Last week I attended a presentation where the speaker commented that companies are becoming so good at targeting their customers with the exact product at the exact time they need it, that even if you win the search battle, you may already be too late. SEO and SEM are powerful tools, but in some cases even those could prove useless.
A chilling thought for any company, but what about a startup like ours which doesn’t dabble in predictive modeling nor spend much, if any, time or money on SEO and SEM? How are customers going to find you before they find your competitors? Or more appropriately, how would your customers even know your product exists? If you’re sitting around waiting for them to find you, waiting is all your company may end up doing.
In order for startups to win, we’ve got to spend more time talking to our customers in the real world. If you’re actually solving a real problem then it shouldn’t be hard to find them. There are companies, organizations, associations, conferences, events, and Meetups for every topic where you can find GROUPS of your customers. And often times they’re closer than you think.
For Unbranded Designs, working at 1871 is the perfect situation as the Merchandise Mart is Chicago’s design center. Countless offices, showrooms, and events held in this building provide opportunities for us to find and speak with more and more customers. Just as Belly went store-to-store iterating on their sales pitch, we can do the same just in this building.
You may not be that lucky to be surrounded by your customers but I guarantee finding them is a lot easier than you think. Go out, speak, and sell to them. If you wait for them to find you, it may already be too late.
