Where Your Best Marketing Ideas Come From
Generate The Best Marketing Ideas By Knowing Your Customers
You might be struggling with a message that really connects with potential customers.
Or, you might be trying to rebrand or revamp an existing message with the launch of a new product or service.
Whatever the case, your best marketing ideas will fall somewhere in between knowing exactly how a potential customer feels about the industry you're in (what you're selling), and the ease in which a potential customer can take a positive action toward your business.
1. Knowing Exactly How a Potential Customer Feels About The Industry You're In
Have you talked to your existing customers by surveying them? What do they like and dislike about your business and what can you do better?
The question you want to answer is: "What compelled one of my customers to actually go ahead and purchase from me in the first place?" You're trying to land on a specific feeling. Josh Kaufman in "The Personal MBA" says, customers are driven by 5 primary feelings. Your customers have 1 of these. They are:
- Acquire - gain status, wealth, influence, success
- Bond - develop a relationship, feel loved, feel at home, and be connected.
- Learn - have their curiosity satisfied, to be educated, to learn a new skill or idea.
- Defend - a desire to protect themselves or loved ones, keep them from harm, or prevent bad things from happening to them.
- Feel - want to be entertained or experience something emotional or pleasurable to the senses.
2. The Ease In Which a Potential Customer can Take A Positive Action Toward Your Business.
You must make it easy to make a positive action. That action can be as small as clicking a button, landing on your website, or signing up for your newsletter. This action most likely isn't "making a sale."
Make it easy and beneficial for a potential customer to take an action. The best way to do this is to provide value.
You can lose the business strategy and design and placements and all that (which will make your marketing suffer a bit). BUT, if your message speaks to the heart of your customers' feelings, and it's easy for them to act, you have a solid message for all of your marketing.
