Introduction
Knowing and understanding your customers on a deep, emotional level is truly the beginning of successful marketing.
If you want to really sell your products, if you want to build a business that brings in six (or seven) figures this year…
Then you need to be prepared and get to know your customers better than anyone else in your marketplace. In fact, you should know your customers better than their close friends do.
‘Better Than your Customers even Know Themselves’.
If you have not made your first sale yet:
You should know and understand your ideal customer better than they know themselves. (In other words, the type of person who is most likely to buy your product.)
Believe it or not: It’s not as difficult as it sounds.
The Power of Understanding Your Customers’ Problems.
It’s the same with your customers.
The need to be able to diagnose your clients’ problems. If you can identify and diagnose your customers’ problems, it shows you understand your customers in a deeply intimate, personal way.
Describing your customers’ problems tells them three important things:
You understand where they’re at.
You know where they want to be.
And you’re going to help you get there.
So framing your clients’ problems is a definite process to direct you along the right path to understanding your customer’s needs and wants.
To be able differentiate between what you think they need and what they actually need to resolve their problem is a major key to opening the door to your success.
To begin this whole process
Start by looking at your product and ask yourself:
What problem or problems does it solve?
Make a list of those problems.
Which one MUST be solved?
Which problem keeps your ideal customers up at night?
Is it the kind of problem customers would pay money to solve?
If it’s not, you may have to go back to the drawing board.
If you have found a problem that’s worth solving: Brainstorm as many ways to present this problem as possible.
Then ask yourself…
Does the problem make any particular goals unattainable? (For example:
Being overweight might make it impossible to chase after your kids.)
If so, how much effort will they waste if they don’t solve this problem?
What’s the history of the problem? Where did it come from and what caused it in the first place?
What are the long-term implications of the problem if it’s not solved (not only for the client but possibly for their families etc.)?
Choose one way to present the problem and develop it into small piece of content. Ideally, it should be a place where you can get feedback (like a blog post). See what resonates with your audience.
Once you find the reframed problem that resonates, write a longer piece of content about it. Use this longer piece of content to start creating demand for your product.
Put yourself one step closer to the BIG marketing piece that could longterm lead customers to you… instead of the other way around.
A Shortcut to Understanding Your Customers
Strangely, understanding your customers’ problems is not as difficult as it sounds. Most people don’t spend much time thinking about their problems.
They certainly don’t spend any significant time thinking through all the vast implications of those problems. Or how a single problem may be affecting all other areas of their lives.
As a business owner, that’s something you should be doing. I would encourage you to give this some serious thought.
What are your ideal customers’ problems?
What are all the wide-spread symptoms of those problems?
What kind of life do they have as they’re living with those problems?
What emotions are triggered on a regular basis because they have this problem?
If you’re having trouble thinking this through, I’ve found the best starting point for understanding your prospect’s problems is YOU.
Your own experience.
Think about it. You’re in the business you’re in for a reason. In all likelihood, you’ve struggled and overcome many of the conflicts your prospect is struggling with right now. You’ve probably felt many of the same feelings and experienced many of the same emotions that your prospect lives with every day.
That which is most personal, is most general. Your own fears, your own hopes, your own struggles, and your own frustrations are probably very close to most others in your niche or market.
Keep in mind: A problem you’re struggling with right now may be how your reach your target audience this year.
The ultimate goal is to use data for more than the usual who-is-buyingwhat? Instead, use it as a way to understand the full scope of a customer’s problem, which can create opportunities to sell them a broader, more integrated set of products or services.
Or to simply be more confident that you know what their issues are, and you’re as relevant to them as ever.
People don’t care about your company or your product. They only care what your product can do for them.
Don’t take it personally.
You can actually use this to your advantage.
If you take the time to understand your customer’s challenges, listen to their concerns, and address their priorities (instead of your own), you build trust and credibility.
When you fail to understand the psychology of your target customer, you set yourself up for poor results and wasted time. Your ads aren’t as effective as they could be. Your copy doesn’t convert. And as a result, you miss out on potential leads and sales.
You might have a lot of data about your customers, but if you don’t understand what’s going on inside their heads, then you’re trying to run the race with an arm and a leg tied behind your back.
Here are three questions which may help you discover what’s most important to your customers:
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What keeps your customers awake at night?
The objective of this question is to help you identify your customer’s most painful problem.
If your brand messaging articulates your customer’s problem more clearly than they could’ve said it themselves, they’ll automatically assume you have the solution.
Find out what your customers’ problems are, and show them how your company will eliminate those problems from their life.
2. Who else has tried selling a similar product, and how has it failed?
Think about a time when you were about to buy something but decided against it at the last minute. Why didn’t you buy it?
Can you remember the reason you decided not to make the purchase? Maybe there was something that the product didn’t offer that you felt was important. Or perhaps it was something about the experience as a whole.
Your goal is to discover what prevents people from buying from your competitors so you can remove the friction for your own product. With this kind of insight, you can:
Present the most effective value proposition
Address your customer’s biggest concerns
Win them over
3. Do your customers have their own language?
The goal of this question is to identify the language your customers use in their day-to-day interactions, so you can incorporate it into your messaging.
Every tribe has its own unique language and terminology. How do your target customers talk about their problem to their colleagues or friends? What words do they use to describe it?
Listen to how your customers talk, and translate your brand message into a language that resonates with your audience.
Get the answers you need by talking to your customers
Marketers who don’t invest time in understanding their customers will always be at a disadvantage to competitors that do. But if you can quickly show how you solve their problem, your campaigns will produce more leads and sales.
Here are 3 ways you can get the real answers to these questions, straight from your customers:
- Conduct customer interviews
- Use Social Media and listen to what people are saying
- Develop Competitor testing:
And remember, it’s all about your customer. People don’t care about your company or your product; they just want to know whether you can help them solve their problem. Use this to your advantage when crafting your brand message, and let them know that you can solve their problem.
So what does this mean for you?
As a marketer, it’s your job to find out which competitors your customer has considered—and where they fell short. Then you need to clearly explain how and why your product can solve the problems that the competition can’t.
