By the end of this Profile Your Green Industry Customers guide, you will have a totally different mindset. This is something that really hasn't been talked about a lot on the Internet much. More importantly, I really feel like this is one of the main reasons why managers fail when it comes to building a lawn care or other green industry business. You have to understand your customers to know what services to offer, what marketing should look like, everything.
What You Will Learn
Then we're going to talk about mind mapping tools that really will help speed up the process of implementation to help you successfully get on the right path. Before we get started and talk about mindset and mind mapping tools. As you understand how the entire process works, you'll be able to implement this at a faster rate.
Competition
Then we will be researching your competition. Now the reason you want to research your competition is because your competition, especially the ones that are doing well in the market and dominating the market, are gathering data you need. So they already have the customers.
They already have the traffic. And all you must do is simply look at them and look at who their buyers are so that you have the right information and you'll be able to figure out who your perfect buyer is, what their likes are, what their dislikes are, and everything of that nature. Then we're going to talk about the basics of profile.
So after we have gathered the competition, we want to profile our perfect buyers. And I'll talk more about that, utilizing certain tools that you can use to find that data out. Once we have figured out the basic data such as who the person is, maybe their age, maybe their income, maybe their education level, we can gather even more intel. But before we can do that, we need the basics so that we can match things up and make sure that we are actually headed the right direction.
Next, we're going to talk about some shortcuts. So over the years, I've done this many, many times and I figured out some shortcuts to help you speed the process up. Then, we're going to talk about a typical day that your perfect buyer goes through. And the reason you want to do this is because it's going to reveal to you a lot about your perfect buyer. What does their day look like?
Customer Fears
What are their insecurities? What are their fears? What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? Everything about them to the point that you know, if you place your lawn care services right in front of them, will they buy them, or will they just totally ignore you? So that's just something good to know before you start selling any untested services.
Because many people make the mistake of just launching products and services, not realizing who their perfect buyer is and then, of course, later on wondering why in the world is their product and service not selling. I'm sure you've been there, and I've been there as well and you have made the right choice in taking this first step.
Media Mapping
And then, of course, we're going to talk about media mapping. We are going to use certain media sources to really go deeper and dive deeper into understanding the perspective of your perfect buyer. What are things they like to watch on YouTube or other social media? Weed identification, how to start a garden? What are things they don't like?
And it'll just make things more clear to you as far as putting yourselves in their shoes. Because sometimes putting yourself in other people's shoes is a hard thing to do. Just saying, hey, put yourself in those shoes and think like them, That's not always easy thing to do. And of course, finally, is going to be talking about buying habits. This is going to reveal to us what they buy.
And by knowing that and knowing the habits, what they how much money do they spend and everything like that, that is going to reveal to you future products and services that you can offer later. So this is not just finding the perfect buyer, it's finding what they want at the end of the day. So you see why this is so important and how it's going to make a vast difference in your business?
Well, hopefully, you are excited as much as I am excited about teaching this to you and helping you out. So let's talk about mindset. What I want you to do before you read this guide is to understand that the biggest mistake most product owners make is selling their features alone.
So if you build, for example, a piece of software, your marketing says this software can do this and it can do that. But, really, what it comes down to is your perfect buyer is wondering what's in it for me. Don't sell the vitamins, sell the good health.
Right? So that comes down to benefits. Maybe the software maybe the software can speed the process up. But the benefit in that case is that it can save time. You can say it saves time. You have probably been taught that benefits are crucial. But let me challenge that at the same time.
Let me ask you, how do you know if these benefits are really the benefits of your perfect buyer? Because if you don't know your perfect buyer, how do you know if those benefits really are impactful? Do you know even what your perfect buyer looks like? Do you know what their typical day looks like? And do you know their fears and what gets them excited?
You see what I mean here? You need to know your perfect buyer. And without any of that information or that type of intelligence or data about your perfect buyer, you don't even know if the benefits are even going to be impactful or not.
So, hopefully, you have a better perspective of why we are taking this approach and why this particular mindset is crucial. So, moving on, I want to talk about mind mapping tools. And the reason is because this is not really required, but that can help you brainstorm and implement things a lot faster. So as far as implementation goes, once you've mapped things out, map out your typical perfect buyer's typical day. If you can map that out, you can always go back to it and look at it.
Mind Mapping
It's just easier for the brain to understand things when you map things out. I personally use a free iPhone mind mapping tool. You don't have to spend anything else. You can spend $2, $3 to upgrade to a paid version if you would like, but there are tons of free mind mapping tools out there that you can use.
Now if you like free mind mapping tools you can use on your desktop computer, then you might want to check out Xmind. I use a software called Lucidchart. Lucidchart is one of the best paid flowchart tools out there and definitely will help you kind of map out things out of your mind. And that way you look at it in the future. Like I said, it's just going to make things a lot easier.
Research Your Customers
Let’s look at how to research your competition. Keep a paper and pencil or some sort of notepad ready so that you can jot down the websites. Now, this is not complex. What we're looking for is high traffic competitors that might be doing well. Because the more traffic that they are getting, the more these particular tools that we are using will reveal.
Alright? So let's get started. So the first site that I want you to go to is called quantcast.com. Go to quantcast.com, click explore, and you type in a keyword. Jot down the keyword that best describes your general niche. Don't be too specific just yet.
So in this case, let's say, for example, that I want to create a service that primarily appeals to lawn care owners. So I'm going to type in lawn care or lawn care companies, and go ahead and click enter. You should also add your city name so you will get more detailed information.
Now, visit these websites and just make sure that these sites fit your key work of lawn care or lawn care services. View some sites. Make sure that that is the type of sites that we want to create. Maybe you want to build something like this and you want to track people in. You want to attract a perfect buyer in, gain their trust so that you can ultimately sell other things.
We can see that it's about fertilization, weed control, insect control, and other green industry help. So we can see that most of the website is for our audience. So if that's the case, we want to definitely copy this. Open up notepad and put that URL in here.
Similarsites.com
There are 2 other sites that I will recommend. Similarsites.com, which basically, if you enter a URL of a website, it'll tell you all the other websites that are similar to that website.
We can get an idea of a hyper responsive buyer too if you look through here. And sometimes if they have forums, that'll give you a good chance to see what kind of questions people are asking, kind of their frustrations, their likes or dislikes, and just could get a feel for what that person looks like.
And also, when you look at the websites, are there similarities within the websites? Look and see if you can find similar patterns throughout these websites.
Now when you have 3 websites, you are pretty much ready.
Now, I want to offer you a different web site as well, a similarweb.com. This is a paid tool, but you can still enter these websites in here and find more data about these websites. You can see the rank within worldwide, within US and the global ranks. So this gives us a better picture of the website itself.
We can see that it's getting a massive amount of traffic mainly from the US, Australia, UK, Canada, and India. We can see that the most traffic was from search volume. So this is kind of painting a picture as we call it. We can see referrals, basically what sites they coming from.
We can see search, we can see social, we can see a lot of these people seem to be on Facebook and Pinterest, which kind of fits it because Pinterest is where a lot of visual, people go. We see audience interest, so this kind of reveals to us potential buying habits. But right now we're not really interested in doing too much research, we just want to get an idea of what that basic picture looks like.
So you can enter the other ones in here but that's fine. All we need to do is create that list. And we as you can see, we have a list of 3 websites and that's all we need right now.
Alexa.com
Now, we are going to discuss about the basics of profiling. Step 1 for figuring out who your perfect buyer is and what do they look like. So to do that, I want you to get access to the list of websites that you copied earlier and go to a website called alexa.com.
You will notice that they have a free version, which is limited, and they have a paid version, which gives you all the data that you need. But for this case, you really don't need the paid tool, you can use the free version itself. So let's put the websites that we found into alexa.com.
We're going to paste one. We're going to click on find. And here we go. Basically, the lower the number, the higher the rank. What we're looking for is where is our perfect buyer and who is our perfect buyer. If you scroll all the way down to the very bottom, you're going to see audience demographics. For example, you might see gender is female.
Customer Demographics
If we know that the major demographic in this case is female, we know that we're probably going to speak directly to females. We can see browsing location is at home, so that's a good sign. That means that they are at home, they're not on the work computer.
And that also tells us that if they're more likely to buy something or if they're on their home computer than if they were on their school or work computer. So that's a good sign. We can say browsing location is home. Then we can see education.
Let’s say a high percentage have at least a college degree. Now we know we’re going to have to speak intelligently to this somewhat educated market. So this is kind of painting a picture here. Continue with at least 3 websites. If it's not consistent across the board, then maybe there's something different about these specific websites.
Depending on the traffic source, that can reveal different things to us. Now we we look at how the site is laid out. Maybe we see services, programs, staff, guarantees, pricing. So another thing we can do is let's see if we can find some sort of forum or customer questions or reviews.
Find all the data you can. So that way, you know who is going to be your perfect buyer. Look at the website. Is the website fitting what I'm trying to sell? Next we will gather more intel using more tools.
Facebook Customer Insights
Now we're going to take it a step further with Facebook Insights. You will need to have a Facebook account in order to do this:
Log in to your account and go specifically to facebook.com/ads/audience_ insights in the address bar. Choose an audience to start, either everyone on Facebook or people connected to your page. Now this is the assumption that you haven't started a page, or your page doesn't have an overflow of traffic to it.
So you definitely want to start with everyone on Facebook.
Now the reason why Facebook audience insights is so powerful is simply because it allows you to dig really, really deep. You can dig into many things. This is basically showing you what all these people on Facebook enter their profile, their likes, their dislikes, their age, their gender, everything. In fact, Facebook is one of the few big companies that is giving you access to this data.
Obviously, they want you to use this data for the purpose of Facebook ads. But, you can use this data for your own products and services and for your future ads as well. Start out with one country, the United States. We want to make sure that we see patterns that are continuous and consistent patterns that show us consistent data with the data we saw on Alexa.com.
Where it says interest, put lawn care or whatever that you're trying use to attract them. You might end up with DIY lawn care people so you may want to look for something else you know people in your area would be interested in like golf.
Facebook gives you a more thorough breakdown of the age range. You can see the age range for people interested in lawn care.
You can see the US demographics and interest data based on purchase behavior, brand affinity, and other activities. Relationship status, job titles, we can see page likes, what do they like? What kind of pages on Facebook do they like?
Website, books, writers, magazines. What magazines are they reading? Better homes and gardens, entertainment, country music, food, beverages, news media, fictional characters' home and garden. What kind of pages do they like?
Activity, we can see frequency of activity. How engaging is this particular audience or how hyper responsive is this audience? What kind of device that are they using? We have household income. How many of them actually own homes? Household size, home market value, and spending methods. Then, of course, purchase methods
So Alexa kind of gave us a broad overview. And of course with their paid version, you'll get a more detailed view, but I'm using all free tools here and this gives us a more specific view. So now you can look at this and have a better view of what this person looks like.
Continue to Profile Your Green Industry Customers Part 2 here.