Marketing Mindset -
Understanding How Your
Customers Are Wired
When you’re first starting out in online business, there’s a lot to learn.
Not only do you need to be able to find and/or create a product or service that people want, you need to figure out how to get your message out.
That process – the elusive task we call “marketing” – starts with understanding your prospect.
You see, it’s not enough just to have a great product at a competitive price. You need to be able to connect with your target market, understand why they buy the things they do, and help them see just how their lives will be better by doing business with you.
Making the Connection
Part of marketing is without doubt, bonding with your prospects. Marketing opens the lines of communication. Marketing isn’t the same as sales, although your marketing and sales efforts have to work together if you aim to succeed.
Marketing can take a number of formats. An email sent out to prospective customers detailing a new product offering is one form of marketing. A newspaper or web banner ad are forms of marketing. A brochure detailing your business and what you offer is another.
Nowadays, marketing uses information and education to open up the lines of communication with prospects. Rather than hitting them over the head with an immediate sales pitch, education marketing brings your business into their awareness and gets them interested and involved.
Providing how-to information for free is one example. You can post on your blog, website, Facebook page. You get them to connect with you and start building a relationship.
Only after building trust with your customers, should you attempt to make any campaigns for selling.
Why People Buy
In an idealized world, people make all of their purchasing decisions by gathering information, comparing products, and choosing the product that best suits their needs and their budget. That’s NOT how it works in the real world, however.
People are inherently irrational in their buying decisions. More often than not, what they want is not what they need. They act on emotion, not logic. Specifically, they make decisions based on notions like :-
- Hopes and dreams. People buy products that they believe will make them happy and successful.
- Opportunity. Impulse buys make up a significant percentage of discretionary spending. If you doubt this for one moment, walk down the checkout aisle at your local grocery store and look at all of the impulse items for sale.
- Emotional needs. Many people attempt to deal with emotional needs (the need for love, the need for security, the need to be needed) by buying things.
- Social pressure. In some cases, people buy stuff because they believe everyone else in their social group is doing so.
- Fears. Fear drives many purchasing decisions. That can include a wide array of fears, from the fear of loss to the fear of death, fear of failure and more.
What does all this mean for your marketing efforts?
Simply that, you need to connect with your prospects on an emotional level. You have to understand and enter your prospect’s mindset.
Forget about yourself and look through the eyes of your prospect. Imagine what it's like to be in their position. Think like they think and feel like they feel.
In many ways, marketing is much about human behaviour.
Creating Your Marketing Profile
Let’s boil all of this down and look at exactly how you can implement these principles in your business.
You want to connect with your prospects. So you have to understand how they think and why they buy.
This simple five-step exercise will help you get inside the mind of your prospective customer, and from there start building your marketing plan:
- Identify your ideal prospect
- Figure out a specific group of people you want to reach, if you haven’t already.
- Pin down as much information as you can, such as age, sex, where they’re coming from, income level, and more.
- Identify your prospect’s wants
- Think about that ideal prospect. What is it that they want from life? Do they want to look better, live happier, get ahead in their career, or have a healthy family life?
- List three things that the prospect would find very important in life.
- Identify your prospect’s fears
- What is it that your prospect is trying to avoid in life? Rejection? Loneliness? Illness? Uncertainty? Failure?
- List one or two fears your prospect is likely to face.
- Locate your prospect
- Find out where your prospect hangs out – physically or online. That’s where you’ll need to aim your marketing message.
- List at least three potential locations. These can be specific websites, types of businesses, clubs etc.
- Craft your message
- Your marketing message should have one underlying theme.
- Based on the information you’ve gathered, create a one-sentence marketing message that will serve as the core of your marketing efforts.
Take a look at how you can craft your message.
Bottomline - Successful online businesses connect with their prospects
on a psychological level, and custom-build their marketing efforts to
match the prospect's mindset.
