Customers Heart or Mind?

“How to get more customer’s for your service or product?”

“What is the secret behind winning heart of your customer’s?”

These above problems can be solved by studying the behavior of your customers.

Customers are not really decision makers in the real world. When ever they will take a decision to go for a product, they speak first with the heart and then mind.

Customers use logic by mind to justify what are hearts have already decided. So winning hearts of customers is essential for your product or service.

“How will you win your customer’s heart?”

• Add emotions, art, beauty, visual, stories and positive things to your service or marketing message.
• Tell to customer’s that your service or product will increase their happiness.
• Customer’s can raise their power and wealth by buying your service.
• Your product should make customer’s believe that they will enhance their stature.
• Tell to customer’s that your service will make them feel better about themselves and superior to others.

The above figure is showing customer’s primary buying behavior.

“You can speak to heart or you can speak to mind, but heart will always win.”

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Competitors tools and technologies

“Why will you track your competitors tools and technologies?”

1. To identify key market segment opportunities.
2. To increase your technology penetration across web.
3. To find out the best trending technologies to work with and find out who is using them?
4. To quickly and easily identify your competitors technologies and marketing strategies.
5. To change the way of business you do.

“How to do it?”

“Built with” is one of the best tool to find out your desired competitors insight.

It is having great features, just type your competitors url in the search box and give a go.

You will get a list of technologies, tools and along with meta data.

It will help you to find out your competitors online marketing strategy, customer analysis along with relevant SEO keywords.

At the same time you can build your own competitors list and can do market analysis,Lead research, trending technologies look up.

I have done a competitors analysis of “Gartner” a Market research company.

The result was amazing and full of great insight. In my above analysis, it is showing current web technologies and tools has been used by “Gartner“.

“Gartner Competitor Technology Analysis by BuiltWith“

Make the most of Linked In

“How to create your buyers persona by using Linked In?”

“How to prepare your buyers persona worksheet?”

The above quest can be solved by following techniques..

1. Select a sample size or your customers in Linked In.
2. Read What they share?
3. Look for skills and common attributes in recommendations.
4. See all endorsements and their connections to get all keywords.
5. Track all your customers blogs and job postings to figure out his area of interest.
6. Look for Awards.
7. See their publications and projects to determine his work and passion.
8. Use Advance search and people finder option to get more insight of your customer.

“With personas, business can be more strategic in catering to each audience.”

Building Buyers Persona!!!!!

“Framing buyers persona for generating better leads and sending good marketing campaigns is a tough job to do.”

Is it really difficult ? if not, how can you make your own?

Then find out the following details about your customer –

1. What is your ideal customers Job title, education level, professional background, skills, age, gender, location, income and abilities?  
2. What is your buyers primary goal, secondary goal and objective?
3. Do your customer tend to spent time on social networks?
4. Where do they get their news?
5. How engaged my customer with professional development?
6. What type of content do they tend to consume?
7. What are your buyers typical organizational goal?
8. What makes your customer stressed?
9. What are the pain points?
10. When your customer finds your product, do they have to go through complex approval process or do they make snap decision to buy?
11. What stands in their way?
12. What is the Pricing and budget?
13. What are their primary values?
14. Are they struggling to stay competitive in a saturated Industry?

“A persona should have enough psychological detail to allow you to conveniently step over to the persona view and see your product and service from her perspective.”

How to get those above details?

• Online Analytic Tool – Use your own analytic tools to segment the visitors by seeing their online activity. Customer visit frequency, Keywords, Time spent and Page views will give you a better insight.
• Team Integration – Get the teams together, not just marketing, but customer services, growth development, client value enhancement and sales to get the buyers exact requirement.
• Social Media Research – Do some research with Social Media Listening like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Flickr. LinkedIn can help you to get the demographic and professional level interest, where as Twitter could be play supporting role to get social interest and psychological details about your buyer.
• Web Exits & Surveys –  Do surveys to understand if your product or services on your site are meeting their needs or not?

“Building buyers persona for your core audience can help you improve the way you solve the problems for your customer.”

“Personas will you to make great marketing strategies.”

LISTEN !!!!

“Voice of Customer”

What is voice of customer?

Which describes your customers feedback about their experience with your products, services and offerings.

Why you need it?

• The importance of features and advantages associated with your product.
• The needs and wants of your competitors.
• What your customer needs for increased satisfaction?
• To know & understand, which of the top web pages customers “really wanted to see?”
• Why people do things they do on your website?

How to do it?

1. Onsite Interviewing and Central Location Interviewing
2. Direct feedback from surveys and forms.
3. Multiple channel listening for your direct and social media communication channels to get topics and trends that relate to your business.
4. Text analysis for mining your data.

“Working model of Voice of Customer”

                           Collect  –  Analyze  –  Act  – Monitor

1. Collect – Identify customers surveys, emails, calls, commented cards.
2. Analyze –  After Collecting key customer insights analyze feedback in real-time.
3. Act – Try to utilize the filtered data to improve your products and services.
4. Monitor –  It will help you uncover amazing patterns to where you are making enhancements.

Voice of customer is a complete set of customer needs and needs.

Low Price or High Price?

“What will you do, when your competitor lowers their product prices?”

“Why your competitor has lowered their prices?”

“Are they new player in the market and trying to establish in the market?”

“Are they introducing new value range because that is what market wants or they have been compelled to cut their prices to boost their sales?”

“Are you confident that lowering your prices will protect your profit?”

These above questions will help you to take decisions before lowering your product pricing.

Reducing prices can do more harm than good.

“You get what you pay for”

       “Expensive = Good”

These above stereotypes working well in many cases, because customers are playing a shortcut version of betting the odds. They are thinking that if the product is expensive, then the quality of the product is good. And the most important thing is that

   “Cheapness is not a strong appeal”

The focus of your pricing strategy should be on how you can ensure that customers buy from you, instead of your competitors, rather that concentrating on price.

The proven conclusion is that you can beat your competitor by introducing better products and services, not by cutting the price.

Do or Die 3 !!

“Competitors Career page Monitoring” – it is waste of time.

The above conversation has been commonly used by all senior management people.They are thinking that it is worthless. But the exact truth behind tracking the competitors career page is priceless. The results are astonishingly effective to identify a growing trend in the company.

• Opening of a New Market.
• Opening of a New Strategy or product.

So be prepare to begin the analysis

• Discover the positions and the locations where your competitors are hiring.
• If they are suddenly searching for developers, that may be an indication of adding a new feature set.
• It can give you information on geographical expansion of your competitor.

Please refer to the above table and career page analysis of IDC, a global market intelligence company. Who is looking for several salesman for Asia pacific region to increase the customer base and business.

Stay tuned for Do or Die 4!!…

Do or Die 2 !!

“Competitors Ad Monitoring” – is it really cool to do a research on your competitors Ad’s?

It sounds bitter awkward, but if you are in a race with 1000 runners and want to be the first to cross the finishing line. This technique will give you amazing results.

• If you knew that your strongest competitor was multiplying its advertisement budget in the same marketing platform, that brings huge amount of customers to your company, would that information help you to make your decision?
• Making a note of different dimension of your competitors advertisement strategy.
• Discover your competitors brand status and current position in the market
• Analyzing the messages that are behind a competitors campaign gives you immense knowledge to enhance your own advertising content.
• Find out the keywords your competitor is using to know whether it’s competing for high search volumes or targeting long tail ones.

“Now a big question will be there in your mind, how will you do it?”

Find out your Competitors advertisements by using online ad monitoring tools.

MOAT is a tool to track each brands Text Ads and Banner Ads. it is really good and will give you optimized result with fine stats.

Take a competitors Ad and Find out answers for below questions?

1. How does the advertisement attempt to get your attention ?
2. What is it advertising for?
3. Who is the target audience for this product?
4. How does the advertisement try to convince you to buy this product?
5. How is the name of the product significant?
6. What images has the advertisers choose to use and why?

Find all answers above in the DELL “Inspiron” R Series advertisement analysis.

Stay Tuned for Do or Die 3!!!!

How a Salesman can help Advertisers?

“Advertisement is equal to Salesman”

We amaze,wonder,praise and educate ourselves by seeing various Ad’s. Some advertisers are creative and cool. But what about other advertisers?

The above question can be solved by a Salesman.

The truth behind advertising is to make sales.  But you are thinking that the only principle of advertising is to keep your brands name before the people.

“So before writing any Ad compare it with a Salesman.”

1. Don’t accept any excuses, which good salesmen don’t make.
2. Ask yourself, would it help a salesman to sell the good?
3. Would it help me sell them, if i met a customer in person?
4. Keep before you a typical buyer, show your Ads to your office employees and get feedback?
5. Don’t think of people in the mass, you will be mad. Think of a typical buyer, who is likely to want what you sell?
6. Don’t try to show off.
7. Try to figure it out what a salesman would do with a half-sold person before him?
8. Don’t try to be amusing.

These above 8 points can give advertisers a brief about how to write a good, simple and informative Ad.

So we know that a Salesman can teach advertisers.

But how they are related with each other?

Advertising is multiple salesmanship. It will deal with thousands, while the Salesman talks to one.

A Salesman mistake may cost little but an advertisers mistake may cost thousand times that much.

A poor Salesman can affect a small part of your trade. But a poor advertisement affects all of your trade.

“So every Ad should be a great Salesman.”

Online or Offline or Both!!!

“I am sorry to saying that Marketers should think differently. Traditional campaigning are not going to help us a lot. Customers behave in a strange way to buy one product.” 

No doubt when we are doing any online marketing, we will think about offline and vice a versa. But in reality, rather than relying on one channel over the other or commencing at one and ending up at the other, our customers are going back and forth between two channel.

I have illustrated above a case study of four customers. where they want to buy one product but in different way. Let’s see how?

Customer 1 – The black dotted line is the first customer behavior, who started from Offline and ends in Online.

Customer 2 –  The red line is the second customer behavior, who started from Online and ends in Offline.

Customer 3 – The blue line is the third customer behavior, who started from offline and surprisingly ends in offline.

Customer 4 –  The violet line is fourth customer behavior, who has followed linear online channel to buy the product.

We are trying to measure the effectiveness of the campaigns & customer behavior,as if the process is Linear. But as we saw Customer 1, Customer 2 and Customer 3 buying behavior indicates we are not ready for the above process.

We are very new to do the Non-Line marketing campaigns and measure the results of such campaigns.

This is the main reason that the web success measurement is not relying on basic “Click Stream Data”.

Taking steps to try other measurement techniques such as Surveys or remote usability studies (Visual Heat Maps & Online Contests) is going to be give us more results and effectiveness.