Wishing everyone all the joys of the holiday season!

Watch for some big new announcements coming soon–we’re going to start the New Year with a bang!

Jeanne and Mike

Last week, I wrote about the power of surveys to help you profit from the downturn.  Now we’re taking it a step farther and showing you some specific steps you can take to take control of your fate:

Find out who your customers are:  If you don’t know basic demographic information–such as age, gender, location, and they kind of business or employment your customers are in–you could be in deep trouble.  To market effectively, you simply must know who among your customers has been hard hit by the downturn.  Having that information will allow you to target your marketing effectively by segmenting your customer lists and offering discounts to individuals in hard-hit groups.  You can’t convince them that you “feel their pain” if you don’t know what kind of pain they’re in.

Remember, not EVERYONE has been hit hard.  Baton Rouge, the city in which I live, is still doing well economically.  It’s important, then, to target offers differently to people who live in areas such as this than you do to people in hard-hit geographic areas or demographic groups. If you can market heavily to areas that are stronger and offer special discounts or incentives to those who are harder hit, your click through and conversion rates will rise dramatically.

Find out what your customers want to buy:  Even people who haven’t lost their jobs or the value of their portfolios are changing their buying behavior.  Remember, Wal-Mart’s sales are up.  Companies that can offer the products and services to help people weather the economic storm will do well.  So think of some possible products and services your business could offer and find out how your customers are likely to react to them.  Get creative and create the products and services your market needs right now.

And remember that social media can’t give you what you need.  The problem is that you hear from only a PORTION of your customers in social media.  Often, it’s the people who either love your products or hate them!  You need systematic evidence from a broad cross-section of your customer base.  Get that evidence and you can create the products your customers want and sell them to those customers.

Find the weak spots and correct them:  Every business has some Achilles heels, things that need to be worked on–but far too many don’t know what those problems are until it’s too late.  Make sure you’re getting an ongoing stream of information about what customers like and DON’T like about your products, services, and particularly your customer service.  Find out what needs to be fixed and fix it, right away, to ensure that you keep your customer base strong.

Bring more people into the funnel:  Referrals are gold.  Why?  Because the people your customers and clients are connected to in their networks are generally like them in key characteristics, such as age, income, education, etc.  Because research has established clearly that the people we hang out with in our social networks are similar to us, referrals and “customer evangelists” are one of the most efficient, low-cost ways to expand your reach into your target market. 

Think about it:  You have a pool of people who are very much like your customers and your target market sitting right there, you just have to find a way to connect with those people.  And that’s what referrals do.  So put requests for referrals into every survey you do. 

And here’s a hot tip:  DON’T just ask people to think of “friends” who might want your products or services, ask them to think about people in particular places, such as civic associations, sports leagues, places of worship.  You’ll get MUCH better results.  (And in our new survey product, we’ve included a model for exactly how to do this.)

Convert those prospects with rock-solid proof:  Once you’re bringing those prospects into the funnel, you’ve got to find ways to convert them.  The best way is with systematic evidence that your products work and your services change lives. 

Case studies and testimonials are great, but they’re not enough.  It’s much more powerful if you can combine that “qualitative” evidence, the “stories that stick,” with hard data that say 86% of the people who bought this product were very satisfied, 90% of the people who came to the seminar took away useful information, etc.  Put that evidence together with the case studies and testimonials that you can also generate through surveys and you’ll increase your conversion rates dramatically.

Follow these steps to using surveys effectively and you’ll find yourself among the firms who conquer the economic downturn and actually profit from it.

The game has changed radically. And I know one thing for sure: Companies that find ways to thrive in this bleak economic winter will be the ones that get the information they need to adapt quickly to the constantly changing conditions—and profit from them.

How can you make sure YOUR business is among them? By using surveys to get the information you need on who’s buying, who’s likely to buy, what they want to buy, how you find those people, and how you convince them to buy YOUR products or services.

The simple fact is, you can’t assume that your customer base will look the same six months, or maybe even six weeks from now, as it did six months ago. The changed economic climate has changed everything—including who can buy and who can’t.

Which means information from surveys is absolutely critical. Surveys can tell you, for example,

• · Where your customers live—so you know what % lies in regions that have been hit hardest by the downturn (because the differences across regions are huge);

• · How old your customers are—because certain age groups have been hit much harder than others;

• · What kind of business or employment they’re in—because some industries have been devastated recently, while others have actually grown;

Having this information is critical to figuring out how to profit from this recession.

Not sure what to do?  Here’s one of the questions you should ask yourself right now: Do I know what % of my customer base is in some of the hardest-hit regions, like Arizona, California, Florida, Michigan, and Nevada? The effect of the downturn on your business, and on the decisions you make, will be very different if 5% of your customers come from these areas than if 50% live there.

As a new McKinsey Quarterly report states, “To weather the storm, it will be necessary to identify anew who and where the profitable customers are and to prioritize the most effective marketing and sales vehicles for reaching them.”

In other words, you have to know such things as

• · what % of your customers are in areas or demographic groups that are likely to cut spending dramatically,

• · how to attract customers who are better off, and

• · how to market effectively to both groups.

Many companies “get it” already, so much so that they’ve GOT the information they need. For example, one survey showed huge variations in customer demand for a beverage company’s products across “micromarkets”—small (sometimes REALLY small) geographic areas. The size of the differences was staggering: Demand was 13 times higher in some regions than other regions, 5 times higher in some cities than other cities, and 3 times higher IN SOME ZIP CODES than in others.

Although this survey was done by a “brick and mortar” company, this strategy is at least as important and effective for online marketers.

For example, if you know where your customers live, you can segment your list and offer special marketing messages, incentives, discounts, and programs for people in harder-hit areas with greater price sensitivity.

The same holds with demographic groups. Suppose your niche is the dog market, where many customers are older women. If that’s the case, you may need to offer special pricing and incentives for this hard-hit group.

In a niche that sells high-end products to affluent young professionals? Lots of those folks are (or were) in financial services. Ouch. What to do? If you KNOW a good chunk of your customer base is there, market other goods, products, or services to them now—things that help them save money, cut costs, or increase their incomes, for example.

Boomers have pumped lots of money into lots of markets for years. But their freewheeling spending was often fueled by borrowing against home equity. As that equity goes down and credit markets stay tight, their purse strings will also tighten.

What will boomers cut? A 2006 survey asked them where they would make cuts if they had to drop their overall spending by 20%. Travel, furniture, and clothing were the things mentioned most. But even if those products won’t sell well, programs and information products that help them “do more with less,” by finding these items at lower cost or by helping them start businesses that produce an additional income stream, MAY sell well.

The bottom line, then, is that NOW MORE THAN EVER, you need to know who your customers are, where they are, what they want. You also need to generate as many referrals as possible, to get more qualified prospects into your funnel.

Simply put, the things that worked six months ago probably won’t work six months from now. Use surveys to get the information you need to survive and thrive.