Knowing Your Buyer is Critical to a Solid Content Marketing Campaign
One of the first things I’ll do with a new client is to learn as much as I can about their buyers. This is more of a daunting task than you can imagine, as most business owners couldn’t give you a good description of a buyer if their lives depended on it.
Technical buyers are especially hard to pinpoint because we think of them as being highly analytical, fact-driven or data-driven creatures of habit.
Even, and perhaps especially, technical buyers are driven by their emotions as much as anyone when it comes to making a buying decision.
However, because they don’t wear their emotions on their sleeves as do non-technical buyers, it’s harder to pinpoint their emotional hot buttons.
Here are a three tips on uncovering the “real buyer” behind the curtain:
1 Understand the buyer’s position in the company.
A CIO will have entirely different emotional reasons for making a buying decision than will a production engineer or design engineer.
Thus, the first step should be to identify the positions of your buyers within the company because you may have several buyers in very different positions.
2 Determine the emotional hot buttons for each position.
“Personification” is a technique we often use to put a face and emotions behind a “group” of people. Give your buyer a name, gender, age, and background.
If she’s a CIO who has worked 60 hour weeks for most of her life, and is yet terrified of losing her job, then you’ll want to paint a picture of her that represents her deeper emotions.
For example, because she’s afraid of losing her high-paying, high-profile job, you know that she’s got to maintain an air of both professionalism and success. Your job isn’t to sell her stuff. It’s to make her feel and look successful.
Or, if you have a buyer who is an experienced techie with 25 years in the field, you know that he’s got a HUGE ego to feed. It’s his place to be seen as “the guy who knows it all,” and it’s your job to help him feel and look knowledgeable.
These are their emotional hot buttons – it’s what drives them to decide on one product or service over another. They’re not looking for the product with the best specifications, unless that product can also feed their emotional needs first.
3 Understand their secondary emotions and beliefs
Everyone believes in something, whether it’s a religious belief, a political belief, or a belief about how a vendor should operate.
See if you can uncover their core beliefs about life, politics, and business relationships. Once you understand these beliefs, you can easily tap into secondary emotions that come from those beliefs.
For example, if the people in your target market believe that global warming will ultimately destroy civilization as we know it, then even if your product has nothing to do with global warming, you can establish a rapport with your lead by demonstrating that you are “in their camp.”
We want to buy from people who are like us – with similar beliefs, ethics, and ideas about how to run a business. To illustrate this point, one of my clients works as a consultant to the oil & gas industry. These are mostly hand-shaking, good old boys who put their relationships with people first.
We were able to play off these secondary emotions in our copy, thereby creating a connection long before a face-to-face meeting is had.
The Point
Everyone ultimately decides on a purchase based on emotional reasons. They’ve got to “feel good” about it before they’ll make the purchase decision.
Get to know your customer and lead from an emotional standpoint, and then write your copy in a way that connects to their deeper emotions. This is how you generate more leads and make more sales online.
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