable with.

While every strategy is different, many of the activities are the same from plan to plan.?

For me, setting up an Instagram account is simple. For many of our clients it is anything but easy! So we developed a portal our clients get free lifetime access to that helps take them through all of the steps they need to take to make their own page, step up accounts, write content and more.?

We don’t have to do this. We know we could just tell them to google it, or check out youtube. But we also know our clients are busy, they need the help, and they may not know which advice is best to follow, so we made it our job to meet their needs.

Following the customer has led to us discovering new opportunities too. We’ve run in-person events for years, but had to move to webinars when the world changed. Since then we’ve maintained our webinars, which has opened us up to serving people out of our core geographical areas.?

Following the customer has meant finding more of them too.?

As we move into 2022, with more expected twists, turns and unexpected developments, it's more important than ever to take time to tune in and listen to what your customers, clients and community need.

When we follow the customer, we grow our business in a more meaningful, impactful and profitable way.

Are you following the customer?

Rachel Klaver is a marketing strategist and owner of?Identify?where we help small business owners develop a marketing strategy and action plan for their business. This newsletter is based around ideas in her new book Be a Spider, Build a Web coming out in 2022. You can also check out her?podcast?here