I’m taking some time to explore the VIP of the business world here on the blog. Who is that person? Your customer of course! Without them, face it, your biz is toast. If you missed my first blog post about The Five Things You Must Know About Your Customers, pop back on over there and check it out, it’s a can’t-miss.
Today I wanted to delve into the big mystery every biz owner is trying to solve: how to make customers buy more. In order to know this, you’ve first got to know why people buy your product in the first place, then you can leverage that knowledge to cater more toward those needs in your marketing strategy.
To make this more digestible, let’s think of a fun example! How about a house cleaning service. If I won the lottery, my first purchase would absolutely be a maid. I mean, vacuuming is the WORST, right?
You can probably come up with some extremely logical reasons why someone would hire a maid right off the bat. Their house is dirty, they’re too busy, maybe their house is too big for one person to manage.
These types of reasons fall into what we would call manifest motives, aka: motivators to buy that are pretty surface level, easily understood and agreed upon by most people, and based on conforming to social norms.
In order to truly reach your customer in a place that makes them ecstatic to buy, you’ve got to go deeper than manifest motives.
Latent motives are that next deeper level. Latent motives are the reason why a customer makes a decision on a more internal and emotional level. Most of the time, the customer is either unwilling to admit or may not even know these are their motives, because they are so deeply personal.
Going back to our example of house cleaning. While manifest motives would say a reason to buy is to have a clean house, latent motives say a reason to buy is that a clean house makes me look like I have it all together even though I feel stressed and overwhelmed.
Most people don’t want to admit that they make buying decisions based on emotions, but we all totally do it. In fact, it’s just in our nature.
Scientist have found that the human brain has three distinct layers of functionality: The Reptilian Brain, The Middle Brain, and the New Brain.
We would all love to think that as smart and evolved humans, we use only New (Rational) Brain to make educated, logical, fact-based purchasing decisions, but studies have shown that while initial thought processes start in the New Brain, the Reptilian Brain ultimately factors in emotions and makes the call.
Yep, you thought our species was super evolved, but we’re really just a bunch of apes making emotional decisions and searching for bananas.
Perhaps it’s a slight exaggeration, but here’s the meat of what I’m getting at here today: when it comes to marketing to your customers, hit them with a message where they’ll feel it. Not in their logical brain. Don’t bore your customers with facts and statistics and lists of features. Find them in their heart.
Take some time to truly understand what motivates your customer. Talking about emotions and feelings doesn’t always sit well in the business world, but if you want to get there, you have to go there, and the best place to start is by hitting the phones, the coffee shops and your Skype account to get out there and talk to your customers.
I truly believe in this stuff. That’s why customer interviews are a part of every branding project I do. There’s nothing better than being able to provide my clients with crucial insight into their clients, so they can do what they do better. If you want to gain the knowledge of these interviews but aren’t sure if you’re ready for a full branding process, I also offer brand audits. Click here to learn more.