In marketing and sales, it is critical to know that customers always buy for their reasons, not yours. Therefore, it is important to know and understand your typical customer’s buying strategy so that you can sell to them effectively and efficiently, by matching your marketing and sales methods to their buying strategy.
Imagine how much more effective your marketing can be if you know the psychological profile of your customers in a way that enables you to engage with them before they are even entertaining thoughts about your products or services. Instead of operating in the competitive scramble for the customers who are ready to buy, you can create a relationship with customers who will never even consider a competitor’s offering if you get this process right.
In any buying strategy, the customer has to move through a spectrum from not wanting your product or service to a position where having your product or service is a must.
The question you should be asking is, how well does your marketing system address the needs of the people in your market at each stage of that spectrum, rather than just focusing on the customers who are ready to buy?
The spectrum customers typically move through is:
- Become aware of a problem
- Want a solution.
- Research options.
- Analyse alternatives.
- Negotiation and purchase.
- Experience the solution and evaluate the results.
Your task as a marketer is to understand the psychological triggers that cause your ideal customer to move from one stage to the next. Then you can design your marketing process to stimulate those triggers in the most effective manner.
The way most people advertise is very logical. Of course, you want your ad and your proposition to stand out to people who already want what you offer. But according to numerous field tests, that situation only relates to between three to ten percent of people in most markets. This leaves a massive number of potential customers who will never know about you until they are actively looking for a solution, if the only marketing you do is advertising to the ready-to-buy customers.
You can create massive leverage in your marketing if you develop strategies to build trust relationships with people who are not yet ready to buy, before your competitors even come into consideration.
What happens when a potential customer gets to the point of knowing the product or service that will meet their needs? We end up with a situation where a customer has to evaluate offers from different suppliers where typically the suppliers are previously unknown. There is a very short window of opportunity for the supplier to build a relationship of trust and this puts incredible pressure on unprepared suppliers. This also puts most suppliers into a very competitive situation. It is much more difficult at this stage to show the potential customer why your offer is superior because they have already made up their own mind about what they want. Therefore, it is the cheapest supplier that usually gets the sale.
Ideally, you never want to put yourself in this situation as a business owner, but this is where most businesses tend to find themselves more often than not.
With the most effective marketing strategy, the focus is on defining the psychological needs of the ideal customer. When these needs are understood, it is much easier to create an offering to attract the ideal customer in a much more effective way than the norm.
When you can identify and define your ideal customer with a level of intimacy that allows you to get inside their mind and where you can explain their issues, problems or challenges better than they can, you have a winning combination.
This strategic marketing process has the aim of creating a unique strategic position that becomes the power base from which all marketing strategies are developed. The propositions based on the ideal customer’s desires should attract and compel the ideal customers to enter into a relationship to learn about your products or services and then to buy and become repeat customers who stay for life.
About the Author:
Greg Roworth is a business growth specialist and author of Run Your Business on Autopilot – How to Leverage Your Business for Maximum Profit in Minimum Time. He specialises in assisting smart but frustrated business owners to discover their unique market positioning and to quickly leverage their business by attracting more ideal clients and building the systems to run their businesses on autopilot. He currently leads a team of business growth specialists as CEO of Business Success Systems. To contact Greg please visit www.BusinessSuccessSystems.com.au or email him at greg@BusinessSuccessSystems.com.au
