A simple way to think about marketing that makes it easier
to get more new customers
I think everyone uses the same process to make buying decisions.
And I’ve found that if we (business owners and marketers) rearrange our marketing to match that process, we can get more people to buy from us, and marketing becomes simpler, less confusing, easier.
Let me show you the process I think everyone uses to make buying decisions, and then I’ll show you a few examples so you can see how they fit.
When making a buying decision, I think we all hold 4 questions in our mind. And we decide to buy or not, and whom to buy from based on the answers we get to these 4 questions. And the order in which we get the answers matters too.
Here are the 4 questions:
Can this help me get what I really want?
Can I trust them?
Is what I get worth more to me than what I have to give to get it?
Should I buy now, or can I wait?
I call this The 4 Questions Framework.
Here’s a flowchart that depicts how we use the 4 questions to make buying decisions in the real world:
The 4 Questions Framework
How Can This Framework Help You?
I had a client who was selling a $497 online course that teaches business people how to be more effective. (I’m intentionally being vague to protect my client’s identity.)
He had built an online sales funnel himself that included four videos. He invited people on his email list to view each of the videos a few days apart each, and the fourth video had an offer to buy his $497 course.
He hired me to rewrite the scripts for the videos, because the funnel wasn’t performing very well. His original videos were good, but he got a crucial thing wrong:
The order in which he presented his message.
If you take a look at the flowchart again just above, you’ll notice that the first question we all want answered is: “Can this help me get what I really want?”
And here’s the important thing: if we don’t get a satisfactory answer to that first, then we’re going to EXIT (see the red box).
Well, my client actually had some pretty good answers in his videos to the question “Can this help me get what I really want?” but those answers were not the first answers he gave.
It turns out, my client was answering the second question first, in his videos—”Do I trust them?”
If you think about it, it makes sense that his videos weren’t performing well…
Do you even think about whether you trust someone before you know if they can help you get what you want? No. We don’t do it. We don’t stick around. If the first thing someone is doing in their marketing is talking about trust, or trying to get us to trust them, and they haven’t given us a good reason to believe they can help us get what we really want, we won’t stick around. We’re wired to ask this first: “Can this help me get what I really want?” And if we don’t get a good answer to that question first, we’re moving on and not giving any more of our attention.
In the very beginning of his videos, my client was talking about his credentials, and how successful he’d been in his field, and other trust-building information.
This was in conflict with the process we all use to make buying decisions, and so most people left at the beginning of his videos. He even told me that his video viewing stats showed that most people left within the first minute of his videos.
I rewrote his video scripts, and one of the things I did was to first answer the question we all want answered first, which is “Can this help me get what I really want?” I’m happy to report the videos did a lot better for my client, and his results improved substantially, but the lesson here is even more valuable:
