In this article, I’m going to take you deep into the mind of your customer. So deep, in fact, that when you finish reading, you’ll be able to do the one thing that almost guarantees sales.
You’ll be able to provide your customers with relief to their biggest problems.
Then I’m going to show you a way to create a hub of hungry buyers who will pay for those answers.
But before I show you how to do that, I want to show you something that can literally explode your sales.
Why It’s Best To Ditch Unmotivated Customers
If you’re a regular reader of the blog, you’ve most likely heard me say it’s better to have 1000 motivated customers than 100,000 unmotivated customers.
It’s such an important part of marketing that it’s worth repeating. Don’t target unmotivated people.
Target customers who are looking for solutions. They are the people who will buy a product. They are motivated.
They are motivated by their fear, frustration, or pain. And those feelings have pushed them out into the world to find a solution.
Solutions And Relief Are What People Are Looking For
No matter how marketing evolves, there are principals that don’t change.
One of those principals is that people don’t buy a product. They buy a result, a benefit, a solution, or the avoidance of pain, not a product.
That’s why it can be so tough to convert readers into buyers when doing product reviews.
Product reviews often talk too much about the product itself and not enough about the solutions and relief the customer experiences after they buy it.
Let’s see an example:
Most smartphones now have all the same features. So how do people choose what phone to buy?
- People buy a basic cell phone so they can stay connected to the people who matter to them.
- People buy the latest iPhone X so other people with look at them in awe.
- People buy a strong, durable phone case to remove the worry of accidentally dropping the phone.
- People buy a big-screen phone because they DO want to watch Netflix, but they DON’T want to buy a tablet
Very few people sit down and compare the hundreds of phones available feature by feature.
They buy a phone because it offers them a solution to their needs.
Remember, people don’t buy features. They buy the benefits of those features.
Feature, advantage, benefit…
Air conditioning in a car is the feature, the advantage is the air being cooled, and the benefit is driving in the car on a hot day and feeling cool.
If a salesperson says:
“This car has air conditioning.”
You’d probably think, “Well, so what, most cars have air conditioning.”
If the salesperson told you the result of the air conditioning instead, you might be more interested:
“Your passengers and you will enjoy a consistently cool temperature when you drive in the car, even on the hottest day, due to the automatic climate control.”
Start to think in results
What is the result someone will have if they use the product you’re selling?
Before we go on. Read that sentence again. Here it is:
What is the result someone will have if they use the product you’re selling?
The result your product offers is the solution to your customer’s need.
Let’s use the female relationship product His Secret Obsession as an example to dig deeper into results.
The customer profile for His Secret Obsession customers is something like this. “A single woman, possibly lonely, who may be attracting the wrong man, is not able to communicate with men she finds attractive, or find out what men really want from her.”
- Does this customer care who James Bauer is?
- Does she care that there are 20 chapters in the book?
- Does she care it’s a digital product delivered as a pdf?
Nope, she only cares about getting relief from the nagging voice in her head that might be saying she is going to grow old alone.
The relief that people want is getting rid of the nagging voice inside their head.
Motivated buyers in the relationship niche want to get rid of the nagging voice inside of their head more than they want a relationship. A relationship is a solution to the relief.
Which is why we have to stop selling logic and start selling results, solutions, and relief.
Everything about your product is an excuse the customer uses to justify purchasing your product to get results, solutions, and relief.
Customer Research Is About Discovering What Relief People Want
When a customer pays attention to you, they are paying attention to the chances of getting the solution they want.
You could say people don’t care what your product is or who makes it. The product is nothing more than a conduit to getting relief.
An exercise you can try when researching your customers is to imagine you are your ideal customer. Close your eyes and get into their mindset.
Remember that when you speak to a customer, you’re entering into a conversation they’re already having inside of their own mind. You’re not starting a new conversation or pulling them into your conversation.
When you begin to figure out what the customer wants, use first-person language to describe their situation and needs.
An example for the female relationship niche might sound like this:
“I am a 42-year-old woman with two children, and I work all day because I want to provide for my children. Any man who enters my life needs to understand this. And I think it’s hard to find a man who wants a ready-made family. Most men, especially on dating sites, are players. And I’ve been single for so long I don’t even know how to get started dating again.”
Discovering Customer Needs
Start with the needs of your customer and build your marketing around them.
Don’t fit your customer around your marketing.
Remember customers are only interested in having their needs met.
As affiliate marketers, we should accept that we’re not as good at understanding our customer’s needs as we think we are, which is why we research.
This is why Reddit is such a powerful research tool. Join the subreddits and talk to people.
Don’t market or sell to them; just talk to them and find out what their most powerful needs are that you can fulfill with your marketing.
You’ll discover more in a 15-minute chat on Reddit than spending an entire day thinking about what your customer wants.
Don’t get locked up inside your imagined reality. Instead, go out and talk to people and you’ll find out everything you need to know.
The most important thing you can do for your business is spend time talking with prospective customers and finding out what their problems, fears, and anxieties are…
What are their wants, aspirations, desires, dreams, and fantasies?
Then you’ve got everything you need to create your marketing.
Pay Special attention to unmet emotional needs
I ran the following search string in Google:
site:reddit.com/r/RELATIONSHIPS lonely
And I found a link on the first page of Google that led me here:
The event
About 10 months ago I was dumped by my longterm serious boyfriend due to him wanting to head in a different life direction that would be extremely hard to include a serious partner without a lot of long distance.
The Reaction
It sucked and still sucks. I keep myself really busy with uni, work, gym, and some extracurriculars.
What Life Looks Like Right Now (Marketers call this stage ‘hell’)
Still, every night I come home to my empty apartment and its just so damn depressing. I’m bored, lonely, and have a hard time getting to sleep.
What emotional needs are not being met?
What Do They Want Relief From?
I can have the best productive happy busy day and within an hour or two of returning home, my mood plummets.
This person has lost a purpose. When this person was in a relationship, what things did they do when they got home?
Something as simple as taking a message, preparing a meal, looking for a movie, or going out for a walk with their partner.
Perceived Barriers
I’m not a people person really so it’s not as if I’m socializing all day.
Unidentified Problem
I don’t know why I get so depressed every night when I come home when I’m perfectly chipper and energetic all day.
Another way of saying what that person just said is this:
“I have a problem, but I don’t know what it is. If you can tell me what it is and I think, ‘Wow, you get me,’ then if you offer me a solution, I’m going to take it.”
How I am Burying My Head In The Sand Right Now
I don’t know what to do with myself except smoke or drink to distract myself from feeling this way. That’s what I’d like to do right now actually.
With the information from one post on Reddit, you’ve now got heaps of information on the unmet emotional needs and relief a person in the female-relationship niche wants.
How can you use that information to create content that speaks to that person and shows them how the product you offer can give them the relief they’re looking for?
How To Get Thousands of People To Listen To What To Solutions You Have
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It’s all very well and good having all this information about your customers, but you need to be able to talk to them. And there are few better ways to talk to people than in Facebook Groups.
However, if you join someone else’s Facebook Group, there are rules. You probably cannot put a link for your product in the group.
So, the only question that remains is what is stopping you from creating your own Facebook group?
Here is a step by step guide for creating, advertising, and running a Facebook Group.
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