A journalism teacher announced an assignment: To write the lead for the student paper. He gave them facts: Entire school faculty will travel to the state capital on Tuesday for a meeting with the Governor, Margaret Mead, etc. He asked them then to write the lead. All of the students got the lead wrong, which was: No school on Tuesday! (from Made to Stick by Chip & Dan Heath)
Empathy for the customer
I’ve learned that understanding your customer better is the heart of marketing and makes all the difference in whether you succeed. Once you understand your customer, the choice of how to market to them and how you should tailor it to them becomes trivial.
Each marketing channel is fit for a specific type of customer. The chart I’ve linked below explains this perfectly. If you don’t follow this chart, you’ll have a bad time. If you choose a too intensive marketing method like 1-1 sales for mass market goods, you’ll be massively unprofitable. If you choose a method too broad like billboard advertising when you’re selling high ticket customized software, you won’t get any customers, unless you’re advertising on Highway 101.
Understanding how your customer wants to hear from you is important if you want them to pay attention. If you create a tech demo for software that requires the user to do extensive setup, your customer won’t do that! Understand that the average software engineer you’re selling to has tasks that are part of their job description that take up most of their day. Why would they give up their time to try out your software? Unless you’re promising to 10x their output, it’s a tough sell. Generalizing, you need to have empathy for what your customer is going through in life and present the solution to their problems in a way that makes it easy for them to see the benefits of your product.
When you’re developing the service or item you’re looking to sell, you need to look at what the customer needs. Talking to customers is number one, but even then you need to be careful to not fool yourself. Are you selling a “nice to have” or a “I need this right now”? It needs to change the bottom line somehow, either making their business more profitable, their work easier, or their life better.
Focus on your ideal customer
To understand your customer, develop an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Figure out who you’re targeting and what they’re like. What do they do all day? What problems do they have? Dig into their likes and dislikes. How many people are there like this?
Once you have an ideal customer, you can determine what marketing channels to use. Even when you’re not working directly with your customers to change your product, you can still be informed by your ICP. If your hypothetical target customer would love your change, then it’s probably a good idea.
The key here is that you’re not targeting every customer that walks through your door. You need to exclude as much as possible, in my experience I’ve struggled with narrowing down far more than being too exclusive. If you aren’t targeted with your marketing efforts, they’ll be ineffective and unfocused. Don’t forget that the more you exclude non-target customers, the more the target customers will feel that your service is just perfect for them! They’ll be more likely to buy and pay a higher price, since the service will be more valuable to them.
Let’s take a hypothetical – you’re selling a high ticket product to businesses. You get two customers, one’s a team at a big corporation and the other is a local service business. You’re overjoyed that you’re now profitable! But now you need to start improving your product and searching for more customers. You tell your team to make both customers happy, so your team begins adding features that both customers are requesting. This means that your team is moving half as fast as they could for each of the customers, since there’s very little overlap in what they’re looking for. Your marketing is focused on acquiring both big corporations and local service businesses, so you end up confusing customers since they’re not sure if your service is right for them. Since there’s no focus on a target customer, the business doesn’t get to grow.
Now let’s look at the positive example – you’re selling software that emails reminders to clients before their appointment. You realize that your ideal customer is a small or midsize service business that has trouble with clients missing appointments. Specifically, they’re looking to reduce no shows without adding more work to their plate. From this you can develop an ideal customer profile – they will have a lot of appointments per day, like a dentist or salon, they rely on appointments and not walk in traffic, they don’t have admin staff that’s handling appointments, and they aren’t big enough to require a custom built solution. Thanks to this customer profile, you decide that the best way to market is to offer a free trial of your software, which you can sell through local business meetups. You can also use internet advertising targeted towards business owners, emphasizing the time and cost savings.
Building customer relationships
Just because you have reach, doesn’t mean you’ll have customers. Internet advertising is expensive. Social media stars have a difficult time monetizing their audience. Even companies like Reddit, despite having a huge user base, can’t turn a profit.
Don’t outsource your audience to the algo
When you get a view, make sure they’re captured in some way. This way you won’t have to rely on the platform you’re on. You may go viral one day, but next week you’ll be back at square zero if you don’t capture those views. The canonical example is the email list. Sending emails to customers rounds to free, it’s opt in, and most customers who are interested in your product would be glad to see emails from your business. There’s a reason every company tries to get into your inbox, it’s because you’re almost guaranteed to see their emails. Owning your distribution channel ensures that no matter what you’re doing, you’re guaranteed to get eyes on your content, with nobody’s interference. There are other ways to do this, like private Discord channels, forums, or SMS.
The reason this works in creating more customers is that someone may not be ready to buy today, but maybe in a few weeks after receiving more information about the product they will be. It also ensures that past clients stay in touch and encourages re-purchasing.
Lead magnets
How do you get viewers to join your community? Use a lead magnet. Give people free stuff in exchange for them joining your email list. Common lead magnets used are free ebooks, discount codes, free trials, and free consultations. You give value to potential customers in exchange for being able to give them more value. The more value you give, the more likely people are likely to buy.
High view counts don’t mean they’ll buy
Going viral doesn’t mean you’ll get customers. This goes back to the ICP and understanding what your customer wants. Optimizing for view counts isn’t correct – you’re looking to optimize the number of customers. On Twitter you’ll sometimes see someone who’s going viral and they’re selling something totally irrelevant. While certainly better than no views at all, the conversion rate of those views to sales will be low. On the other hand, if you’re selling a killer product which is highly targeted that solves the ideal customer’s problem, each view has a high probability to convert to a customer. It doesn’t matter if you’re not going viral since you’re still getting a high number of customers.
The key is to have alignment between the things you’re posting and what you’re selling. Developing a persona is one way of doing this, but also just being clear about what you’re offering is fine. A well crafted Call To Action (CTA) can be killer for converting views to customers. Using a lead magnet and presenting it well in a tweet at the end of a thread, or in the description of a post can be very effective.