Unless you’ve talked to a broad spectrum of customers, you may have little idea what attracts them to your products or brand. You may have a skewed notion of what they like least about them. You might be in the dark about what keeps them coming back—or might send them packing.
A lot of organizations just assume they have this information. They might talk to a few customers at a tradeshow twice a year, or hear sales folks talking over lunch, but such information is generally anecdotal and often misleading.
Is your customer service a strong point, or an area of weakness? Are new features attracting more new customers, overwhelming existing ones, or both? Do your marketing efforts valorize product features customers want, or are you ignoring aspects they value most?
The lack of such information becomes keenly apparent when developing client messaging. Trying to develop coherent, meaningful messages can be maddening when you’re working from the “guts” of various higher-ups with no real data to rely on. The result is often a labored word salad designed to include various individuals’ favorite buzzwords while actually saying as little as possible in language indistinguishable from every other similarly positioned product out there.
Research is the cure. Talk to your customers and prospects to hear directly from them what they want from you and your products. Identify their pressing challenges and how they believe your solutions help meet them. Armed with this information, messaging can flow seamlessly and focus on what’s really important to the customer as opposed to satisfying internal corporate demands or powerful individuals’ whims.
If your messaging is customer-focused, your marketing efforts can follow suit. Knowing customer challenges, needs, and preferences can inform both copy and visuals, making both more appealing, and boosting new customer acquisition and customer retention.
It’s amazing how often organizations dismiss research required to identify customer needs and preferences as a superfluous expense. So many spend tens of thousands on marketing efforts that research would prove don’t speak the language customers want to hear. There is a client I know that has paid to revise its messaging 3 times in the past 18 months. It’s not due to a shift in offerings, but whiplash as leadership careens from one emphasis to another looking for something that sticks.
Spend strategically upfront. Learn what your customers do and don’t want from you, what they do and don’t value, and gain mightily on the back end with more effective marketing that successfully engages prospects.
Leonce Gaiter – Vice-President, Content & Strategy
