As in The long tail in the book The Curve, by Lovell Nicholas, business strategies are proposed with which to grow your business thanks to the possibilities offered in this digital era.
This model focuses on finding your audience and how they behave differently depending on their level of connection to you or your company.
Following the methodology of The Curve you will find the next information in this post:
- How to boost your business.
- Customer life cycle.
BOOST YOUR BUSINESS WITH THE CURVE
The main point of this strategy lies in knowing your audience, what do they want, and what would they be willing to pay more for? Not all of your audience wants the same, many will not even be interested in buying from you, at least not yet.
That is why when planning our portfolio of products and/or services we must take into account the different groups that make up our audience:
- SUPERFANS: they are great followers of your work and are willing to spend much more on what you offer (their average ticket of them is above the average customer). A clear example would be Apple fans who are the first to ask for new products or services as soon as their release is announced, even if it is months in advance.
- FANS: these are also loyal followers but you will have to prepare products or services according to their expectations if you do not want them to lose interest so they end up in the competition or spending less.
- CUSTOMERS: are those who buy your products but don’t connect with your brand yet or that don’t need what you offer.
- NON-CUSTOMERS: they have heard about you or your brand but have not made a purchase, either because they do not trust you or because they do not believe they need what you offer right now.
Some time ago this categorization was much more complicated to achieve, but nowadays with the measurements made in your social networks, web, e-commerce, email marketing campaigns, etc., becomes an affordable task.
Some examples of data to analyze would be the number of interactions per user or the average sales ticket. If someone interacts and spends a lot, we are dealing with a fan of the brand.
How can we link this model to the customer lifecycle? Read on for a practical example of the approach that could be set to your audience.
LIFE CYCLE OF YOUR AUDIENCE
If we already know the needs of our potential customers, we just have to offer services and/or products that meet their needs, but we will have to help them go through the entire customer life cycle that we have designed.
It rarely happens that someone in your audience becomes a “fan” from one day to the next, the logical process consists of several steps as shown in the following practical example of a construction company:
- Engagement element: this allows you to make yourself known by offering something that brings value to your audience for free or at a low cost. The CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) here is very high for the benefit obtained, in case you get some profit, but do not worry because the key is that for the following sales the CAC is drastically reduced. In this situation, it could be an ebook, newsletter, or webinars on topics related to construction.
- Proof of trust: once your audience connects with you and your company, they will start to entrust you with larger jobs at a much lower CAC than if you had tried to sell your product from the beginning. Following the example, they could hire you for consulting services on new construction.
- Technical validation: if you have already built enough trust, they will entrust you with more complete projects that include both consulting and design work and the execution of this for small works or reforms.
- Trust and full support: they already know what value is provided by your company so your customer is ready to request you with the design and execution of any type of work.
OUR CONCLUSIONS
First, we must understand The Curve and see how we can segment our audience in the necessary levels (IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE 4!), thus building the life cycle of our customers and the strategy for them to move forward with us.
Several of the keys would be:
- Analyze your audience, are there superfans in the industry, and what are they looking for?
- DO NOT make the mistake of only offering your services to a single segment of your audience. It is a process in which your client has a starting point and as you gain confidence with them you move towards the sales lifecycle increasing more income and with a very low CAC compared to the conventional sales approach.
- Of course, there will be times when customers will skip phases and require your business services at any level of the process from the beginning. In those cases it is better for you, you have managed to get to the stages that are most profitable for your company without having to “invest” in them in the previous stages. After that, you continue to help it move through its lifecycle.
- This model is used in both B2C and B2B, although in the latter the concept of a fan differs slightly from the definition of this term. In B2B the “fan” would be that client who trusts you so much that they have you as the first choice over other suppliers, even paying more because they want you to do the work. We will not go into this topic now, but here the key lies in being radically different to stand out from the competition.
