Thoughts Brewing Blog

Micro Business For Retirees:  Simplify Your Marketing Efforts and Get More Customers With 4 Questions

Written by Damien Griffin | Sep 13, 2023 11:42:00 PM

Since, by definition, your micro business has a small number of people involved, it is likely that your team does not have someone with a marketing background.

We definitely didn’t when we started, but we’ve learned a lot from marketing, sales, and business experts.  

This short post compresses many marketing concepts into four questions. If you work on these until you have real, honest answers, you will be on your way to getting more customers.

 

Question #1

Who is my customer?

Answering this question may be harder than you think.

Answering “Everybody” or “Anyone with a pulse” or similar will ultimately work against you.

The more specific you can be with this answer, the better your marketing can be to those potential customers.

 

Question #2

What problems do they have that I can resolve quickly and thoroughly?

Now that you know who your customer is, you will need to know what problems they have.  If they don’t have any problems, then they don’t have a reason to look for your business.

Your goal with this will be to position your products/services as solutions to their problems.  

Focusing on what you can do quickly matters because if someone else can do it faster then you will have a hard time convincing the customer to go with you.  Similarly, if you can’t thoroughly solve their problem, they will find someone that can.

 

Question #3

Where do they spend their time?

This could be a physical place or somewhere online, like social media platforms.

Maybe the reason why your Facebook ads haven’t gotten you any business is because your customers are on TikTok (or they don’t use social media) and never see your ads.

 

Question# 4

If I solve their problem at my current rates, will they genuinely thank me afterwards? 

This is really important and is about value.  

If someone feels like your prices were too high then, even if you did the job thoroughly, they aren’t likely to thank you.  And that usually means that they will not purchase from you again and will not tell others anything good about you.

The short version of this is that the customer should always feel like they got more than they paid for.