Are You Telling Your Customers What They Want To Hear? You may have come up with the best marketing push in the world but if you haven’t taken the time to discover how your customer is going to react then you could be simply wasting your time. Are your customers switched on? Are they interested in what you have to offer, however nicely you package it? In short, are they taking a blind bit of notice?
Are You Telling Your Customers What They Want To Hear? You may have come up with the best marketing push in the world but if you haven’t taken the time to discover how your customer is going to react then you could be simply wasting your time. Are your customers switched on? Are they interested in what you have to offer, however nicely you package it? In short, are they taking a blind bit of notice? Go for a ten-minute drive through any Northants town centre and the chances are you’ll pass around 300 attempts to advertise to you.
From special promotions in shop windows, bus stop posters, billboards, signs, vehicle graphics and digital ticker tapes, not to mention your friendly local citizens wearing branded t-shirts or carrying bags for life. Pop online and catch up with your friends and family on the social media platforms and adverts prevail here too. The truth is that you will probably ignore 99% of these wonderful attempts to beguile and woo you. The reason? Most of those advertising bites are not relevant to you at that particular moment in time. You may well be interested in a two for one deal at the local deli later in the day when you are hungry.
You might even want to buy a new car when your present one gasps its last breath. And you might want to join that local health club now the New Year has come round and you decide to get into shape, again. A persistently leaking tap at home will make you notice plumber’s vans whilst on your morning commute but if you lack a plumbing emergency these advertising campaigns have no meaning for you as an individual. Most marketing advances are designed to tell customers what the brand owners want them to hear. It’s symptomatic of many businesses that they singularly fail, in fact, to understand that you need to tell your customer what they want to hear.
Stop telling your customers what you want them to hear Start telling them what they want to hear! And to get to grips with this, you need to stand in your customer’s shoes if you want to run effective marketing campaigns. You might think that your customer cares about the same things as you, and perhaps they do. But opting for that kind of strategy can stop you thinking about what really matters to your customer. It’s the most important and simplistic part of any marketing campaign: get to know what your customers actually want and provide it for them. And that means asking the right questions in the first place. You can, of course, use your intuition and if you have it in bucket loads and have a real feel for what your customer actually wants.
Even a little will help you make a more valued decision though it can often be a false friend. Another option is to collect data through market research, that can reveal all sorts of wonderful information about your average customer’s buying behaviour and even their underlying wants and needs. You can use your customer services section to find out about what your most valued asset likes about your product (or dislikes), you can spend time profiling your ideal client, centre your campaigns around their behaviours, needs and desires or you can run focus groups and gather usable data that way. Whichever method you choose, finding out what your customer really wants to hear will help develop a more meaningful, and more successful marketing campaign. Jules White is the founder, franchisor and the Northampton franchisee for The Last Hurdle. A business development specialist with over 18 years’ sales and marketing experience. Jules has twice been invited to be a panellist for Facebook, advising small businesses how to use Facebook for business.
