How To Identify & Connect With Your Customer

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How To Identify & Connect With Your Customer

September 22, 2008

When you’re selling anything, there is always a certain “type” of person that will end up purchasing it from you than others.

Sure, anybody can come to one of my websites, sign up for my free newsletter and buy one of my books, but there is only a certain TYPE of person who actually does.

What you need to do is pay extra close attention to your customers – the people purchasing from you right now. It won’t be long before you begin to notice things a lot of them have in common. Maybe there’s an unusually disproportionate number of men over 60 who are buying from you. Maybe you notice an odd number of them who drive BMW’s and live at least 60 minutes away.

Whatever.

You’re looking for anything you can tie them together with and start thinking about. This will help you in spades when you design your next marketing piece or when you rent a list or place advertising on another website in an effort to get more people to your site. You want people exactly like the ones who are already buying from you, just more of ‘em! (and to ignore everyone else – they’re not your market anyway, so it’s useless to try to pander to them. Yes, anyone “COULD” buy your product… but there’s only certain people who actually “DO” (or will)… remember that phrase, for it is gospel in marketing.)

Same goes for when you’re doing keyword research for a search engine marketing campaign. For every keyword you can possibly imagine, there’s a very specific mindset – a very specific universe of hopes, fears, needs, desires, etc that come attached to it. The person who searches for “digital camera” is in a very different frame of mind than someone searching for “Canon XL 782” or whatever. Chances are, the latter person is looking to buy that exact model right now, while the former is still in the research phase trying to decide what they want.

You have to take all of this into account when designing your site and your online marketing campaigns.

But no matter what you do, there is one formula that has stood the test of time on how to take a prospect and guide them through the decision-making process.

That formula is called AIDA.

A = attention – before you can sell anything to anybody, you first have to get their attention. In the print advertising world, we usually accomplish this with a compelling headline. There are a zillion different ways to write a headline, but this is not a copywriting course. Basically, the headline needs to call out to the reader and let them know deep down that “hey, this is exactly what you wanted” – it needs to grab them and compel them to stop whatever they’re doing and at the very least read the next line.

I = interest – after you have your prospect’s attention, you have to get them interested. Again, this can be done a ton of different ways. A story, a challenge, an answer to their most urgent question, a dramatic demonstration, etc are all ways to build interest.

D = desire – interest alone isn’t enough. Now you’ve got to get them to WANT what it is you are selling. You might’ve gotten Bob interested in a drill, but now you need to get him to want YOUR drill; the exact one you happen to have right here today. We all know drills make holes, but maybe yours is a super-duty ultra-tuff model that can drill straight through diamond and comes with a lifetime replacement guarantee. Make Bob drool for your drill by pointing out all the cool stuff it does, how all that will help him build projects faster, and especially how Bob will be able to brag to all his buddies about how he can drill through any element known to Man.

A = action – even desire alone isn’t enough. For example, I may desire a Porsche. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to go out and get one today. Now you have to motivate me to actually whip out my check book or credit card and send you some money. Nothing gets sold until you specifically ASK for the sale. It also helps if you happen to have a special price or special payment terms if they order today (and have a really good reason WHY today as opposed to any other day.) As always, you have to be crystal clear about it. When selling one of my reports online, I like to say something like: “To get my report instantly on the next screen, all you have to do is fill out this form below. Double-check to make sure everything is spelled right and you entered the credit card numbers correctly, then hit the ‘submit’ button. After that, your credit card will be charged $27 and you’ll be sent to the download page. If you have any questions after you get my report, my phone number and e-mail address will be right there if you need them.”

And boom – that gets the sale.

For every action you want someone to perform on your website (newsletter signup, sale) you have to make sure your pages take them by the hand and lead them through the AIDA process. Understanding who your prospects are, what frame of mind they’re in right now, and how to speak their language will determine WHAT you say and HOW you say it.

But when talking to your prospects, there is one thing you must NEVER do…

…and that is to use “happy talk” on your website (or any other promotional materials, for that matter.)

What’s happy talk? You already know what happy talk is: it’s that deadly dull intro text to a website that’s supposed to explain such platitudes as:

“welcome to XYZ Company!” (WRONG: websites do not need fluffy “welcome messages” – this was very popular back in the 1995-1999 days of the internet, where nobody knew what they were doing. Instead, what you should replace this with is a compelling reason for them to STAY on your site and read through it.)

“we’re America’s #1 leader in Lava Lamp sales!” (WRONG: even if this is true, there’s no proof, and everybody these days knows that any Joe off the street can throw up a website in a few hours and say whatever he wants. Instead of this outright claim (which isn’t believed immediately anyway) try saying something like “117,832 lava lamps sold since 1999 and over 346 different lava lamp styles in stock RIGHT NOW – check out these cool new designs below…” – Although still not ideal, this is far better because it’s a lot harder to argue against exact numbers and even more difficult to argue against how many different varieties you have ready to buy right now. Because of the vast numbers (and if you have good design and presentation), the customer will automatically ASSUME you’re #1 in lava lamp sales, which is more powerful than you telling them so. And even if they don’t think “#1″ specifically, it doesn’t matter because all you’re really looking for is the sale from the guy viewing the page at this moment, not to win some imaginary popularity contest.)

“you’re about to see some of the most popular lava lamps ever made!” (WRONG: Don’t tell people what they’re “about” to see… just show them! If what you have is of substance, you don’t need filler phrases like this to present it.)

“with 21 years experience we’re the home décor pros!” (WRONG: There’s a time and a place to let them know you’re experienced, but slamming this in the prospect’s face immediately before they’re even interested in what you’re offering is the wrong aproach. Remember AIDA. Don’t jump the gun. Get them interested and wanting what you have, and then you can back it all up with an experience claim later. Your experience seals the deal on a sale they already want to make; it doesn’t create the sale.)

“whether it’s a long drive from home, or a cozy night inside, we’ll make sure you…” (WRONG: Institutional advertising from Madison Avenue uses this kind of bullshit a LOT in their ads – literally to the point of being cookie-cutter. The idea here is since they have no idea what the prospect really wants, they’ll just cover all the possible bases and hope for the best. Pure laziness. Don’t you do it. There’s no excuse for not getting to know your prospect’s inner world.)

“since 1896 – we make dreams come true” (WRONG: Incredibly vague and uses more of that “talking about expereince before generating interest” stuff. No matter what these guys may think, their customers are NOT coming to their website to “make their dreams come true” or whatever the alternate wording may be. Ask yourself this: if your best friend asks you why you shop at, say, Amazon.com for example… what would you tell them? Now apply that same concept to your own website. Why would someone want to be there? What are they wanting to accomplish? Ask your customers. Now find a succinct way of putting that into words, preferably with some kind of USP (Unique Selling Proposition) attached (we’ll talk more about USPs in a future post))

“if you’re looking for lava lamps, you’ve come to the right place!” (WRONG: Painfully obvious, yet so many sites continue to use this kind of crapola on their site.)

And on… and on… and on.

If you’re not sure whether something’s happy talk or not, here’s how to tell: if you listen very closely while you’re reading a chunk of text, you can actually hear a little voice inside your head go “blah, blah blah blah…”

A lot of happy talk is self-congratulatory hallow promotional B.S.; the same kind of thing you find in badly written brochures. Unlike good promotional sales copy, happy talk conveys no real useful information and it focuses on how great YOU are instead of what makes you great and how you can benefit the reader.

Note: Your website does not exist for you. It exists for the person who’s going to be giving you money. So let the page be about THEM and solving THEIR problems – not you. Only talk about yourself whenever you’re establishing credibility or telling a compelling story about how you enormously benefited someone exactly like the person reading the page who was experiencing the same problem the prospect is. You can also talk about yourself when you are specifically trying to bond with the prospect’s belief system, but that is an advanced topic I can’t fully cover in this post.

So think to yourself when you read your website’s text: “Is this how I would actually TALK to the prospect if Bob were sitting in front of me right this instant?”

If the answer is “no”, get rid of it, or re-write it.

As a copywriter, part of my job is to take a client’s products and selling propositions, structure them into a logical flow and then communicate everything in the most compelling, crystal clear way I know how.

You might view copywriters as “professional explainers.”

It’s possible to get so close to your products and your business that you begin to forget why people are really buying from you. Often, the real reasons people buy are quite different from the reasons they’ll actually admit to.

These “real reasons” are your meat and potatoes, and if you can decode them from your market you’ll always dominate the competition. They almost always stem from some kind of emotional response, rather than a logical one.

During the last century, a guy named Ernest Dichter was called in to help Duncan Hines figure out why their new cake mix wasn’t selling. It was a wonderful cake mix and all the work was done for you, so why weren’t people buying? Mr. Dichter promptly went to work actually traveling around interviewing housewives trying to learn the “real reasons” behind what was going on.

Interviews with homemakers had convinced him that mixes typically made a housewife feel useless, simultaneously devaluing her role and threatening to put her out of a job. If manufacturers would leave dried eggs out of their cake-mix formulations, thus requiring women to add fresh eggs themselves, the homemaker would feel more personally involved in the making of the cake and be able to serve it proudly as her own work.

So Duncan Hines tweaked the product and came out with a new marketing stance aimed at being a trusted partner in cake creation rather than a one-size-fits-all template.

Logical? No. Emotional? Yes. Did understanding the real reasons and making the change sell tons of cake mixes? You betcha.

Get rid of all happy talk out of everything you create, learn the real reasons your customers buy from you, learn to speak their language and use words and phrases THEY use among themselves (yes, even if that means slang, cuss words, and other types of “unprofessional” talk!), and then combine all this together into new marketing messages and website content.

Do this and you’ll begin to sell more than you ever thought possible.

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