Business Planning – Velocity Media

17 February 2016

40 Questions to Help You Develop Buyer Personas

When it comes to putting together a successful marketing campaign you need to know your market, but a general overview will only get you so far. To get that intimate voice in your copy where a potential customer wonders “are they reading my mind?” you need to get to know your buyer.

One of the best ways of doing this is to establish buyer personas, avatars that describe the people you want most as your customers. These avatars embody the demographics, characteristics and behaviours of your ideal customers, and give you a single person to direct your blog posts, social media updates, videos and sales copy to.

But where do you start? While ideally you want to interview your ideal customers to get it straight from their mouth, you can also start to establish personas by looking at past customers and who you want to work with. Here are some questions to ask to get you started.

Getting to know your buyer

The best place to get to know your buyer is by looking at their demographics and personal characteristics. This will give you clarity around the type of person you are targeting and the voice you need to use to communicate to them.

1. Are they male or female?
2. What is their age?
3. Where do they live?
4. What stage of life are they in?
5. Are they in a relationship or single?
6. Do they have children?
7. What level of education did they complete?
8. Did they attend a specific school or university?
9. Where do they work?
10. How long have they worked there?
11. How much do they earn?
12. How much do they spend?

Uncovering your buyer’s pain points

Your buyer’s pain points can tell you a lot of information, from what problem you need to solve and product or service you need to lead with, to the messaging you need to use, objections you need to overcome and risks you need to minimise.

13. What do they value?
14. What is important to them?
15. What do they need?
16. What concerns them?
17. What frustrates them?
18. What do they want from your product/service?
19. What don’t they want from your product/service?
20. What do they appreciate?
21. What don’t they appreciate?
22. What challenges are they experiencing?
23. Are they time-rich or time-poor?
24. Are they more focused on price or value?
25. Are they a leader or a follower?
26. Are they cautious or a risk taker?

Discovering ways to reach your buyer

By drilling down further you can also start to identify the best ways of reaching your buyer, what tactics to use in your marketing and who else you may need to market to get your buyer over the line.

27. Where do they like to socialise?
28. Who do they like to socialise with?
29. Who’s opinion do they hold in high regard?
30. Who influences their buying decisions?
31. Who do they look up to and admire?
32. What are their interests?
33. How do they like to communicate?
34. What books, blogs, magazines, newspapers, trade publications, blogs and websites do they read?
35. What radio, television or YouTube channels do they listen to and watch?
36. What social media platforms are they most active on?
37. What social media influencers do they follow?
38. What events do they attend?
39. What places do they frequently visit?
40. What other brands do they use or are they loyal to?

These are just some of the questions you can ask when establishing your buyer personas. When you have an avatar set for each of your target customers consider pinning their profiles up in your office so you and your team never lose sight of who you are talking to and serving.

Do you use buyer personas to help make your marketing more targeted and engaging?

Amanda

P.S. Need help developing your Buyer Personas? Give us a call on 07 3820 9810 or email info@velocitymedia.com.au

15 December 2015

Four ways to reignite passion in the New Year

December is often a month of extremes in business. You are either incredibly busy or incredibly quiet; burning with enthusiasm or burning out. Even the extremes can change week-to-week!

So how do you find inspiration, reignite your passion and keep your motivation up as you head into another year?

1. Switch off

While it is great to do business development and planning over the break with distractions at a minimum, it’s also important to take some time to switch off completely.

Amazing things happen when you put distance between you and your business. Perspective changes, passion reignites, and problems are often more easily solved. Not to mention all of the ideas you were too busy to listen too before will come rushing in like a flood.

2. Go back to your roots

Remember why you started your business in the first place. What need did you aim to fill? What impact did you want to make? What outcome did you want to have?

So often we lose track of our mission when we are stuck in business as usual. Going back to your business roots will help you to remember why you do what you do and give you the opportunity to realign your day-to-day activities with what you want to achieve.

3. Go where your customer is

When we start out in business, we wear multiple hats. We talk to our customers, develop and market our products, manage our finances and run our businesses.

But often as we grow, we start to delegate or outsource many of these tasks to save time. As time goes on, we can often become further and further removed from our customers.

The trouble is our customers are our greatest source of learning and inspiration. When we become disconnected from them, we lose focus, relevance and direction. It is through them that we see needs, find patterns and identify opportunities to innovate so get back in touch.

4. Get out of the ‘in’

Once you’ve switched off, got big picture focus and have reconnected with your customers, it’s time to start working on your business and putting those big ideas into action.

As entrepreneurs, it is often the big picture activities and innovation plans that get us more fired up. They also just so happen to generate the most results, so make sure ‘working on’ your business has a regular place (and the proper priority) in your schedule.

The New Year is a great time to make new working habits. What can changes can you make to your schedule to spark passion and boost motivation?

Amanda

10 March 2015

Five tips for managing and increasing your capacity

When it comes to growing a business, there are a number of areas you need to manage and monitor closely. While most businesses watch their competitors, customers, and cash flow proactively, there is one area often forgotten until reached – capacity.

It’s a familiar story; a business owner focuses on sales to increase cash flow but has not thought about how or when they can deliver all of the new work sourced. As a result, the quality of products or services can be lower or the turnaround longer, affecting their reputation.

To ensure you don’t play the lead role in this tale, here are five tips to help you manage and increase your capacity.

1. Know how much work you can handle

The first step in working out your capacity is to know how much time it takes for you or your staff to produce and deliver the products or services you provide. Then you need to work out how much time you have designated to fulfilling customer work or orders in addition to all of the other operational tasks that keep your business running as usual each working day.

Also look at your current workload, are you servicing all of your clients successfully and meeting their expectations? What is your turnaround time like, are you meeting or stretching deadlines? Are you getting the feedback you normally do or want to? If your answer is no to any of these questions, or if you are already busy, stressed and not coping with the workload, chances are you are at or very close to your capacity.

2. Find ways to streamline

You still need to continue to bring in income so the first step is to look at how you can minimise the time spent in existing tasks. This starts by identifying ways you can streamline and systemise your processes and utilise your current team more effectively.

Also, look at how you can take on new business at your current capacity. It could be a matter of scheduling work a week or two in advance when your capacity has increased or giving a more realistic timeframe on turnaround and delivery to your customers.

3. Revisit your numbers

When you know your what your capacity is, it pays to revisit your numbers. If you are saying yes to work because you need the money, despite not having the time or ability to service expectations, then it could be time to overhaul your pricing and minimise your expenses.

While you may lose some price-focused customers by increasing your prices, you will at least have increased your income at the same capacity. This may also free up additional funds to increase your capacity by hiring more staff or outsourcing.

3. Build a flexible team

Staffing costs can be a massive expense to business owners, and for smaller businesses, a cost they can’t always afford to sustain. With this in mind, look at developing a flexible team that can help you increase capacity through busy times.

Having a trusted group of outsourced professionals on call when you need them, can help you meet your workload and increase your capacity when you need it, without ongoing staffing expenses.

4. Hire smartly

When it comes to hiring staff, give careful consideration to what positions you need to fill first and their roles. While you may need ‘doers’ to increase your capacity immediately, you will also need ‘business generators’ to cover your growing costs and fill your new capacity.

It’s at this point where you need to decide how big and fast you grow and continue to go back through the steps as you discover your new levels of capacity.

Amanda

17 February 2015

Is the price right?

Nothing can cause confusion and doubt in a business like pricing your products and services. While you don’t want to charge less than you are worth, you also don’t want to price yourself out of the market, so how do you know if your price is right?

Whether you are starting out or starting over, here are five factors to consider when pricing your products and services.

1. Costs

First and foremost you need to be financially informed. Before you set your pricing work out the costs involved with running your business. These include your fixed costs (the expenses that will come in every month regardless of sales) and your direct costs (the expenses you incur by producing and delivering your products and services).

2. Customers

Know what your customers want from your products and services. Are they driven by the cheapest price or by the value they receive? What part does price play in their purchase decision?

Also look at what you are selling, are your current customers buying high-end or low-end products and services? This information will help you determine if your price is right, what level of service or inclusions you should be offering and lastly if you are targeting the right market. It may be that you need to change your market to make your business more profitable.

3. Positioning

Once you understand your customer, you need to look at your positioning. Where do you want to be in the marketplace? Do you want to be the most expensive, luxurious, high-end brand in your industry, the cheapest, beat it by 10% brand or somewhere in the middle? Once you have decided, you will start to get an idea of your ideal pricing.

4. Competitors

This is one of the key times you can give yourself permission to do a little competitor snooping. What are they charging for different products and services? What inclusions and level of service are they offering for those prices? What customers are they attracting with their pricing? And how are they positioned in the marketplace? The answers to these questions will give you an industry benchmark for your pricing.

5. Profit

One of the most important questions business owners neglect to ask themselves is “How much profit do I want to make?” They tend to look at what others charge and then pull a figure out of the air to be competitive without giving consideration to how much profit the want and need.

While you may be in business for the passion and to add value to the lives of others, you also need to add value to your own. So give careful consideration to what your time is worth.

How do you determine your pricing?

Amanda

27 July 2014

Knowing when to walk away

In business we often come across opportunities, people, businesses, ideas and situations that look promising and profitable.

While some can certainly meet and even exceed our expectations, every now and again one can hand us a confronting dose of reality that can result in hard decisions and the possibility of cutting all ties.

But how do you know when to stop or when to try harder? Here are five checks to put in place so you know when it’s time to walk away in business.

1. Know what you stand for

Know who you are and what you stand for both personally and professionally. Also know what your business and brand stands for, beyond just making sales or profits.

What boundaries do you want to set around the way you work? What behaviour is acceptable and not acceptable from you, your staff, your customers, suppliers and associates? What lines are you comfortable with crossing in business and what lines will you never cross?

By establishing what you do and don’t stand for and what you will and won’t tolerate you make it easier to identify when you need to take action to prevent a situation from escalating, or when you need to cut your losses and walk away.

2. Be committed to win/win

Any business arrangement you enter into should be win/win, and equally win/win at that. If it isn’t steps need to be taken to rectify it in order to create a mutually beneficial arrangement.

To guard against possible resentment and relationship breakdowns, you need to regularly evaluate your working relationships and maintain open communication to make sure all parties are getting what they want and need.

Sometimes in relationships one party ends up giving more at times, the key is to be aware of it and manage it to ensure it balances out. If it still continues to be win/lose than it might be time to lose the relationship.

3. Keep your emotions in check

Emotions influence and impact every decision we make. For this reason it is important to be mindful about how they may be motivating or fuelling your thoughts and actions through crucial situations and circumstances.

Whatever you are dealing with examine your thought process, are you making rational arguments? Are you calm or highly emotional? Are you looking at the facts or at the hypothetical? Often some time and space from the situation can be enough for you to think a little more rationally and logically.

4. Listen to your intuition

Our subconscious mind takes in far more information than we can consciously process and can often give us little clues through our intuition to help us in our decision-making.

While we can’t recall all of the information, we will often get a ‘feeling’ that something is not quite right. Listen to it; you get this for a reason. Find out more information to evaluate the opportunity, person, business or idea properly if needed and make the decision that gives you the most peace.

5. Know your value

In order to avoid resentful and difficult situations you need to be clear on the value of your time and expertise. What you do, what you know and even who you know is valuable.

If you want to know how valuable, work out what it would cost to hire someone else to do everything you do at your level. You will soon see just how much your time is worth and how valuable your knowledge and skills really are.

Once you know your value set your price and stick to it. As tempting as it can be to chase, discount and say, “yes” to the money, it can come at a cost and sometimes even a loss to your business.

By knowing what you are worth and what you want to command you will be able to sort the good opportunities from the bad or the costly, and move away from those who don’t value you faster.

How do you decide it is time to walk away in business?

Amanda

14 July 2014

Three ways to gain more clarity in business

Every minute of every day our brains are filled with thoughts, from client deadlines, to-do’s, calls, meetings, appointments and ideas, to errands, the friends we need to call, the family commitments we have for the week, the things we’ve forgotten to do but still need to do, and on it goes.

With so much action going on all the time, it can become almost impossible to focus on the task at hand. To help you be more clear and precise, here are three ways to gain more clarity in business.

1. Go back to basics

It is easy to get distracted in business. From the regular interruptions of phone, email and social media, to watching what competitors are doing, listening to every bit of customer feedback and innovating products and services to meet market demand and grow, we can lose sight of what we want to achieve in the day, week, month, year and beyond.

When this happens it’s important to go back to basics. Look at the key markets you are targeting. Have they changed or do they need to change? Profile your current and ideal customers, remembering that your market should be an inch wide (targeted and specific) and a mile deep (lots of interested customers).

Then look over your points of difference, your key messages, your brand positioning, your business SWOT, the ‘why’ you do what you do and what you want to achieve. These business and marketing basics will give you more clarity on your business and help you establish the direction you want and need to take.

2. Simplify

By over complicating tasks and processes, failing to reduce wastes and inefficiencies and refusing to give up control and delegate or outsource, we leave ourselves bogged down in task overload and unable to see beyond our own to-do list.

With complication being the enemy of clarity and creativity, look to simplify. As you go about your day always be asking, “Is there any easier or quicker way to be doing this?” By simplifying, you’ll reduce the time and money spent, and give yourself more brainpower to prioritise and focus on what you really need to be doing.

3. Purge your thoughts

If you are becoming increasingly distracted by thoughts going a million miles an hour, take 5-10 minutes to write down everything that is running through your head.

As tempting as it can be, this is not the time to develop your ideas further or put them into action. You are simply purging your thoughts and ideas to increase your focus and clarity, with the added bonus of providing a point of reference for later.

What are your tricks for gaining more clarity?

Amanda

16 June 2014

Four questions to make the New Financial Year more profitable and productive

With the end of financial year fast approaching, it’s an opportune time to pause and take a moment to step back from the day-to-day running of your business and regroup, refocus, and realign with your greater vision and goals.

Not sure where to start? Here are four questions that will help you start the New Financial Year off more profitably and productively.

What has worked?

When you look back over the last year look at what has worked well. From sales and marketing strategies to systems and procedures, what has generated the most results or made the most difference in your business?

These are strategies and tasks you want to give priority to. You might even want to plan to invest more time, money and resources in these areas to grow them further and generate more return in the next half of this year.

What hasn’t worked?

When you look back over the last year look at what hasn’t worked. This is an important opportunity to learn from mistakes and hindsight.

What sales and marketing strategies haven’t worked? What products or services aren’t selling? What business relationships aren’t profitable or working? What have you learnt from the challenges you’ve had over the last six months?

What could be done better?

Before you rid your business of everything that didn’t work, it is important to ask “why” it didn’t. Are there still opportunities to be had if done right or better?

When you look at what has worked, are there opportunities to make it even better, faster, bigger or more effective? Always be looking for areas to improve.

What is your market telling you?

This is perhaps the most important question. Over the last year, what has your market been telling you?

What products and services are the most popular? Who is buying from you? Why are they buying from you? Why do they need and want your products or services? Why are they coming to you and not someone else? Are they responding to some marketing messages better than others?

What feedback have you received? If you’ve had complaints, have they been addressed in your business and with the customer/s?

Have you had more new customers than this time last year? Have you had more repeat customers than this time last year? Has your average customer transaction price increased from this time last year? Why?

Answering these questions will give you greater clarity on what you need and want to achieve, where you need to focus your efforts, how you can be more strategic and targeted with your marketing and how you can measure your success.

Here’s to a happy and profitable New Financial Year!

Amanda

23 November 2013

Four questions that will transform your business

As the end of year approaches quickly, it’s quite natural as business owners to start thinking about the year ahead. What plans we’ll make, the new goals and targets we’ll set and of course how we can make our businesses even better and more profitable in the coming year.

To help you with this process and get you thinking more strategically about your plans, here are four questions to ask yourself that will help you transform your business.

“What are my customers and potential customers’ greatest challenges and what is it costing them?”

Identifying your customers and potential customers’ greatest challenges will help you develop more relevant products and services, identify ways to upsell, cross sell or resell your customers and of course make it easier to position your products or services as a necessity your customers “must” buy.

Beyond that, it will also help you form more profitable alliances and referral partnerships with other businesses your customers may need before or after you, opening up more opportunities and income sources.

By answering the second part of the question, “what is it costing them?” you’ll be able to identify your customers pain points which will make your marketing messages more targeted, strategic, personalised and as a result more effective.

“What are my customers telling me verbally and non-verbally?”

Your customers are always your greatest source of learning so listen closely to what they are saying and also look at what they aren’t saying.

Are some products and services selling more than others? Do they praise you for a particular area consistently? Do they complain about a certain area consistently? Are they coming back and buying regularly? Are they referring others?

When you take the time to listen to what your customers are telling you you’ll start to identify areas you can improve, work out your most profitable products and services and find out ways to make your customers happier, more loyal and as a result more inclined to buy again and refer.

“How can I move away from exchanging time for money?”

This question addresses one of the biggest challenges we can face as business owners, particularly those of us who provide services. With time being our most limited resource, the last thing we want is our income being capped by how much time we can devote to our work.

By starting to think about what else you can do other than just charge for your time you’ll start to develop different products and identify other sources of income, particularly passive income.

“How can I leverage my time, knowledge, money, resources, contacts and efforts to further my business?”

This would have to be one of the most powerful questions you could ask yourself. Leverage will help you to grow your business quicker with less time, money and effort spent.

True entrepreneurs spend most of their time answering this question with one addition – how can I leverage other people’s time, knowledge, money, resources, contacts and efforts too?

If you start asking these questions as you do your business planning for the year ahead, you’ll be sure to make it your best year yet. What questions would you add?