Welcome to episode 85 of my podcast The Executive Edge, with this week’s guest, Ken Cook.

Ken owns a business called www.thepreparedgroup.com wherein he licenses agents, who consult with other business. His approach has developed a template that gives a client step by step ways to make progress and build a bigger, and better business. He’s done this very successfully both with his own companies and those he’s helped.

He and I discussed the steps he used. We also the difference between the steps and the tactics to employ to enable our marketing initiatives to work. Without realising it, most of the time we are really just implementing one tactic or process without reviewing whether it’s the right tactic. Therein we can sometimes give up or complain that our marketing isn’t working when in reality the bit that is in question is our attempts to correctly assess our audience. Or, we may have believed our audience frequents a particular social media site when in reality we would be better to target our efforts in another way

What else did we cover?

Ken and I also discussed the other steps he believes in, and the way the data we collect should be informing us. It might be familiar to us to talk return on investment, or ROI, but his preferred measure is something he calls ‘acquisition cost’. What is the cost of servicing the client? When you factor that in, it gives a real time measure of how effective our strategy is and whether to continue to target that audience or not.

I found this episode very interesting as it’s something I’ve struggled with too in the past. Deciding who your audience is and trying not to believe that everyone could potentially benefit from what you have to offer, is a good first step. It can take courage to define your market and even more determination to market to a smaller group of people than you think, but it might be more likely to succeed!