Maven Marketing with Brandon Welch

Your Most Overlooked Customer

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Most businesses are shouting at the wrong people.

In this solo Maven Monday episode, Brandon breaks down the most overlooked customer in your entire market. The one who isn’t ready yet… but absolutely will be. If your industry has a long buying cycle (think home services, healthcare, legal, or high-ticket purchases), this episode will challenge how you think about advertising, timing, and growth.

You’ll learn why chasing “today customers” turns marketing into a price war, and how the fastest-growing companies quietly win customers years before the sale ever happens.

This one's about building familiarity, trust, and preference long before your competitors show up.

If your marketing feels expensive, exhausting, or stuck in short-term thinking... this episode will reframe everything.

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Host: Brandon Welch
Executive Producer: Carter Breaux
Audio/Video Producer: Nate the Camera Guy

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Brandon Welch:

Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. I'm your host, Brandon Welch, and it's just me and you today. And today we're going to talk about your most overlooked customer. You have a customer right now that is not hearing you, that would buy from you if you just talked to them with a little bit more intention. But first I have a question. How long does it take before somebody buys something in your category? Is it one year? Is it 10 years? Is it 20 years? Most service companies, it takes multiple years, if not multiple decades, before the average person comes around to buying something in that category. If you're a lawyer or a doctor, it can take years and years before somebody switches to you. If you're a home improvement company, it could be decades before somebody needs a new roof or an HVAC unit or electrician services. And I just want to start our conversation there because we tend to talk in small business America. If you're doing less than$100 million a year, you don't have uh big, fancy strategists, you don't have analytics, you don't have a whole lot of like fancy things that the big, big brands do. So there's this conventional wisdom that all customers are the same, and we just need to talk to them. We just need to make some noise, and then people will show up at our door wanting to do business with us. Now, that can happen, and it does. The longer you're in business, that the more that happens uh by accident. But in most cases, for uh the errand of getting new customers, winning new people over, we're talking to everybody as if they're in the market now. And the truth is for most service and big ticket items, it's at least 10 years. So we're gonna use that as an example. Uh maybe you're a little bit higher than that, maybe you're a little bit lower than that, but just as an example, if it takes 10 years before the average person, say, does a major home improvement or makes a big professional service choice or buys a big retail item, that means that only 10% of people in that category will buy this year. And if you take that 10% over the entire year and you divide it into 12 months, that means about 0.8 or 0.83% will buy this month. And if you divide that out into four weeks per month, that means that about 0.2% of the population will buy this week. Yet, most small businesses advertise as if it's the entire 100%. They don't realize that by saying, hey, come buy my thing, come buy my jewelry, come buy my big expensive item, choose me as your service provider. The second that you do that, you actually wire your message to be incompatible and uninteresting to 98% of the population or 99.8% of the population in this example. And so what I want to just suggest to you is that your advertising on a whole can actually matter very little today, unless you have a very short purchase cycle, unless you are selling cheeseburgers or pizzas or water or oxygen or something that people buy very, very often, what we call commodities. There are far, far, far more people buying in the future than there are right now. And I just want to suggest that maybe we should be talking to a few more of those people into the future. If you wait to win them over when they finally decide to buy, you can do that. Uh you could advertise uh transactionally on search engines, and that is still a good thing to do. But that is where every one of your competitors is, and why would you pay thousands of dollars or devote your entire marketing budget just to be on a list with a bunch of other people they could buy from? I want to suggest to you that there are three different types of customers. We call those the today customer, the tomorrow customer, and the yesterday customer. Now, everybody wants the today customer. They think I want to put dollars in and I want to get money out. But that today customer who waits until today to decide who they're going to buy from only wants to compare price, speed, and convenience of that sale. They will choose the person who discounts the most, can show up the fastest, and make the most concessions usually. And that is usually not the type of customer that most of us want. That's not the type of customer I or my clients want. What we usually want is that customer who cares about commitment and our quality and our value and the relationships we provide. But to convince them of that, we cannot wait till the finish line. We cannot wait to that moment where they are comparing on a transactional scale us to a bunch of competitors because they just don't want to hear it. So after the sale, we always need to focus on that yesterday customer. We need to continue that tribal bond, that added value and support. And that is also a very overlooked customer for most companies. But I want to talk about the tomorrow customer. The companies I work with that grow the fastest, the ones who grow the most profitably and the most predictable and the biggest over time, many of them five, ten, and even twenty Xing the top line revenues of their company and their profitability while they're at it. Those are the ones who focus on the tomorrow customers. We talked last week in our episode about no like and trust, how you win over that tomorrow customer. It's a really important episode. You should take a look at it. We'll make it pop up in the comments down here. Uh, we talked about talking to one person, being a consistent personality, and showing up daily to them. That's the essence of the tomorrow customer. And showing up daily as it relates to your marketing budget uh means getting the largest group of people you can afford to reach on a daily basis or on a multiple times per week basis, and putting 60 to 70% of your budget there so that that 0.2%, 0.2% we talked about, uh will continue to get to know you over time. If you don't do that, and you just use your advertising dollars to say, hey, I sell air conditioners and come buy your air conditioner for me today, well, we know that 99.8% of people didn't hear that because they didn't care. But instead, if we entertain them, if we promise them something in the future, if we talk about our shared values, if we support things in our community with them, if we let them see us as real human beings, like next-door neighbors and brother-in-laws and uh the people that we are in real life, and like we show up at church and in our social circles, if we make them know, like, and trust us long before the sale, every month you advertise, you're getting an extra 0.2% of that population. You're getting your bigger scoop. You're snowballing that 0.2 every week turns into another 0.2, and then you have a 0.8 per month, and then by the end of the year, if your advertising budget is appropriate and you're doing it consistently, you could have a much bigger percentage of that 10% or that next 10% that's going to buy you. And that is the magic. You do not want to be limited to finding someone who does what you do. You want to be limited to them finding you long before they knew they need you for what you do and for why you do it, more importantly, because when they understand why you do it and they trust you like a friend and they believe in your way of doing business, they're gonna be willing to spend more money. They're gonna come to you faster, they're gonna waste less of your time, they're gonna waste less of your dollars, they're gonna cancel you less often, and they're gonna bring back their friends and family way more often. And if you do this, search engines, lead sellers, and your sharky competitors never made it to the party. If you just win them over long before your competitor was even focusing on them, and that's gonna happen. Most businesses in America have a short-term mentality. You want to have a slightly longer one, you want to build relationships, you want to do it through consistent, daily, broad, large media, and you want to do it with a campaign that makes you real and likable and trustable so that there's no chance that those other people enter the sales equation. You've already won them. And when you do that, my friends, you snowball over and over and over and over and over. You've heard us talk about this, you've heard us uh write about this, you've read our book, uh, but if you haven't, and this is the first time, we would love to have you back every Monday learning more about how advertising actually works in America. We are unreasonably obsessed with a small business owner and the people who work for small business owners. We believe it has the power to change America. Our heart is in it to grow for you. And I just want you to adopt a little bit of that long-term mentality of the tomorrow customer. It's the overlooked customer, but now you know, or now you've remembered, or now you've just been reminded, if you're one of the few that's doing this, why it's so important. Thank you so much for listening. This was a short episode. It was designed to be a short episode. I hope you take this into your week and make magic happen in your company. We can't wait to help you. Check out the Maven Marketing Mastermind at Maven Methodtraining.com if you'd like to bring your company and have us help work on it as a group and build your tomorrow campaigns. Or subscribe to the Maven Monday podcast uh on Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you're listening to this now. Thank you so much for listening. Have a great week.