You, me, our friends, and family…we are all becom­ing one.

1. How does this effect small businesses?
2. They’re just price shopping…right?
3. What you can do about it.

With all of the pub­li­ca­tions and online resources, con­sumers now have the abil­ity to make smarter deci­sions when they buy. Unfortunately, most of the major sup­pli­ers of these resources only look at the major play­ers in the mar­ket, which means they are con­stantly over­look­ing the lit­tle guys. (Small Businesses)

You may sell some of the high­est qual­ity wid­gets out there and even offer top of the line cus­tomer ser­vice… but unfor­tu­nately the chances of you being pub­lished or men­tioned in any of these con­sumer resources are very slim.

With the ease of access to infor­ma­tion, regard­ing the qual­ity of the prod­ucts and ser­vices we buy, we also have the abil­ity to become mod­er­ately edu­cated on the sub­ject of our pur­chase, way before we even begin to look for a provider.

‘Intelligent con­sumers’ will also buy based on price, but I would not cat­e­go­rize the major­ity of these con­sumers as the dreaded “price shop­pers”. The dif­fer­ence is that the price shop­pers are (for a num­ber of rea­sons) strictly mak­ing their buy­ing deci­sions based 80–100% on price alone. While the major­ity of ‘intel­li­gent con­sumers’ are look­ing for a per­fect over­all value and they are will­ing to spend more if your price matches their per­cep­tion of value.

The ‘intel­li­gent con­sumers’ are the buy­ers you MUST tar­get.
one more time…
The ‘intel­li­gent con­sumers’ are the buy­ers you MUST target.

This means all of your mar­ket­ing and sales efforts must be dri­ven towards tar­get­ing more of these buy­ers…“But how?”…“And won’t I lose the buy­ers who are not in the ‘intel­li­gent con­sumer’ group?”

No. — Marketing towards the ‘intel­li­gent con­sumers’ does NOT mean you are exclud­ing any­one from your mar­ket­ing efforts, but you ARE offer­ing the value the ‘intel­li­gent con­sumers’ are look­ing for.

Doing this is rel­a­tively sim­ple — offer as much VALUE as you pos­si­bly can.

Going back to the begin­ning of this arti­cle, we know that ‘intel­li­gent con­sumers’ are deemed intel­li­gent because of their drive to become edu­cated on the sub­ject of their pur­chase, before they ever really start the buy­ing process. If infor­ma­tion is the first place these ‘intel­li­gent con­sumers’ are look­ing, you must become that source of infor­ma­tion. When you become their source of infor­ma­tion or knowl­edge, you are com­plet­ing 4 nec­es­sary actions in order to effec­tively posi­tion and mar­ket your small busi­ness to your prime cus­tomers by…

1. Becoming an expert
2. Adding value to you small business
3. Becoming a valu­able resource
4. and start­ing a rela­tion­ship before a true sales process begins

We are knee deep in the 21st cen­tury and it’s time that our Small Businesses are primed and ready to compete.

- Click here to read the fol­low up arti­cle “The Internet Standard”

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Travis Gutierrez
Owner — Phoenix Small Business Solutions

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