Marketing

Making sure you bring your offering to the right market

The Delivery Concepts Guide introduced you to the concept of the Personal Value Proposition from Alan Dibb. Now, let’s fill one out for your offering.

In filling out the PVP, be brutally honest. Your ability to be precise in marketing to a target audience will set you up for wider impact. Focus on the long term value of this work, so that you can achieve the short term.

Functionally, the PVP is a qualitative answer that you’ll quantify for ease of communication. Here’s how to complete the PVP:

1. Name all the market segments you know about that you serve. Do not start with “everyone”. Instead, think critically about who you know uses your product, program, service, or system. For example, say your program maintains a database of current and past grants and cooperative agreements. If you’ve done recent discovery or design work on this database, you might have a list of users you know access the system. If your office hasn’t recently done discovery or design work, you’ll need to look at the user information you have, whether that’s institutional knowledge from colleagues, analytics on who’s accessing the interface, or manual submissions and inquiries.

2. Assign each market segment a score 1-10 for PVP: A score of 1 is a very low value; a score of 10 is a very high value. Warning: this might feel like guessing, but push past pure guesswork by talking to colleagues and looking at competitors. Who’s been in the space the longest? Who’s the one who seems to know? Bring them into the process to get the voice of experience in the room.

3. Compare the scores of each market segment. Whichever segment is the highest value is where you should target your marketing.

Again, this is not to exclude other market segments, but to focus your resources on a high-value target so that then, after serving that customer well, you have the resources, know-how, and systems in place to expand your marketing and let more and more people know about the excellent product, program, service, or system you provide.

Building a backstory

Now that you’ve identified your highest value customer, it’s time to really understand what they need from your offering. You can use any data you have on the customer segment to help you write this story, but the trick is to build a model customer that seems to live and breathe. Give them complexity; give them depth.¹ Invest in this character, as you already invest in your real-world customers.

Doing good work now means not only that you’ll build a marketing plan that speaks impactfully to your customers now, but that you’ll be able to evolve the character over time, creating a valuable efficiency.²

Answer the questions below to build a persona for your ideal customer.³ A few rules:

1. Remember, you do not need to go do additional research to answer these questions. Simply use the data you have, including institutional knowledge you have access to, and build a character. You are not building a description of a real person; you’re building an imaginary one with a completely imaginary life.
2. Do not answer these questions through the eyes of your organization. Try to imagine the character: what do they do? What would they seek out?
3. Do not limit your answers to a business or professional sphere. This exercise only works if you build your ideal customer out just like a real person: with multiple interests, dimensions, and even contradictions.

• What keeps them awake at night, indigestion building up…eyes open, staring at the ceiling? -What are they afraid of?
• What are they angry about?
• What are their top daily frustrations?
• What trends are occurring and will occur in their businesses or lives?
• What do they secretly, ardently desire most?
• Are they part of any particular professional subculture, like skilled trades, teaching, engineering, or the legal profession?
• What content do these folks consume online, on TV, or in print?
• What’s a day in this person’s life like?
• What’s their main emotional attitude towards your offering? Are they distressed? Interested? Annoyed they have to be there?
• What’s the ONE thing this character craves above all else.

Now that you’re really in the mind of your ideal customer, you can figure out how to market to them effectively, and effective marketing is the basis of successful delivery.

What to do

To start to wrap your arms around marketing, assess your resources if you’re making a new offering or take an audit of what you already do as a team that seems to fit in each of these categories if you’ve got a legacy product. You might not have any advertising or promotions going, and that’s okay; now that you know, you can work on them.

Going from audit to action

The next step is to move from audit to action, actually bringing your offering to customers. Get to know them in a targeted way, never losing sight of the value your work brings to a highly defined customer area. Here are a couple of exercises to get you started: Elevator Pitch Develop a few great elevator pitches for different contexts. Keep it simple, and don’t overthink it. Fill in this formula:

You know (problem)? Well, what we do is (solution). In fact, (proof).

Tune this statement for each of your marketing segments.

Repurpose your training

One of the secrets of marketing is that great marketers usually give their most important secrets away.⁴ Giving away your secrets might seem counterintuitive, but just because someone knows something doesn’t mean they can implement it. They need you for that.

If you’ve already built a training series, then you can pull the “secrets” to your offering out of it and offer those in your advertising and promotional materials. If you haven’t built trainings, think of your initial advertising campaigns as training for potential customers: does your offering solve their problem? How can your work complement theirs?

Conclusion

Building meaningful, resilient relationships with customers requires your building a great customer funnel from advertising through to retention, and that’s a long road. For a deep dive on marketing, two resources have stood out to us in the course of research for this Delivery Guide. Follow either one of these plans, and we know you’ll see results:

Alan Dibb’s One Page Marketing Plan Strong Brand Social’s S3 System

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