How to Use Marketing to Boost Profitability

Most small business owners and CEOs think profitability and immediately think minimize collection costs and uncollectible accounts, unbillable bench time and minimize office space rent — you know, cost-saving measures. Heck, most financial professionals do the same thing.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all about employing cost-saving measures, but there’s another component at play: marketing.

Specifically understanding how to choose your customers and not the other way around. Understanding who makes an ideal customer allows you to build your entire marketing, sales, and service efforts around attracting and converting this customer group.

Start by asking some questions about this group:

• what do they read?
• what do they listen to?
• what challenges do they face?
• how do they buy?
• what triggers them to start looking for a solution?

This information is the secret to unlocking massive profitability. Most businesses have a need triggered soon by some type of life or business cycle change:

• marriage
• the birth of a child
• divorced
• birthday
• illness
• pay raise
• calendar event
• budget refresh
• office relocation
• etc.

The answers to the questions above are not always available, but thinking about them in correlation to your ideal customer will allow you to boost profitability.