Strategic Planning Kit For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 9

Researching the Market to Find New Customers

In This Chapter

• Investigating new customer markets and picking the best ones
• Establishing and targeting your markets
• Crafting positioning statements
• Deciding how to reach your new customers
• Keeping a focus on the market

Asking a business whether it wants to find new customers is like asking you whether you want to make more money. Of course you do! Two ways to grow your top line are to increase sales from your existing customers (see Chapter 8) or generate sales from new ones (which I cover in this chapter).

Finding new customers is the role of marketing. After you sift through all the semantics, misused business lingo, and fuzzy concepts, marketing is really pretty simple: Identify who you want to sell to, figure out how to get those people to notice you, and when they do, get them to buy from you. So if marketing is this simple, why does it continue to be confusing? Mainly because most people make it too complicated. At the end of the day, nothing matters until you have a sale. And the only person who can make that decision is the customer. As management guru Peter Drucker says, “The purpose of a business is to create a customer.” Period.

The primary reason marketing campaigns fail is because customers weren't offered something they wanted, needed, or valued. The components of a campaign — the product, the product's price, ...