Finding a way to get under your customers’ skin is one of the most powerful ways to drive volume and sales. If you can communicate with them in a way that makes sense for them, then there’s nothing you can’t achieve as a business.
But how can you get under their skin and make real progress in this regard?
That’s the topic of this post. We look at some of the strategies you could deploy and how they might help you take your business to the next level.
Understand Their Pain Points
As always in marketing, you want to start with empathy. Understanding your customer’s pain points is one of the most effective ways to get your message across.
Start by listening to what they want by collecting feedback or asking them for reviews. This information provides insights into how your business can step things up a notch and produce better results.
If you can get into conversations with customers and talk to them about what they want, that’s even better. These often provide deep insights into how you can help them, and what they are looking for in a service like yours.
Feedback is also crucial, especially if it is negative. You want to find out what you’re doing wrong so you can stop making mistakes in the future.
Once you start taking feedback onboard, customers will notice, and your business will become more successful. You’ll show that you’re interested in the opinions of others and what matters to them.
Identify Emotional Triggers
Next, you want to think about emotional triggers. Understanding what puts your customers in the mood to buy from you is essential.
Unfortunately, there isn’t one size fits all for companies looking for these secrets. What motivates someone to buy a pizza from a pizza shot is different from what motivates someone to buy a website-building service.
Therefore, you’ll want to connect emotions to your industry. If you have someone highly empathic on your team, they can usually help with this.
Once you know the emotion, then the next step is to capitalize on it. Most companies work with fear, desire, and greed, which sound negative, but can be highly effective. Settling on one of these can often help you get further than your rivals who don’t understand the emotional dynamics at play.
If you have pain points in place, you can link emotions to these triggers. This mapping is crucial in brainstorming sessions because it helps you understand where customers are at when they start looking for services like yours.
For example, imagine you run a plumbing firm and you know customers need you to fix serious problems with your house. Your messaging and communications should reflect this, providing reassurance to people who might be in distress.
You can also play on this if you are in the hospitality business. This time, the aim of the game is to get people to consume your services by creating desire. What could be better than sitting down to a delicious meal when hungry or staying in a luxurious hotel in a five-star location?
Reframe Your Value Proposition
Another thing you could do is reframe your value proposition. Revising your unique selling points could be a way to gain traction and move forward.
If you need to do this, it should emerge naturally from considering emotions and triggers. You might notice that your marketing is slightly off by failing to complement how your customers feel at various points in the sales funnel. A few tweaks here and there to video scripts, and marketing copy could make all the difference in the world to your firm.
For example, you might notice that people aren’t as excited as you’d like them to be about your products and services. As such, you might want to point out through an emotional lens how you can help them.
You can also focus more on solving the problems that irk them the most. The more you can drill down into these, the more value for money your business will offer.
Don’t be afraid to get stuck in the weeds with all this stuff. The more you can work out what value your clients are trying to extract from you, the more you can rethink your approach and adjust your marketing methods.
Open The Conversation Up
Another way to get under your customer’s skin is to open up the conversation. Staying in touch with them as much as possible makes them feel like they are getting personalized treatment from you.
Opening the conversation is useful but also time-consuming. As such, many companies adopt a hybrid approach where they put chatbots on their websites and then combine them with human reps during office hours.
Whenever a chatbot company releases new builder tools, you can put this process into overdrive. Constructing an AI just for your business can be highly effective in helping customers and directing them to the resources you need, any time of the day or night.
Opening up the conversation like this takes investment, but it’s worth it. It reassures customers and encourages them to keep coming back to you.
Create A Sense Of Community
You may also see success in attracting and engaging customers by setting up a community for them. Giving them somewhere they can go to be social is a highly effective technique that goes a long way.
If you can, foster connections within the community itself. Look for ways to get people talking to each other so they don’t feel atomized. Keep them chatting about your products and all the things you are doing to help them succeed.
What’s nice about creating a community is that it allows you to leverage user-generated content (UGC). This form of social proof is highly effective when you want to attract new people to join your movement or whatever it is that your company is doing. Prospective clients are far more likely to trust the words of their peers than they are to believe everything you say.
Showcasing real-life examples of what your product or services are doing to improve the lives of customers can also work. Verifiable case studies are a powerful tool that proves the value you offer (without you having to hide behind marketing gimmicks).
Be Transparent
Of course, you also want to remain transparent. The more you can do this, the more likely you will build trust.
If your business is struggling, it can sometimes be a sign that this trust is breaking down. People might not want to go to you because they aren’t sure whether you really provide them with any value.
If your business is going through a hard time, tell your customers about it. Explain that you’re a startup and that you’re still putting all the systems you need in place.
Also, think about whether you want to allow people a behind-the-scenes look at what you’re doing. This way, you can sometimes build trust back where it’s been lost.
Always stay authentic to your message and avoid the temptation to sway and blow about with the times. Make sure you remain firm in your core principles.
Be Consistent
To get under your customers’ skin, it also helps to be consistent. The more you can show you’re doing the same thing over and over, the more people are likely to become familiar with you.
While this approach sounds dull, it’s one of the most effective marketing techniques out there. It’s one of the reasons why brands are so obsessed with brand voice and guides. They want every interaction to feel the same for customers.
Being consistent is something you’ll need to prioritize across channels. It’s not enough to be consistent on social media if your website doesn’t match your tone. That sort of approach will just confuse people.
Therefore, always go beyond expectations. Look for ways to keep things the same while also delivering extras and freebies that customers want. Look for ways to use your brand to foster deeper loyalty.
Personalize Your Products And Services
Another approach to getting under your customers’ skin is to personalize your approach. The more unique you can make it, the better.
Personalization works because it shows clients you really care about their needs. You’re not just spamming them with whatever generic service you offer everyone else. No, you’re working hard to learn more about their needs and what might be good for them.
Personalization requires data, so setting it up can be costly. But once you have systems in place, you can offer more bespoke guidance on relevant products, services, and content, providing leads with shortcuts.
You can also better predict what customers will want, which is ideal if you have a CRM. You can feed your data into the software and use it to tell your reps when they should contact and prospect and what they should say.
Start with small elements of personalization and then work from there. Don’t feel pressured to do everything at once. That’s where people get burned out.
Thanks for stopping by!
Magda
xoxo