The Customer Is Always Right!
How many times have we heard this saying, and as cynical business owners, how many times have we responded “yeah right!” When it comes to marketing however, the customer is always right, I am going to give you a very real example to explain why.
Marketing is all about going to your targeted market, finding out what that market needs then provide a product or service that fulfills that need. It is not the other way around, provide a service or product to the target market and convince them they need it!!
Recently we have been working with a number of businesses in earthquake affected Christchurch to create and implement robust marketing plans to help those businesses attract new clients. Part of that process asks the business owners to find out more about their target market; what issues were they having that led them to the business in the first place, why did they ultimately choose that business, why do they keep coming back? These are just a few of the questions we ask.
We then gather all this information and create really strong marketing messages in the words of the customers. The purpose of this is to then attract other like minded potential customers with similar problems by making it easy for them to relate to the message they are reading.
This process works most effectively if you use the words of the customers.
One business recently had done all the research and developed their new marketing messages for a number of their services which was timely as they were about to upgrade and relaunch their web site. On reviewing that new website prior to launch we noticed, although it looked more up to date, the content had not been changed to reflect the research they had just completed.
The problem was the owner of the business had filled their web content full of industry terminology, much of which you would find nowhere in the research. To help the business owner understand how important it was to talk in the customers language rather than their industry language we analysed the search engine results for the customers words and the industry words for the same service and found some astonishing results.
With the service that generated the most income for the business the customers wording generated 6 times the search traffic of the industry wording and in another analysis report 8 out of the top 10 search phrases were in the customers language as opposed to the industry language.
So what is the message here, you have to resonate with your target market(s), connect with them to continue to attract more customers and command a bigger share of that market segment. The only way you can do that is to talk in their language not yours and the only way you can do that is to talk to your target market.
Warning
It’s all very well having your website optimised for search engines but if you have done this using your industry jargon (which you will have if you have not talked to your customers!!) rather than your customers words, you WILL be missing out on lots of traffic to your site and the potential to convert that traffic to paying business.
