In This Episode You’ll Learn:
- Brands need to earn visibility
- Why companies that do audience research outperform their peers by 466%
- How to get customers to recount their buying journey
Mistakes Make Marketers
As the founder of four businesses, Katelyn has made a lot of mistakes—and she has made a point to learn from them. The biggest lesson: Get your product in front of the right people. Today Katelyn helps marketers figure out who their best customers are and what triggers them to buy.
Many companies are excellent at building products but struggle to get people to know about them. The first step is understanding your audience.
Earn Your Customers
Research shows companies that do audience research outperform their peers by 466%—and only 35% who do reported doing it regularly.
“To be able to grow a business today you can’t just be pushing your message on people . . . . You really need to earn it. And the way that you do that is by deeply understanding your customers.”
Katelyn says though organic visibility is becoming more difficult, it’s not going away.
Traditional Marketing Falls Short
Traditionally businesses are taught to look at lots of quantitative data on an audience, construct a customer profile from that data, and hand that customer profile to the marketer.
However, a generic customer profile doesn’t tell a marketer what motivated a customer to buy. In fact, the customers themselves often don’t know.
Interview Your Customers
Katelyn advocates for conducting customer interviews as a way to get the details of a customer’s buying journey.
Before any interview, Katelyn asks: What was the customer trying to get done that led them to purchase a product?
“The reason why they bought isn’t necessarily the thing you’re selling.”
Being able to tease out the problem a customer was trying to solve in purchasing your product gives you clues to how to fine-tune your messaging and customer experience.
Recreate the Buying Journey
When setting out to interview customers, Katelyn recommends:
- Email your customers individually and ask for a 20 minute interview.
- Shift the interviewee’s focus from giving feedback to storytelling.
- Focus on what customers have done, not on what they say they’re going to do.
There is a wealth of useful information in the kinds of alternate solutions customers tried before purchasing your product. Find out about them, why they didn’t work, and what kind of product the customer desired after that experience.
“Talk to your customers. I can guarantee you that doing it poorly is still much more valuable than not doing it at all.”
Learn More:
- Katelyn’s Twitter
- Katelyn’s website
- “How Crafty Marketers Use Buying Triggers To Outsmart Their Competition”
