How To Find Customers

“If You Focus All of Your Marketing, Selling and Servicing Efforts Exclusively Based on What Your Customers Really Want, You’ll Be Rich! Guaranteed!”

This is one of the most common mistakes made by most home based greeting card businesses and if you simply follow this one secret you will make money. It makes sense when you stop and think about it – give your customer what they want and they will buy it.

With this now firmly in your mind, think about the type of cards you produce and which customer would most likely want to buy the cards. Is there a market for the greeting cards you currently make or is there a demand for a different type of greeting card – maybe humorous cards?

Then think about how you will introduce that customer to your product as well as how they would find your product if they were actively searching. By identifying these answers, you will identify the advertising method in which you need to use to reach your target customer base.

How to Research Your Target Market/Customer

In order to communicate a message through the grapevine a marketing/advertising plan should be developed. Use the following list of steps will help you do research on your target market.

The first step is to research industry trends that are and are not favorable.

The second step is to find your potential market(s) or “total” market(s) within the list of favorable trends. When you find each potential market, look at whether the market is at beginning growth, growth, maturation, saturated, or declining stage.

The third stage is to choose your target market and sales strategy method(s) to reach each target market (e.g., buying mailing lists, direct mail, etc.). This step also involves predicting how many greeting cards your target customer will buy in a month, quarter, and/or year in order to determine how much revenue you can expect in the same period of time (e.g., one customer could buy ten cards per year, five cards per year, etc. depending upon the target market they are in).

The fourth step is to document your research and sales strategy into a marketing/advertising plan.

How to Make it Easy for a Prospective Customer to Use You

Why should anybody buy from you?

Do you know the answer to this question? You better, because if you don’t know how do you expect you potential customer to know?

To get people to buy from you need to point out to them why they should and the benefits of doing business with you.

You need to create a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) A USP is a statement that defines exactly what is you do and how you do it differently from anybody else who is selling greeting cards.

Most people may thing that all greeting card designers are the same. It’s your job to educate your prospective customer about why you are the best person to buy from.

What is the benefit/value for them in using you? Your USP could be: “I have been designing and making greeting cards for over 10 years specializing in the Wedding industry. All my work and products come with a 100% Money Back Guarantee and I donate a percentage of all my profits to saving the rain forest foundation.”

Can you see how this is unique? It makes you stand out from the general run of the mill card makers and it shows that you specialize in one area and it is of no risk to your customer to buy from you because you guarantee your work.

You need to find that one thing that makes you stand out from your competition and take away all the barriers a prospect may have before doing business with you.

Use the list in the e-book to help you create a marketing / advertising plan.