Drilling Down Into Your Customer’s Deeper Motivations

If you’re already getting leads and sales through your website… Who is are your best, and most common, customers?

(Your conversion data in Google Analytics is a great place to begin. What are the demographics, and interests, of your customers? Which information pages on your website are they reading before they buy? How do they first find out about your website – through ads, specific keywords, social media, or some other path?)

The more data you have, the easier it is to build an ideal customer profile. But don’t stop at the basics!

When we’re profiling ideal customers, most people stop at the question “Who are they?”.

So most customer profiles are simply lists of traits and demographic details.

My ideal customer is a 45-55-year-old woman living in Sydney or Melbourne who is married, has 2-3 (now adult) children, works in middle management in IT during the day, and enjoys underwater basket weaving.

The deeper we drill down into customer profiles, the more valuable insights we uncover:

• TRAITS – Who are your customers? What are your customer demographics?

• INTERESTS – What motivates them (in general)? What kinds of websites to they look at when they’re not visiting your website?

• BEHAVIOURS – What paths to they take to buy? What can their quirks, habits, and actions tell you about their psychology? What are they likely to be doing when they’re not buying from you?

• NEEDS – Why are they buying from you? What role will your product or service play in their lives? What problems will it solve?

• VALUES – Why are these problems/roles/needs important to your customer?

• MOTIVATIONS – What are the thoughts behind these values? What are your customers’ deeper (and unspoken) fears, biases, prejudices, and automatic responses?

The exercise above often reveals deeper insights that help you to be more targeted – and effective – in your marketing approach.

A colleague of mine – Zoë Routh – runs Boundless Leadership programs, and often invites CEOs and senior executives to networking events she runs to help her to build connection, and demonstrate her expertise.

But because Zoë has a deep understanding of the CEOs and leaders she works with, she understands that time pressures on these busy and influential people mean it’s difficult for them to get away from work in the middle of the day or evenings. So Zoë cleverly runs her events as leadership breakfasts, rather than lunchtime or cocktail networking events.

Laid out in black-and-white on this page, it might seem like an obvious tweak – but it wasn’t so obvious when Zoë first began.

“I did two years of lunches until I worked out it was too hard for people to get to consistently each month!”

Zoë keeps listening to her clients and experimenting with her approach, to find new ways to improve. This listen-experiment-improve strategy has helped Zoë to raise the effectiveness of her client outreach, and become one of the most respected and in-demand names in leadership transformation in Australia.

The same strategies Zoë uses to improve her physical marketing work in the context of your website’s marketing too.

Listening to your customers, experimenting with your approach, and following the measurable improvements help you to significantly improve your sales and marketing outcomes online.

Your customers are different – and different customers will have different needs.

Engaging videos on your website can often help to increase sales – particularly if you’re selling a product that is better demonstrated than photographed or written about. And autoplay videos (as annoying as they are!) can – in the right circumstances – increase engagement, and achieve a measurable increase in sales. But if your customers work in open plan offices, it might be a bad idea to embarrass them with an autoplay video blaring on their computer!

If your customers are time-poor, quick reference guides can increase sales – and long white-papers or webinars may decrease sales. But if your customers have a high technical need – or worry that making the wrong decision may result in criticism from peers, managers or loved ones – then long white-papers and webinars might be exactly the factor that seals the sale!

If you’re collecting data inside Google Analytics, you already have an incredible source of data about your customers.

But if you don’t know how to read this data – it’s a useless waste that will never increase your sales.

While Cassie was away, I used this past long weekend to get ahead on work. It means I have a few spare hours – and feel like some social interaction.

If you’d like to spend half an hour with me, geeking out and chatting about your Google Analytics data, find a time in my calendar that works for you.

(Note: This is not a “chat” in the “coffee and catch up” sense. I want this call to be beneficial to you, and fun for me. So I want to use the time to work with you to identify a few tiny tweaks you can make to your marketing that will instantly increase sales by 5-25%.)