Business owners want to avoid two things: wasting time and wasting money.
Which are essentially the same thing. Nothing wastes time and money like making a bad marketing decision. An example of a bad marketing decision is marketing to the wrong target market. If you don’t know who you are selling to, how can you create an effective message?
Your clients often make marketing decisions based on gut instinct. (Well, who hasn’t?)
How do you make decisions? How does your client make decisions? Do you sometimes just “go with your gut”? Except maybe you call it intuition? Maybe you have heard a client say, “I love my product so much, I’m sure everyone else in the world will love it, too!” This is an example of an entrepreneur who is just about to waste huge amounts of time and money.
In a recent poll of small business owners, the things they feared the most related to uncertainty about their futures. They asked:
- How do I know if I am offering the right product? To the right audience? With the right messaging?
- Who are my ideal customers, and what do they want?
- What if I make a wrong decision?
“Big data” looks at the past.
There’s nothing wrong with looking at past performance to try to predict future performance. You need to track data to see if you are getting the outcomes you want. That means measuring your customer’s behavior: sales, repeat sales, usage, frequency, all that stuff. We are creatures of habit. What we did yesterday is often a good predictor of what we’ll do tomorrow.
Except when we change our minds. Past performance is not a guarantee of future performance. As you know, if you follow the stock market. So “big data” is great, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
“Big data” doesn’t tell us why people buy.
People buy for all sorts of reasons. Simply tracking purchase behavior tells us nothing about why people are purchasing. Once you know what drives your customer’s behavior, you can write content that specifically focuses on their reasons for buying. That means finding out their attitudes and preferences, likes and dislikes, awareness and loyalty… all those personality-related traits that make each customer unique.
Stop wasting time and money selling to the wrong audience.
With some fairly simple research, you can find out your best customer segments–not just how old they are or how much income they have, but what they care about, what motivates them to search for a product or service like yours, what prevents them from purchasing, how they make their purchase decisions… all those crucial characteristics that help differentiate your best audiences from the best-left-alone audiences. These ideal customer groups are represented by unique buyer personas, which will inspire you to write targeted marketing messages to address their unique concerns.
What if you could see into the future?
Marketing to your best audiences is Marketing 101. Market research is the key. Marketing research lets you peer forward into the future for you and your client. Sometimes the future looks a little hazy, but it sure beats driving blind off a cliff!
Your client just wants to feel confident that she is making the right marketing decisions. She looks to you for guidance. Do you go with your gut and assume you already know what your customers want? You will be right some of the time. If you have lots of experience, you might even be right most of the time. With some mindfully collected marketing research, you will have your best chance of helping your client made effective marketing decisions and avoid wasting time and money.
No one can be 100% certain of anything in life. But we don’t need to be absolutely certain before we take action. We just need to reduce the level of uncertainty to a point where we are able to accept the risks that come with making certain choices and not others. It takes courage to ask questions and listen for the answers. Sometimes the answer isn’t what we want to hear. But we still need to ask the questions, so we can help your client avoid driving off that cliff.
Here’s an example. My friend Christy coaches small business owners, helping them with their business and marketing plans. She told me she was thinking of advertising to get more clients. I said, “Let’s do some research!” We conducted a basic online survey of her current clients and found out they don’t pay attention to advertising. Almost all Christy’s clients found her through referrals. Hey! I just saved her a ton on advertising!
Be a marketing hero.
That’s what marketing research can do for your clients (and you, too). Save them (and you) a ton of time, energy, and money that would have been spent on misplaced marketing efforts.
Call or email for more information about how marketing research can make you a marketing hero.