Marketing Interactions

The Truth About Marketing Demographics

As more and more marketers and salespeople grapple with how to segment their leads and personalize their messaging, the question of demographics is asked. If you've created an emarketing campaign lately, you've likely been asked, what's the customer profile you're targeting?

For some reason, the idea of a customer profile has become kind of like the POW concept of name, rank and serial number. Only marketers do it by prospect title, company size, revenues and employee counts. Depending on what you sell, some of these may have merit, but consider this:

Those definitions are what companies use to decide whether or not they want a prospect.

The problem with this approach is that it has nothing to do with the prospect deciding they want you, your products or solutions. Nothing.

It's interesting to note that even with all the customer-focused strategy discussions, companies still behave as if this process of selection was all about them. And, sometimes it may indeed work out that way.

But, before you start thinking "see, I'm okay, no need to change my thinking about this," chances are those customers tend to be the ones you talked into buying instead of the ones who were actually interested in buying from you in the first place. These are the ones who can turn into demanding, unfriendly customers—so far from your favorite, ideal customers that, after a while, you pray they'll defect. They also tend to be the ones who have the lowest net margins for profitability.

When you think about customer profiles from now on, think about them in relation to Catch Factors.

Catch Factors are the preferences and aversions that form a prospect's gut reaction about your company, products, messages, brand and communications.

Take a look at the 5 Catch Factors in relation to generating customer profiles that help you make better connections with your prospects:

1. Urgency. Define why a prospect will need your product, solution or service now.
   
   • Why is paying you their attention critical for them today?
   • What factors about their situation make it worthwhile to change their status quo sooner, rather than later?
   • What are the business problems they're facing that must be dealt with immediately to reach strategic objectives and gain critical business outcomes?


2. Impact. Assess the value your prospects will both receive by choosing to work with you and gain for themselves because of that choice.
   
   • What overall business value will your prospect achieve if they act on their urgent priorities by choosing your company as a trusted advisor?
   • What expertise will you bring to the project that will have a lasting impact on the way they accomplish their business goals?
   • How will their professional status be changed by this choice?
   • What values will be delivered that reach farther into the enterprise than the immediate project?


3. Effort. Evaluate the difficulty of taking action from the prospect's perspective.
   
   • How hard will they think it is to pursue solving their urgent problem or take advantage of the strategic opportunity under consideration?
   • What will they perceive as obstacles that require too much energy to overcome?
   • How can you make it easy for them to choose to engage with you?


4. Reputation. Your prospect's existing and developing impression of you and your company. [HINT: This does not mean saying "Our company is the leading provider of..."]
   
   • What do your prospects currently think about or know about your company?
   • In what ways can you make lasting impressions that build a solid presence with your prospects?
   • What will they likely hear from their peers and colleagues if they mention your company and how can you impact that?


5. Intent. Transparent actions you can take to elevate your credibility with your prospect.
   
   • What can you do to demonstrate you walk your talk in a way that provides value to your prospects?
   • How can you expose your expertise to become a trusted advisor?
   • Why would your prospects turn to you to help them solve an urgent, priority problem with high impact to their company's business outcomes?
   • What will your prospects think you want from them?

Every campaign has a foundational goal. By starting with that goal and asking and answering the questions for each Catch Factor from the prospect's perspective, you'll begin to see a pattern emerge that will help you formulate a customer profile that enables you to determine just who has the highest potential to be interested in your information and interaction invitations.

By creating your emarketing strategies around the scenarios you develop during this customer profile process, you'll gain great insights to what truly interests, concerns and motivates the prospects most likely to become your ideal customers. And isn't that just what you need to know.

There is just one caveat. This isn't easy. It'll take research, conversations, listening and exploration to discover the best answers. It's not as simple as going to Hoovers and pulling a demographics-based list. Or just blasting everyone in your database.

So, why should you do it? Because by undertaking this type of exercise as part of your overall emarketing strategy you'll get to know your customers.

• You'll start seeing your prospects' situations from their perspectives.
  


• You'll be in a prime position to add needed value.


• You'll know who they are, what their priorities are, and how to serve them in a way that makes a lasting, positive impression.


• You'll get their attention--and you'll be able to keep it--all the way through their buying journey.

Adding value is what generates relationships. And, it's very hard to add value if all you have to go by is statistical demographic information that does nothing to help you get to know who you're selling to.

The truth about demographics is that they're an internal assessment tool for statisticians. Demographics have their place, but not in defining who your customers are or how to structure the effective components of a successful, interactive emarketing strategy.

eBook Download: Amplify Buyer Attention

Hot off the presses, get the 3rd eBook in the Series.

Design relevant content that invites prospect interactions.

In this eBook, you'll learn how to tackle the challenge of relevance by applying 7 Amplifiers to your content development process. By connecting more closely with your prospect's perspective on problems, challenges and opportunities, you'll find yourself engaging your prospects in active dialog, instead of being easily ignored.

Amplifiers help you define content strategically to ensure the focus is kept squarely on creating prospect engagement.

Download the complimentary eBook

According to Forrester Research, 62% of companies don't view the customer experience as critical to the future. Say what? That's about the only thing that will drive business growth as our world continues to embrace the digital environment, putting more distance between you and them.

Your website, email communications and other online content is what will be found first - way before you ever get face-to-face with your buyers. If it doesn't catch their attention, expand their interest and build engagement, your chances of ever developing that buyer into a sales opportunity are very limited.

However, by embracing online content and learning how to generate content that tells a story your prospects find instantly relevant and high value, you can put the digital experience to work and continue to create new customer relationships with shorter cycle times.

Amplifiers structure your content to confirm, correct or expand information and knowledge buyers need to actively engage with your company to solve their high-priority issues.

By using Amplifiers, you'll be able to better tap into the natural ways in which buyers think. There are 7 Amplifiers that provide templates for creating relevant high-value content based on customer thought processes and, employed correctly, will elevate you from a vendor to a trusted advisor.

Download the Amplify Buyer Attention eBook.

If you don't have them already, download the first two eBooks in the series. By combining Catch Factors, Marketing Stories and Amplifiers, you'll have a combination of tools that work together to help ensure your marketing content is focused on matching relevance to your prospects' and customers' perspectives.

Why Marketing Stories Have Catch

Catch Me, If You Can

Plug Your Marketing Leaks

Marketing is making strides in lead generation, but how kinetic is their nurturing?

Lead nurturing is often thought about as being found with a flag waving when your leads decide to take action about resolving a problem your products or services address. But it leaves a lot to chance just hanging around waiting to be found.

Maybe for some of your longer-horizon leads this is fine, but it's not going to help you speed up getting quality opportunities to opt into sales conversations.

You've all seen those funnel diagrams that show spouts of leads leaking out of them at different points during the buying process. In order to stop the leaks and add momentum to your nurturing, you've got to get commitment.

The higher a sense of commitment you can create, the farther and faster your leads will move toward becoming sales opportunities. So, how do you create commitment when you likely can't get a lead to talk to you — even at mid-stage in their buying process?

You do it by being clever about how you create and use your content. And you apply your content to a process that asks for incremental increases in commitment with each step. With each and every communication, your content needs to provide increasingly relevant information. Each time your information is closer to the mark, your lead transitions a to a higher level of commitment with you because the perceived value they get from you goes up.

As you help them get smarter and more competent about solving their problems, they come to rely on your expertise and education. They feel confident. Their commitment will go up according to how much you impact those things.

To get that level of commitment, you need to be smart about what you learn about your leads.

• Ask about preferences
• Interpret behavior to diagnose interests
• Look for changes in attention that indicate priority shifts

Then you act on that information intelligently.

• Provide information that focuses on expressed interests
• Address urgency, limit their effort and respect their intentions
• Increase the perceived value of information exchanged at each interaction

The level of attention your leads commit to your content and communications is a great indicator of commitment. By planning your content strategy with a focus to increasing value and relevance with each communication, you'll grow their commitment.

I've seen a trend lately that companies offer something of high value - a white paper or ebook - and, once you opt in, then they send out a bunch of "so what" communications that give less than that first effort. Which quickly reverses your potential buyers' level of commitment to that company as a viable solution.

Because, they wonder, what if working with the company is just like that? As soon as your relevance diminishes, you have leaks.

You can keep leaks from happening by focusing on increasing their level of commitment with every interaction. With solid commitment, the next step of choosing to take action with you is easy, and more and more predictable—if you're smart about it.

And you'll have higher velocity nurturing that produces more qualified sales opportunities.

eBook: Why Marketing Stories Have Catch

Use stories with Catch Factors to transform buyer attention into engagement and consistently tip purchase decisions in your favor. Learn what a marketing "story" is, why stories

have more impact than other marketing content, how they escalate buyer momentum and why stories build trust that speeds customer conversions. Use the quick guide to create your own stories.

Download the eBook

New eBook: Why Marketing Stories Have Catch

Use stories with Catch Factors to transform buyer attention into engagement and consistently tip purchase decisions in your favor. Learn what a marketing "story" is, why stories

have more impact than other marketing content, how they escalate buyer momentum and why stories build trust that speeds customer conversions.

Download the eBook

Stories are what we tell ourselves to make sense of the world around us.

Marketing is charged with producing quantifiable results in the quality of lead generation and activity management. In order to give sales qualified opportunities, instead of leads, marketing has got to get more effective. And they need to do it fast. Stories are a key to not only creating and extending engagement, but to building trust.

Weave in Catch Factors with your stories and you've entered a whole new realm of effectiveness. The reason stories work is because they force us to focus on the person we're telling the story to, or they don't make sense. Lots of buzz is happening around the idea of personalized and targeted marketing which means embracing the niche. Stories, used wisely, can take you to a whole new level of marketing competence.

Since you can't control the conversation any more, it's time to leverage the options that empower you to guide the subjective experience of your buyers. Marketing stories do that by increasing the personal impact they have on your audience, creating a pull response from your buyers that escalates their purchase momentum and by solidifying your credibilty as someone they want to do business with.

Marketing is like a trial run. It’s the ultimate free demo of what it will be like to become a customer of your company. 

Why Marketing Stories Have Catch, the second ebook in the Catch Factors series, explores all of these ideas and includes a quick guide at the end to help you get started in leveraging marketing stories of your own. If you missed the first eBook: Catch Me, If You Can, you can download it here.

I'm also giving a series of workshops for Business Experts Webinars that expand on the use of marketing stories within content strategies and sales transitional tools. I hope you'll register today to learn more about how to transform your content strategy into a downstream revenue catalyst.

Create a Content Strategy for Lead Momentum

I've got an upcoming webinar for ON24 that you may be interested in attending:

Getting your prospect’s attention is harder than ever. Time is becoming a more scarce resource every day. One-off, one-way marketing doesn’t give you the depth of relevance you need to catch their attention, or to keep it. When you need to engage them in interactions and dialog that move them to sales readiness, this approach doesn’t work.

What will? Transforming your content into customer-focused stories that satisfy as payment for your lead’s attention will dramatically increase your marketing momentum. Stories create pull. By their very nature, stories are about people, which is infinitely more interesting and compelling than product-based messaging.

But stories alone aren’t enough to shift your content strategy into high gear. Appealing to 5 Catch Factors will help you deliver the value that commands your prospect’s attention, increases mindshare, and accelerates their buying behavior. Plus, their decisions to buy are stronger because they have a bigger investment in choosing to act.

During this webcast, you’ll learn:

• What marketing tales are and how to tell      them.
• The value of “essence” and how to use it to increase perceived value.
• How to apply the 5 Catch Factors for      best outcomes.
• How to structure a connected content strategy.

Don't miss this opportunity to learn from a marketing strategy specialist the impact on momentum that stories can have in moving your prospects to sales readiness.

Date: Tuesday, March 26th 2007

Time: 11 am PDT| 2 pm EDT | 7 pm GMT

Register Here

Simplicity - What a concept!

One of the Catch Factors I talk about in my eBook: Catch Me, If You Can, is Effort. Effort from the buyer's perspective. As in their consideration of whether or not their expenditure of time and energy will be paid for by what's at the end of engagement with you.

Whether your campaign is focused on generating initial attention or your buyers' choice to expand their attention paid to your company. You're only as relevant as the last impression you made with them.

Last week (I know, I'm so behind) Jon Burg posted design patterns of the big players. Which one are your interactions most like?

Ease of interactions and simplicity with payment for attention are key. Go look at Jon's post. This graphic representation should give you a contextual frame for thinking about what it'll take to get your interactions prepped for active buyer and customer engagement.

Marketing communications people "hear"

Marketers talk about how many "touches" it takes to generate awareness. Which basically means the person has to respond. Otherwise we won't know that they've got awareness. But, what is it that causes the reaction?

In the course of helping companies run nurturing campaigns, I've been watching how an audience responds. Which is what happens when they "hear" you. Sometimes this takes one communication, sometimes five, or even many more.

When you look at who responds to what, think about what's different. When everything sounds like blah, blah, yada, blah, then it's all the same. Kind of a garbage in, garbage out mentality. But, when something "sounds" different, then you catch their attention. You've broken their status quo for your type of communications.

Motivating your audience to move out of inertia, beyond current sentiment, is the requirement for generating productive interactions. Research indicates that new and exciting experiences can rejuvenate relationships. (Okay, personal ones, but why shouldn't that also be true for business ones?) Getting people to "hear" your marketing communications means they've got to be outside their norm.

Think about trying the following:

• Shake up their interpretation of your reputation. This doesn't have to be a jumping-off-the-cliff thing, but what could you do that would stay within brand, but put a new spin on perception? To alter exactly how they think about you.


• State your intentions - and have them be beneficial for the audience. (hints: don't try to sell anything, it's not about your product, either.)


• Give them a new reason for urgency that entices them to be proactive. This doesn't mean a limited-time offer. Think about triggers that could have impact your audience needs to (and may not) know about. And make it about the opportunity.


• Talk about an elusive impact. If everyone else is talking about cutting costs, what can you talk about increasing that's more compelling - and perhaps unexpected?


• How easy can you make it for them to "get" that something critical has shifted? Sometimes less is more. How few words can you use to tell this story? Make sure they're as different as your idea. If you're still using the words everyone else is, I'm hearing blah, blah, yada, blah.
  

Is Trigger Content in Your Strategy?

Most B2B companies have piles of content about their products and how great their company is, but how many of you have content designed around Triggering Events that impact your prospective customers?

You may be running a terrific nurturing campaign where you've been measuring good response and noted an increase in momentum. Life looks good, right? Then it suddenly stalls. This doesn't necessarily mean your prospects and customers have lost interest, but it may very well indicate a priority shift that influences which business objective has their primary attention. Instead of letting them go, re-engage them by using trigger content.

This is when monitoring the industries you serve for changes that can shuffle priorities can help you develop content that answers the Urgency Catch Factor. [Haven't read the eBook yet?]

Triggering events within an industry can be new legislation, new innovations by top competitors in the industry, mergers and acquisitions, etc. Company specific triggering events can also be executive shake-ups, end-of-quarter results and a variety of others.

Take a look at how your products and offerings can help them answer these new challenges and keep them moving forward. Pare everything but the essentials away and address the most urgent component your expertise can impact. This means getting rid of all the jargony expressions that include robust, dramatic, expansive, etc. Focus on the meat and nail their concerns quickly, concisely and with evidence that shows you deliver what you promise. Don't expect them to figure out that your offering solves their newly framed problem on their own. They don't have the time. You need to make sure it's obvious.

A shake-up in the status quo has ramifications across the enterprise that may have your prospects and customers scrambling to accommodate. A spot-on communication that simplifies what they're trying to grasp will get their attention—and get you in the conversation.

If you're keeping your ear tuned to the industries you serve and applying your insights to the results your nurturing programs are producing, you can react quickly, boost your credibility, and actually gain momentum by staying relevant with your prospect's priorities.

Catch Me, If You Can - free eBook!

This eBook explores the 5 Catch Factors and how, by appealing to them, your content and communications are set to catch your lead's attention—and keep it—from their early buying stages through sales readiness. Attention is a diminishing resource marketers work very hard to capture. What your target market perceives as valuable can be elusive—but it doesn't have to be.

Catch Factors command your lead's attention, increase mindshare and accelerate buying behaviors.

The difference between content and communications that are valuable—or merely useful—is often the tipping point for attention. Catch Me, If You Can is a guide for using Catch Factors to evaluate and tune every marketing communication's ability to catch higher attention and engagement. 

So, what are Catch Factors?

Catch Factors are the preferences and aversions that form a lead’s “gut” reaction to your communication. They help determine whether you capture your audiences’ attention—or not. They include split-second assessments about their urgency for your information (e.g. does it apply to a real problem they have right now), whether or not you can impact their professional success, the effort required to access and process the information, and, finally, on their perception of your company’s reputation and intent. The importance a recipient places on each of these five Catch Factors affects the attention you get—and the downstream revenue results.

I've included an assessment worksheet at the back of the eBook to help you get started.

Download the eBook: Catch Me, If You Can - no registration required.