The best question to drive promotion

• by Dan Bailey

“The Ultimate Question” in marketing, also called the Net Promoter Score, is often stated as “How likely are you to refer this brand to someone else?”  Directed at customers, that indeed is a great question to ask and focus on for brands. From that simple question, marketers can measure how well a brand is doing for WOM (word of mouth) and customer relations. But who is your customer in the first place? And how do you reach them?

For me, that ‘ultimate question’ comes down to something simple brands can ask themselves:

Where does your target segment live and look?

In other words, do the target segment live in Chicago? Do they live on Facebook? Do they look on Yelp? Do they look on Pinterest? Or even billboards? These are not unusual questions to the marketing process. But we so often get so focused on marketing and promoting in the traditional sense: TV, Facebook, Trade shows – whatever the standard for our industry. But “the standard” doesn’t represent our USP – or our best “niche” target customer. In other words, there’s nothing “unique” about the standard. So how can we cultivate our unique positioning in the market?

So go deeper – and never stop asking yourself – where does my target segment live and look?

-Jake Aull,
Zen Fires Digital Marketing