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M-Zone

Sell more by knowing your customer’s customer by Julie Albury, M-Zone.

As a professional marketer I am always telling my customers that they should know more about their customers in order to market and sell to them efficiently. I recently applied this to my own marketing process in a rather different way.

I have a wide range of marketing skills and experience across several different industries, so when I asked myself how I should market me, I realised I needed to focus on one industry and find one “angle” to work on.

I have vast experience in the IT sector working with software, hardware and IT service companies and I know that they need to market to different types of contact, depending on whether they are selling business applications or services.

The common theme, however, is that their prospective customer’s IT director will nearly always be involved in the decision making. So, instead of researching my target audience, I decided to research my target industry’s audience.

I decided to survey IT directors and find out exactly how they prefer to be marketed and sold to. Among other things, I asked what communication channels they preferred (direct mail, email, phone calls, adverts, shows etc) and the frequency of communication.

I conducted the survey by phone, in person and on-line using SensorPro™ from Intellegentia Ltd. Perhaps not surprisingly, the survey showed that IT Directors prefer electronic communications and invariably don’t bother to file paper documents that come their way. That gave me the information I needed to focus my approach based on digital marketing campaigns within the IT sector into their customers’ IT directors. With the survey as evidence it gave my target contacts good reason to secure marketing budget for digital campaigns and helped me to secure contracts with them.