Marketing Strategies to Reach Customers Who Don’t Know They Need You

Not everybody that needs your product knows about your business, or even that it exists. If everyone knew, you would probably have been busy with all of them right now, instead of reading this article trying to figure out marketing strategies to reach customers who don’t know you.

The problem here is finding the right target market and knowing where your customers are. This article addresses strategies to reach out to customers who don’t know they need you. It basically means they don’t really know they have a pain point. For example, a new small business owner manually entering lead data and followups into a spreadsheet may not be aware that a CRM can handle lead management much more efficiently, and with a lot less effort on your part.

So the very first step is to identify and reach customers who don’t know that your product is the solution to a need or pain point they have, even if they’re not aware of it.

Luckily, we had Philip Tnee from Purpleclick as one of the panelists at a recent “Sales for Startup” event organized by Lucep. Philip has a rich background in sales, having worked with large clients such as Facebook who need to reach people in all parts of the world and create awareness about their product and its uses. Philip outlined a quick strategy on how to deal with clients that don’t really know that they have a pain point.

Zal Dastur, Lucep: How do you convince a customer who doesn’t know he has a pain point? Right? Like, they have that point and they are in that, but what do you do to convince them?

So, I think the key with this kind of clients is the right line of questioning, and I always tell my sales guys it’s a little bit like wiring and you know how you get something out of a witness, right! You just lead them down the right lines and then at the right moment use what they say instead. That’s all you gotta do, And, so you ask a lot of ‘would you agree’ questions.

You know, what do you think of this and that, would you agree and when they agree to certain things. You realize you can actually pivot that into what you are selling. That’s the kind of… and of course you have to be very sensitive about this and then you know…come across – say it with a smile. I think that really helps a lot of the times, and then when you challenge these people not too much, just a little bit. Put them in a bit of a discomfort and that’s when they’ll start to open up.

So, if you are stuck reaching out to a customer who has no idea who you are, what you do and more importantly, is nowhere close to buying from you, be sure to follow Philip’s advice. You can also go through our article on Marketing Strategies to stay within your budget where you can find similar strategies that have worked for us in the past with next to no budget at all.

After identifying the right target market, the very obvious next step would be to spread the word of your brand. But Bridget Randolph, a marketing consultant for a London based agency, Distilled, suggested the agency to take it (step by step) through a three step process. First, build customer’s awareness of their need. Second, create awareness of your product/solution and finally third, go ahead with building your brand awareness.