Marketing Needs To Start With A Customer’s Heart, Not Your Product Features
You know the drill. Time to ship product, and with that ship date comes a raft of marketing choices that need to be delivered to channels all over the social web.
You hit send — after all your marketing paraphernalia has gone through voting by committee. But…. Not much happens…
Why do customers who have learned about your product fail to try it?
How can you use marketing to create demand in potential customers who have not taken that risky first step like the early adopters?
The answers to these questions lie in figuring out whether your product can actually help someone feel progress. Progress-enabling forces are a core demand-side catalyst in early stage product marketing.
What does that mean? It means that understanding why a customer becomes your customer has more to do with what makes them feel like they are getting a job done with your product, rather than what differentiates your Product A from competitor’s Product B.
Understanding how an emotional or mental demand for progress tunes a potential customer’s strategy for choosing your product will unlock a new way of thinking about your marketing.
Take a look at the image above. These “levers” of progress making forces are good ways to interpret what a customer might be experiencing when they choose your product. In another post, I will break down each of these for you, but for now, just think of the original thesis: something in a customer’s life is blocking them from feeling a sense of achievement or satisfication. Your product sits somewhere in the middle of that block to unlock their way forward.
How can you exploit the HOW of this? There’s a conceptual approach and then actual steps. The conceptual approach involves understanding why a person might feel this way. The actual steps are the tactics you can use to find this out and then use it.
Conceptually: It’s important to approach this by undrstanding that a customer wants to assign a job to your product. In other words, they don’t choose your product because it’s cheaper than the competitions or because it’s blue or red, or big or small. They aren’t worried about features. What they are concerned with is, “How does this help me do the thing that I want to get done?”
As the founder, who is also managing marketing, you need to interpret that inner drive, and then translate that back to the customer as a phrase, a story, or a design concept that helps them see that journey in your product.
Tactics
1. Find early adopters of your product. You have obviously had early success, that’s why you are contributing time, thoughts and money to this marketing project. You need to talk to those early adopters.
2. Ask them to sit down for an interview with you after telling them you would like to interview them about their personal journey in choosing this product. This can be on the phone or through online video, but it’s ideally in person. You want to be able to see body language, facial expressions, and feel the tone of the person when you ask them questions about their journey.
3. Work through a series of questions with them that focus on their emotional state and their approach to the product. There might be several types of questions here, but what you are trying to dig for is: “What were you thinking when you chose this product? What were you feeling?”
4. At this point, you want to really get super detailed about exactly what they wanted, how they obtained it and what was the result of that success. Ask them to play a movie in their head, and they are the star of that movie, and ask them to describe, step by step, as if they are in that movie, exactly what happened when they chose your product.
5. Take copious notes about this. Try to interview a series of people in this same manner. Make it a logical process and standardize it.
At the end of this process, you should have a trend. Each of these customers should show you something that is similar to each other customer about the WHY of their choosing.
It should resemble something close to this image. There should be encounters with each of these progress-making forces.
Your marketing story then needs to take the shape of offering the product as a catalyst or an enabler of this progress. No one product will look the same in terms of its storytelling characteristics.
If you want an example of what a progress-making story looks like in marketing, you should watch the video about Snickers that I have put at the end of this post. You should be able to see exactly what I am talking about. The marketing for this product is a story, not about the features of the candy, but about the progress that the customer feels, exactly as he feels it. And the product is simply the prop in that customer journey. It’s about experience.
I hope this helps early stage founders understand the forces of progress that are in a customer’s life. If you would like to talk about your marketing strategy, please ping me by leaving a comment or sending me a message. At AppWorks, we love spending time with founders and figuring out these hard problems.
Video: https://youtu.be/vW6ZXHWvaGc
If you are a founder who would like help getting better at building, marketing, or driving revenue growth, come join us at AppWorks Accelerator for the 2020 session beginning in March, applications close on December 16: http://bit.ly/32YvBYh
