Who are you marketing to?

  • Who is your ideal customer?  How different is this from your existing customer base?
  • If your real customers don’t match your ideal profile, is your strategy wrong, or is your targeting wrong?
  • Who does your target customer profile exclude?  Why?
  • Has your actual customer base ever taught you something that changed your strategy? What happened when it did?

What are you offering the customer?  Why you?

  • Can you state why a customer should choose you in one sentence, without hedging or listing multiple things?
  • What does that customer believe, want, or fear that’s directly relevant to what you sell?
  • What’s the one thing you want customers to believe about you that no competitor can credibly claim?
  • What’s the honest answer to “why you, not the competition” (not your marketing copy, the true answer)?
  • If a competitor used your marketing materials, would anyone notice the discrepancy?

What’s your marketing strategy?

  • If you had to write your marketing strategy in three sentences, could you?
  • Do you have a marketing strategy, or a collection of tactics you use?
  • Could someone else in your business execute your strategy if you weren’t there to explain it?
  • What would you have to stop saying to make that clear, differentiated, value-based claim?

Are you meeting your customers where they are?

  • Which of your current social media or marketing channels earns its place strategically, based on the customers and value it provides?
  • If you had to cut every channel but one, which would you keep?  Why?
  • What channel are you avoiding that your target customer uses?

How do you know it’s working?

  • How do you measure effectiveness, not just activity?
  • When did you last make a strategic decision?  What did you base it on?
  • If your best-performing channel disappeared tomorrow, would you know why it worked and how to replace it?

How do you keep making it better?

  • How often do you reevaluate your strategy from the bottom up, not just tweaks?
  • What or who can make you question your strategy?
  • What would have to change in your business or your market for your current strategy to stop working?
  • What’s the feedback loop between customer behavior and what your strategy assumes they’ll do?

Want more information on growing your business

Watch the video or read the full post to learn more about how strategic pricing can help your business

Good marketing depends on understanding who your best customers are; read more about how to develop a strategy built around your best customers and access the full list of questions here