We are all experiencing the current economic climate. It is not a very pleasant site right now and you might think it is time to be bailing out of your carefully crafted marketing campaign and wait for the financial storm to pass. That would be a big mistake and you would have a lot of company as others do the same.
Though you would think these are troubled times and they are, they also create exceptional opportunities for smart marketers who understand the buying process. Especially if they can change the way they used to do business in better times. As you go through this, part of this marketing conversion could make use of a few tried-and-true offline marketing techniques.
As with any business plan you must develop a clear understanding of who your customer is: how they think and how they buy. This is not something new with business planning, it is as old as the days when peddlers rode through settlements with their wares in the back of the wagon over a hundred years ago. They had a waiting clientele as frontier housewives were desperate to get these products they would have hanging on the sides of their wagon. That simple premise of marketing to the prevailing needs worked then and still works today.
As you go through trying to sustain your business in a difficult economy, you must understand the stages of your customer’s buying habits. Your first step is to recognize the need for your product or service to solve a problem or to fill a need. Just by designing your campaign to capitalize on the solutions your customers need, this will help you make sales.
People have realized that when prospective buyers recognize their need for something, they will be looking for information before they decide to buy. It could be that they have needed this information in the past. Maybe they will replay a memory of that solution that either worked or didn’t work. They might make comparisons between the listed benefits of using current, competing products. If you present that marketing campaign showing customers with similar needs happily bought your solutions to their problems, using real and true testimonials, will bring you sales.
That mission accomplished and once your prospect has decided to buy, it is your job to make that buying process as easy as possible so they can buy and receive your product or service. You certainly do not want them jumping through nonsensical hoops to spend their money with you. Buying should be a 3-step process:
Step #1 – Click the “Buy Now” button
Step #2 – Landing on the Paypal or other payment processor page to enter their information
Step #3 – Receiving the download link or an attachment in the Thank you email
You might want to take a lesson from any retail store where you have made a purchase in the past. How many hurdles stand between you and the check-out counter? How long would you put up with ridiculous questions or requests for information or opinions on you way to pay for your purchases?
If you want to build a list and get permission to market to your buying customer in the future, you might send them to a squeeze page between Step #1 and #2, so you can get their email address, if you haven’t already gathered it on your sales page somewhere. If you are using a squeeze page, you might want to offer your buyer a free gift, like a special report or ebook just for being a customer. Free gifts build goodwill.
Always remember, customers come in all sizes, shapes and attitudes. What appeals to one customer and makes them reach for their credit card might not do a thing for another customer. To try and increase the interest in your products with customers holding different needs, think about including more than one list of benefits on your sales page or even have different sales pages, using keywords that will attract customers with opposite needs.
We go through these financial ups and downs all the time, some worse than others. The job for you, as a marketer in any market, is to understand your customers and what they need from you. After you have made that determination of their needs or wants, be sure to provide it. If you make your sales page full of enough benefits and testimonials to overcome their natural sales resistance, your business will grow in any market.
November 18th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
Understanding your customer and then providing them what they need is clearly important. Right now in the internet marketing niche there are tons of people searching for a way to break into the market. Understanding the hurdles you went through as an internet marketer and helping them make their rite of passage easier is likely to be well received in this marketplace.
November 18th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
I want to take umbrage with part of your post. You focused a bit too much on needs but people buy what they want.
Great article otherwise but people search for and buy what they want even though their needs would help them more.
Key is to give them what they want and sneak in what they need as needs are hard to sell.
November 18th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
I fully agree that understanding your customers is key for success. Handling all customer with one list will certainly result in loosing some customers quickly. Good post.
Fred
November 20th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Good post.
Creating the desire for what you are selling is part of the process too.
Even if the person visiting your site feels like he wants to buy, your copy should convert that want into a need subtly. That way they believe that if they don’t buy right now, they are missing out on something.
Keep up the good work.
November 21st, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Good post. Understanding your customers is important to the selling process. And as you said, they come in all sizes, shapes and attitudes. Knowing these things about your customer will help you to slant your promotions toward their needs.