In our podcast episode, Risks and Rewards of Business Diversification, Julia and Laura discussed business diversification, both organically by evolving your company and quickly through the use of mergers and acquisitions. An important aspect of that is understanding your own company, such as its income streams—which almost always means your customers. But as your current company or a newly diversified one, are you marketing to the right clients? We’ll show you how to find your ideal clients and use marketing to sell to them.
Understanding the Difference Between Your Current and Ideal Client
Whether you’re selling one-off products or recurring services, you generally know who your current customer base is. But those clients might not be your ideal ones—the largest, the best ROI, the easiest to sell to. As your business grows and evolves, especially during diversification, it’s time to reevaluate.
- Knowing What Has Worked: Who, where, and how you currently sell are all important data points, both for keeping what works and knowing where you haven’t looked for clients.
- Sifting Through Your ROIs: Have you ever done a deep dive into the most successful sales? Is it better to have a few high-ROI clients or many smaller ones? What characteristics do they have?
- Reviewing Disruption in Your Industry: Ignoring changes in your industry, especially when it comes to selling and marketing, can be easy. From where your clients find you to how they buy, review disruptions: everything from phones to social media platforms.
- Your Targeting Should Be Forward-Thinking: Keeping disruptions and the changes to your industry (especially through diversification) in mind, you need to find where your ideal clients are now and where they are emerging to get to those markets first.
To learn more about finding your ideal clients, check out our article, Identifying Your Ideal Client Profiles.
Diversify Your Client Base with New Marketing
Okay, so if you find new clients and online spaces where they live, how do you reach them? Unsurprisingly, marketing is the most effective way of reaching out to these clients—with online marketing being the highest return on investment in this always-online world. While below we’ll talk about specifically changing your marketing when you’re diversifying into a new industry or market segment, the general advice is the same: expanding and diversifying your client base requires marketing and advertising of a similar scale.
Using Marketing to Break into a New Product or Industry
As mentioned in the podcast episode, diversification can help keep your business more stable—especially for weathering long-term or short-term crises, disruptions, and even another pandemic. However, this can be hard to do. Your old tactics might not translate, especially when it comes to marketing. It’s time to get strategic with your marketing:
- Your Website Needs to Grow with Your Business: New markets mean new pages, but new customers might also mean a whole new website, especially if your website isn’t mobile-friendly.
- Dealing with Reputations and Publications: This is a great opportunity for a press release, but that shouldn’t be your only public relations tactic. Getting onto the right online listings, reviewing and updating current ones, and better managing them allows higher visibility.
- Breaking Into New Social Media Spaces: Whether you’re shifting your demographics or just never got active on social media, selecting and marketing on social media platforms is critical to reaching new clients. Doing it right requires diligence and responsiveness.
About the enVisioning Success Podcast
This article is based on topics discussed in enVisioning Success, our weekly podcast hosted by Vision CEO Laura DiBenedetto and COO Julia Becker Collins. In it, they discuss all things business and marketing, from lead generation to leadership. Find us on PodBean to download from your platform of choice, or subscribe to our mailing list to get new episodes and other news delivered directly to your inbox.
When you’re looking at diversification for your business, the marketing surrounding it can make the difference between its success and failure. If you’re in the early stages of these new initiatives, now is the time to talk marketing. If you’ve already expanded and need help identifying and targeting the new clients to sell to, you’ll need to rapidly invest in new marketing. Vision can help with both; for years, we’ve helped clients identify new audiences and diversify in both offerings and locations. Contact us today to learn more and get started.
