Marketers like to ask: How do I increase my sales? How do I get more leads? How do I drive more traffic to my site? How do I achieve better search engine rankings? How do I keep customers from abandoning their shopping carts? How do I use the data I get from my analytics software? How do I move to the next level?
These are important questions. Over the last decade we’ve challenged hundreds of clients to reframe their questions. For instance, instead of asking, “How do I increase my sales?” marketers should address, “We need to reach more people.” Jeffrey, my brother and partner, and I put this list together to help you consider those in this two-part column.
There Is a Bigger Question: What Makes People Buy?
Focus on this question and everything else falls into place. Understanding “What makes people buy?” requires more than a simple change in tactics; it requires a significant change in perspective.
Your perspective dictates your strategy.
Without the correct strategy, you can win all the battles and still lose the war.
Without the correct strategy, you can get more leads, drive more traffic, rank high in the search engines and still fail to increase sales.
This isn’t theoretical. We see it happen all the time.
Tactics: The Unspoken Assumptions
When you tackle site optimization, design, or redesign, you begin with a set of assumptions. Usually, your assumptions reflect a granular, detail-oriented view of the problem as the business sees it.
This leads you to imagine the solution lies in the application of “best practices” — a series of tactics. But Sun Tzu explains that tactics, applied without effective strategy, are “the noise before defeat.”
To answer the question “Why do customers buy?” you must approach the problem as the customer sees it. Until you understand the customer’s perspective, you can’t talk tactics. For now, put those tools back in the box.
When you ask, “Why do customers buy?” your view of your situation zooms out. You see the larger picture that will help you systematically connect your tactics.
You must fully understand the answers to the buying question before you can begin choosing the system’s components. We’re not talking about your system for selling. You already understand that system. We’re talking about the customer’s system for buying.
In review:
- Begin with a new set of assumptions: The problem is systemic, not granular.
- Embrace a new perspective: See what customers see. Understand the questions customers ask as they try to solve their goals.
- Ask a bigger question: Why do customers buy?
- Develop a new strategy that reflects this perspective. How can I answer questions the customers ask and help them buy?
- Remember, it’s too early for tactics. Understand the big picture and how it affects the customer’s system for buying.
The critical answers to this new perspective — the answers that meet your specific needs — can only come from you.
Seven Online Marketing Challenges
Sometimes you really do just need answers to the questions marketers ask — just not as often as you’d think. We don’t doubt you put in a lot of time; we do suspect you’re not asking yourself the more complex questions. However, when you do have the challenges below, there are ways to solve them — and frame them as bigger questions.
1. “We need to reach more people.”
- Improve your search engine rankings by adding more keywords to your content.
- Find new places to advertise.
- Grow your mailing list.
- Advertise offline.
- Initiate a viral marketing effort.
- Increase the number of links to your site.
- Create an affiliate program.
That’s a start. Next you must ask yourself the bigger questions:
- Are the people coming to our Web site satisfied with what we present? Or does our presentation set up obstacles to buying?
- What does our conversion rate reveal? If less than 10 percent of the visitors to a page are not taking the action we want them to take, we’ve got a problem.
- Do we provide enough information so people return even if they are not ready to buy right now?
- Is our rate of repeat visitors increasing? If it’s decreasing, we’ve got a problem.
- Are the people who buy from us sufficiently delighted to buy again, or are we always looking for new customers?
- What does our repeat customer rate tell us? If our business is at least two years old and less than 30 percent of our customers aren’t repeat customers, we’ve got a problem.
- Are we marketing to the search engines or to the people who visit our site?
- What does our transaction rate tell us? Are our visitors taking the actions we’d like them to take, or are they just “visiting”?
2. “We need to reach better people.”
- Find more appropriate publications to target.
- Explore better keywords.
- Identify a better list to source.
- Define the characteristics of the most qualified buyers.
- Reach your competitor’s customers.
- Insure shoppers can find you when they’re ready to buy.
- Create the right content to attract search engine traffic.
That’s a start. Next you must ask yourself the bigger questions:
- If we’re reaching the right people, do we have relevant content that meets their needs in the early, middle and late stages of their buying process?
- Is our offering so narrow that there are few qualified people?
- Is the decision cycle for this purchase so short that we must win buyers before they’re aware of their need?
- Is our message strong enough to persuade the “wrong” people we reach to pass it along to the “right” people?
3. “We need more resources.”
- Decide if more money might solve the problem.
- Decide if more time might solve the problem.
- Determine if your staff is sufficiently skilled to solve the problem.
- Perform a vendor/consultant evaluation.
- Define the opportunity costs in terms of return on your investment.
That’s a start. Next you must ask yourself the bigger questions:
- Do our resource allocations match our priorities and our goals?
- Are our resource allocations based on predicted rates of return?
- When we allocate resources, do we hold decision-makers accountable for the returns?
- If we don’t have the time or resources to do it correctly now, when will we?
Next time we’ll cover the last four of seven strategic challenges that marketers must consider. Are there other challenges that marketers must tackle? Let me know.
Very good post. We too often forget the more complex question and focus on the easy basic one. We see this too often with clients and even internally.
This problem relates too often to being fast at any price; "just do it" and we'll see what's sticking, "let's iterate fast", etc. Focusing too often and mostly on the outcome without thinking about the why and how leads companies to move faster but also waster precious resources (time, money, etc) working too rapidly on the wrong element based on the wrong assumptions.
Should be printed and put in front of every online marketer. Kudo.
Good post, just want to add that what I focus on in terms of 'big picture' questions is Pain and Benefits (my last CEO, who was an engineer liked to say that I often "beat him with the benefits stick").
What is the buyers pain? In life, creatures are motivated by escaping or avoiding pain and this basic, biological instinct is a fundamental driver for purchasers also. So, look at your target market and understand what pains it is that your problem solves for them?
Then, when you want to communicate your product to your target market, think in terms of benefits, not features. Benefits speak to their pains and explain what the customer will get from using your product.
I often create a Feature/Pain/Benefit matrix before ever doing any marketing work (even before website content creation) and then we can draw from that matrix to put together all marketing content/collateral.
Here's an example:
Feature – Can send a reminder to your phone (make your phone beep) to remind you of a meeting.
Pain – I put meetings on my schedule, but I am so busy that I still am late to meetings, which is embarrassing and gets coworkers/managers mad at me
Benefit – No more being late to meetings.
Doing a matrix like this can also spur great advertising since you are creating mini scenarios for product usage.
-Carrie
Very good post, lot of very important points are covered, but I would like to go deeper in the buyer decision process, to understand how the buyer behave himself, when they’re visiting the specific website. With the decision process we can often make the segmentation of the visitors to put them into different patterns. Lots of marketers just ignore this fact. Because the stage of the process is not always obvious for the potential buyer.
In which of 5 stages is customer currently present, is it need recognition or evaluation of alternatives (one step before the purchase decision)? Or is he or she already at the stage of purchase decision? In my point of view, every marketer should understand their visitors; segment the visitors by the different stages within the buyer decision process, to provide an appropriate solution.
I’ve tried to segment the referral traffic to analyze the current customer needs. Just looked at the forum posting, twitter accounts and all this social networking stuff, to understand what the potential customers are looking for and in which current stage they could be. And I could say, that this approach works very well, additionally I’ve looked at other metrics like time on site, bounce rate etc.
The result of my study was that identifying the current stage of this process, can improve not only the conversation rate but also other important metrics. It is possible to apply this approach to other Traffic Sources e.g. newsletter, paid search and organic search.
Dimitri
Really appreciated this post. I found myself asking the question, "What makes people click?" and then looking at the more complex questions. The point of having relevant content for the early, middle and late stage of the buying process is a new idea and challenge for me. I agree with Martin. Very much looking forward to Part 2.
Jeffrey
Great Article.
Yes they always keep us on our toes
Thanks Bryan
Cheers Kevin
[...] my last column I covered the first three of seven online marketing challenges. Marketers often find they need [...]
[...] my last column I covered the first three of seven online marketing challenges. Marketers often find they need [...]
Excellent points on the ‘good starts’. You really hit it on the head here with the difference between what everyone things they SHOULD do and what the yreally should do.
Great info on “we need to reach more people”. that struck a cord with me.