There’s an old saying that says that we are incapable of genuinely understanding someone until we have walked a mile in their shoes. Same is true about marketing and understanding your customer.
How else can we know what drives our customers to buy our products unless we GET them?
The goal here is understanding. How can you motivate someone, how you can you persuade someone, how can you sell someone without understanding that person?
However, as transparent as it may seem, it can be easily forgotten. For example, when I sold my Mastermind Mindset course, my sales copy reflected my mistakes.
Although I carefully identified my customers’ objections, I forgot to address them in my sales copy. I gave my prospects no reason to either believe me or the claims I was making regarding what my course can do for them and their businesses.
As a result, I was embarrassed to admit to myself that I had 0% conversions for a $27 product. It was one of those Huge Failures that made me understand that I was shooting blind relying simply on the product and fancy graphics.
What I lacked was connection with my customer who, as I determined later, was a frustrated internet marketer who’s looking for a silver bullet product that will cure his marketing using nothing but pure magic.
Although my product seemed to fit the magic bullet criteria, since I showed my students how to improve their marketing using nothing but thought, no one bought my course, because I’ve overlooked the fact that internet marketers are guided by the belief that nearly everyone’s a scammer and that sales copies are lies.
Did I forget that when I’ve written my 24 page sales copy? You bet. I assumed that I was trustworthy and as a result failed miserably at marketing a low ticket offer.
To better understand your customer you need to spend at least 20% of your time “in the field” communicating with them, getting to know them, finding out what their problems are, who do they vote for and whether they believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny.
10 Questions To Answer To Better Understand Your Customer
To better understand your customer, Dan Kennedy recommends answering 10 questions:
- What keeps them awake at night, indigestion boiling up their esophagus, eyes open, staring at the ceiling?
- What are they afraid of?
- What are they angry about? Who are they angry at?
- What are their top three daily frustrations?
- What trends are occurring and will occur in their businesses or lives?
- What do they secretly, ardently desire most?
- Is there a built-in bias to the way they make decisions? (Example: engineers = exceptionally analytical)
- Do they have their own language?
- Who else is selling something similar to them, and how?
- Who else has tried selling them something similar, and how has that effort failed?
In addition to these questions you might want to gather demographics: age, occupation, income level, zip code etc. These factors are bound to help you in answering all of the 10 mentioned above.
6 More Things You Can Do To Better Understand Your Customer
Here are 6 more things you can do to better understand your customer:
- Read the same publications and blogs your customer reads
- Visit the same discussion forums and message boards
- Play pretend customer with other vendors
- Attend your industry trade shows, conventions and seminars
- Subscribe to the same mailing lists your customer subscribes to
- Regularly mastermind with other marketers and vendors who provide the service in your industry
The Best Way Ever To Understand Your Customer
To this day I haven’t found a better way to understand your customer then actually talking with him and asking him what is his biggest problem or frustration and delivering a product which solves that problem faster and better than any other product out there.
That’s not only the best way to understand your customer but it’s also the easiest way to sell anything to anyone ever!
At the end of the day, marketing is as much about understanding as marriage: strength of your household is determined by the level of understanding between you, your spouse and her mother 
.
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Well, that’s just it. If you want to sell something to someone you have to know what that person wants. You need to ask them questions and find out how to solve their problems with the product you’ve created for them. Once you do that and show them you are a trustworthy human being who is wanting to better their lives with what you have to offer, you just might have it.
Eric´s last blog ..Happy New Year 2010
Eric, first of all, I am pleased to see that you’ve switched
the theme of your site and uploaded a self-hsoted blog
to your domain, it looks great!
Second, as it obvious as it may seem, even the pros
tend to forget that “magic selling formula”. As I’ve said, it’s
important to constantly be in contact with your customer to know
what’s going on.
Igor