So, when I was first learning about marketing so I could get paid waaaaay more per hour than most 19 year old kids… One of the big buzzwords was “demographics”.
Demographics is a way of saying, “birds of a feather flock together”. Shoestring Step TWO is Find Out The W’s and it means Who Wants your stuff, Where they are, What they really Want (and Why)… and finally, hoW to contact them.
Shoestring Step TWO: Find Out The W’s
The lawn aeration biz I got into back in the Eighties gave me my first introduction to “birds of a feather flock together.” You can read about it in my free booklet, “The Shoestring Story”. Y’know, I COULD have randomly picked a street and walked up and down it handing out flyers… but that would have been a crapshoot. I might get a good neighborhood and sell a boatload of my services… or I might not.
See, the specific “Who” that I was looking for fit a pretty strict set of criteria… customers of my lawn aeration bizness had to:
- CARE about the health appearance of their lawn
- NOT have the time to do it themselves
- HAVE the money to pay someone else to do it
Now, some neighborhoods you could drive by and tell that NO ONE in ’em really cared about their lawns and didn’t look like they had money either… so it’d be a waste of time and money to pass out flyers there.
Some areas were thick with retirees. These guys had the money and cared about their lawns, but..! They mostly did everything themselves. My flyers would become kindling or birdcage liners in the DIY ‘hood 😉 .
Other neighborhoods had folks that did care about their lawns and didn’t have time… but the reason they didn’t have time was that Mom AND Dad were working three jobs. These folks didn’t have the money. Passing out flyers there would result in a lot of slammed doors.
But in a wondrous hidden portion of the world was a magic land. A land where piles and piles of people fit all three requirements: they WANTED the benefit of my service, DIDN’T want to do it themselves, and COULD afford my price. The challenge was finding this magical place.
Knowing Where to find your Customer is like Shooting Fish in a Barrel…
Lazy Man’s Shortcut to Piles of Customers
We’re talking about demographics, right? Target marketing. Find out Who Wants your stuff and Where to find oodles of ’em.
Now if you’re a nineteeen year old lawncare entrepreneur, there’s two ways to figure out where to drop your flyers. ONE, you could walk up and down a lot of streets. Or TWO…
You might spend a little on market research.
In my case, I opted for the latter. My partner and I took out a classified ad and got only three jobs; there was barely enough profit to pay for the ad. But we noticed that out of about 150,000 homes that that newspaper reached… TWO of the calls came from the very same street.
Do you smell opportunity? We did. THAT street is where we handed out flyers… and we got boatloads and boatloads of jobs on that street and a few surrounding it. Like shooting fish in a barrel. The magic was all in knowing Who our customer was and Where a lot of them were hanging their hats.
By taking the time to Find Out The W’s, we saved a lot of energy and made a lot of bank.
As you’re walking the Shoestring Steps… the Five Steps to Five Figures per month… Step TWO is all about finding out the W’s and getting your message in front of the right people at the right time.
Keep Stepping,
Kurt
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