We hear a lot of reasons for not doing the kind of customer research you should be doing to improve your products and services, your processes, and your marketing. They all boil down to three things:
- Time
- Money
- Hubris
That last one is a killer. It’s not just that you think you know your audience better than you do. It’s that you think you know what your audience wants better than they do.
“Ready, fire, aim” rarely finds you hitting your target.
Which leads to a lot of thinking along the lines of, “Let’s just dive in. The faster we get started, the faster we’ll be out there selling. And we can answer questions as they come up.”
On the one hand, this is good news. Eagerness to get started means you recognize there is a problem and you want to address it ASAP.
On the other hand, “ready, fire, aim” rarely finds you hitting your target.
Instead of focusing on the time you might waste with a bit of research and testing, think about the time and money you’ll waste on having to redo a full project’s worth of work you’ve invested in. (Or worse—limping along with lackluster results not even knowing that it’s your shiny new thing that’s holding you back.)
I’ll also trot out a favorite hackneyed chestnut, “If you don’t have time to do it right, how are you going to find the time to do it again?”
That’s not meant to try convince you to do something you don’t want to do, but to consider another way of thinking about the problem. Instead of viewing your research and testing as a separate process that keeps you from getting out there and marketing, think about how you can incorporate audience research and feedback into your marketing itself.
Here’s one way that we’ve found works well across a range of industries and product/service types.
Pick a single product or service you want to focus your marketing on. (You can, and should, expand this later.) With that product or service in mind, create an email cadence that looks at 3 different facets of the problem you’re solving and talks about each of those facets in two different ways.
For example, we know that our prospects don’t really want to build a new website or create a content marketing program. They want to attract better leads or increase engagement with their prospects or shorten their sales cycle.
For each of these outcomes, we’ll create two email messages. One will focus on the aspirational gains that achieving the outcome will lead to. To other will be all about what stands to be lost by not achieving the outcome. Or out another way, this email talks about the cost of not solving the pain point they are experiencing right now.
These 6 messages aren’t designed to sell. They are designed to encourage engagement with a lead magnet that provides expanded value and information on the issue and ways to solve it.
It is the last email in the sequence that sells for you. Ideally, your marketing stack is able to tell you which of the 6 previous messages a prospect has interacted with so you can tailor the closing email toward their interests.
At the very least you need to track that information in aggregate so you can adjust future iterations of this email cadence, and your marketing more broadly, to reflect what your audience is telling you they are interested in.
This is not a replacement for more sophisticated forms of testing, but it can be an invaluable tool for smaller initiatives or under-resourced teams.
It also assumes you’ve done a fair bit of work up front to identify the issues your prospects are thinking about around the problem you’re solving. That effort is worthwhile because this exercise forces you to focus your marketing on the problem your prospects are experiencing, not your solution you are proposing. It uses language and perspective that match your prospects’ language and perspective. And it tells you where you’re right and where you’re wrong on all of those things, giving you the chance to adjust your assumptions and sharpen your message and the offers you are making, whether via your website, email, podcasts, speaking engagements, or other channels.
Occasional large-scale changes can re-invigorate a marketing plan that’s beginning to falter and can provide a blast of inspiration that ripples out through the rest of your marketing. By the way, if you’re interested in hearing some of my podcast and radio appearances, you’ll find a few of them listed on the Andigo website.
Photo by Stephen Kraakmo on Unsplash
