Marketing gets a lot easier, and a lot more effective, when we have an accurate roadmap
For a long time, I felt like I was operating in the dark.
I never knew what to do in my marketing.
I never knew what to write, or say in my marketing.
I never knew what would work.
So, I winged it. I said what I thought customers wanted to hear, like how great our service was, and how experienced we were, and how much we cared about quality and speed.
And we got lucky a few times and got some clients.
But for the most part…
My marketing fell flat and
I couldn’t bring in enough clients
It was really frustrating. Working really hard at something and getting measly results is really frustrating, and it deflates your motivation.
Then I had a different thought.
Instead of trying to figure out what I needed to say and do in my marketing… instead of focusing on me… what if I focused on the customer? What if I got inside their head? What if I tried to see why and how they made buying decisions?
I realized quickly that I couldn’t really get inside my customers’ heads, but I was already in my head, so I decided to first look at how I made buying decisions.
And maybe it was because I was asking myself a new question, but a pattern appeared. I noticed that I used the same process every time I made a buying decision, regardless of what I was buying.
And then I noticed that everyone uses this same process that I use to make all buying decisions.
It was at this point that I realized that this was very good news. If everyone uses the same exact process to make buying decisions, this could simplify marketing considerably, and maybe make it a lot easier to do!
I was hopeful.
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:
Even small changes in your marketing, that make it match up more with how we all make buying decisions, can create significant positive differences in the results you get.
Does this seem too obvious? “Duh—of course you have to talk about what the customer wants first!”
You might be surprised.
A huge amount of marketing gets this wrong, and they talk about everything except what the customer wants. They talk about how great their company is, how low their prices are, how long they’ve been in business, what they are and what they do (which by the way, are not the same as what the customer wants).
Look at this example—this is the main headline—the first piece of copy you read when you arrive on the home page of a (big) web design firm (I took a screenshot):
Let’s break this down. Let’s see what they’re really communicating here. My comments are bolded and in brackets.
“As a full-service digital agency” [here’s what we are]
“with capabilities across web design & development, marketing and branding” [here’s what we do]
“we work with clients to unlock value” [more of what we do, but maybe you could make a flimsy argument that this is what the customer wants, because all customers want value, but this is so vague and broad that no customer would recognize this as something they “really want”]
“through creativity, technology, and business minded thinking.” [more of what we do]
BOTTOM LINE: This marketing message conveys “what we are” and “what we do,” and nothing else. It does not answer the question we all want an answer to first: “Can this help me get what I really want?” For this reason (and others) I think this marketing message is ineffective.
There’s another test you can use to see if you agree:
Just ask yourself how you feel after you read this:
“As a full-service digital agency with capabilities across web design & development, marketing and branding we work with clients to unlock value through creativity, technology, and business minded thinking.”
If you were in the market for a website, and you were looking for a web design firm to hire, would this message make you feel anything? Would it give you any reason to believe this company could help you get what you really want?
I don’t feel anything after reading that. And it gives me no reason to think they can help me get what I really want. So, I wouldn’t stick around. I’d leave their page immediately and go back to Google to look at the next company in the search results.
What could they do differently?
What if instead, they had simply started by saying:
“We build websites that differentiate you from your competitors and help you get more new customers.”
I would at least be interested enough to keep reading, which is all they need to accomplish at this stage of the game!
Why? Because I want my company to be differentiated from my competition. And I want to get more new customers. In fact, those are two of the biggest things I want as a business owner.
On top of this, even the companies that attempt to talk about what the customer wants first, a lot of the time, aren’t talking about what the customer really wants.
Remember, the first question in the framework is “Can this help me get what I really want?”
