Start from what our customer wants
It is imperative that as a marketer we do not just speak to what our customers tell us they want. Humans are complicated beings, sometimes even we ourselves do not know what we want, or why we made certain decisions. A simple mind exercise you can do right now, is to ask yourself this question: “Why did I buy the phone I now use?”
You'll likely have an answer immediately. But then when you challenge your first answer, most of you will realize that your first answer is merely a justification. Most of you desired the phone first, and then followed up with your rational thinking to “decide” that such purchase decision is wise. Therefore, before we do anything marketing, we should first consider: what are the key desires/needs that our customers are looking to fulfill?
“If I had asked people what they wanted,
they would have said faster horses.
”
Organize the Needs/Desires for our persona
Careful, objective and thorough customer interviews should give you pretty good insights as to what your customers are looking for. Let’s take my brand EONIQ as an example, we make customized watches at around 200USD price point. 1st I’ll put into the table the top 5 needs for one of our persona, from the most important to the least.
Step 1: Put in the key 5 needs from your need finding customer interviews
Then I’ll try to give them %weight so they will add up to 100%. Try to avoid having equal percentages for 2 need items as most of the time we do have one need being more important than the other; it’s just that we might be too lazy to rank them during this exercise.
Step 2: Try to give the key needs % weight. At this stage if you realize that the ranking’s a bit off, it’s now time to re-arrange them.
Them it is time for us to fill in the key messages. These are the key messages that we want to bring to our customers. There are many channels through which we can portray such messages, such as our branding, our press coverage, our social media profiles, our websites, our ads, and much more. One way to get started without getting overwhelmed is to imagine a video Facebook post: What would be the title text? What about the description texts? What are the key points I want to include in the video?
Keep in mind that this step is highly iterative. As you run more ads and conduct more social media listening your messages WILL change.
Step 3: Fill in our marketing messages. What should be included in your sales pitch for your persona?
The item flagged [I] in red are messages that you cannot explicitly state. It’s very useful to include these items, and be reminded that we will have to use implicit means (background music, video shooting artistic directions, casting, etc) to bring such message forward. Saying that a watch is cheap doesn’t make your customers proud, so we will have to imply that the watch is affordable. Another example is that if you run workshops for your company, you should probably prevent stating that the whole workshop process is very simple and easily enjoyable, as that will make your workshop feels cheap and unprofessional.
After completing this table, you’ll realize that some of your messages can address more than 1 user needs/desires. Feel free to highlight and mark those items down. We’ll be able to group them in the whole product analysis tool.
Repeat the exercise for Barriers
A lot of marketers focus on selling points and forget to counter the negative biases of the viewers in our marketing channels. Case in point: EONIQ sells customized mechanical watches, and one of our key channels is Facebook marketing. Whenever one of our target viewers scroll across a watch sponsored post, there’s a very high chance that the post is about another watch that retails at similar market price (Facebook algorithm), which is usually a quartz driven fashion watch that is made to last a little more than a few months on a wrist. Over time whenever they see a watch related post, they assume nothing more. Barrier 1: assumption - we are just fashion watches. This bias creates a major barrier for our customers, so most of our initial ads ended up screaming “we are not one of them!” with our visuals.
But then viewers begin to assume that we have a very high selling price so they stop clicking on our ads altogether. Barrier 2: assumption - we are very expensive.
Both assumptions became significant barriers to our conversion. As marketers, if we can anticipate the viewer’s negative biases and counter them, our marketing efforts will become more efficient.
Barrier and counter messages for our persona
You’ll realize that most of the counter messages are implicit (marked with [I]). This is because direct counter messages to false assumptions generally make you look like you are explaining yourself and is rarely desirable in marketing’s context.
Review, role play/mental exercise, iterate
Now that the table is completed, some of you may feel accomplished that you’ve completed a framework. This is not the point though, as the main reason why we create this table, is to help us prioritize our marketing messages with our logical mind so that we can then use our hearts to empathize with our personas.
The final most important part of this framework is then to highlight the more important messages addressing our more important key barriers and key needs/desires. Connect those selling points into a short sales pitch, and then put yourself in your persona’s shoes.
Will your persona like what they hear?
If yes, you can start creating your online presence, decide on your social media profile, your website contents, your brand videos and more. Don’t forget to come back to this exercise; after 4+ years of selling to thousands of customers, I still need to refresh my understanding of my customers from time to time.
P.S. I can run my role play mental exercises a lot easier with a pie chart format than a table format with numbers. If that’s you as well, consider conducting the whole product analysis.