Marketing is the key factor behind success of every business. You cannot come up with an outclass product and expect people to automatically know about it. You have to let them know about your products and convince them to buy these products.
With the passage of time, marketing has changed course. It isn’t how it used to be anymore. You have to strive hard to make your place in the market and win the trust of customers. With changing times, customers are getting smarter too. According to a study, more than 80% of people do not rely on salespeople to inform them about the products but, study the market on their own.
In today’s marketing world, cold-calls and subtle persuasion will not come as effective for your business as they used to be in the past. The customers are not interested in knowing about the virtues of your products but are more inclined to know how beneficial the product can be for them. With everything adopting an alternative route, it is best to flip your marketing approach. Instead of product-based marketing, adopt a strategy that is customer-centric. Know in detail about your customers and come up with product and services that are valuable for them.
What is consumer-based marketing?
As mentioned earlier, you have to let your consumers know of your product and services and convince them that it is of the best value for them. In order to accomplish this, you need to adopt a strategic marketing plan that studies the needs and values of your customers and comes up with product solutions accordingly.
Consider this example for clarification. You have written the best possible blog post and are completely satisfied with the information laid down there. Unfortunately, your blog post doesn’t attract much traffic mainly because your consumers are busy elsewhere and secondly because they are unaware of the post. In such a case, you need to up your organic traffic generation game.
One important attribute that needs to be considered while doing so is to know which social platforms and mediums are actively used by your target audiences. Once you are ready with the data, you know how and where to target. You can act professional and use specifically designed tools to help you with the lead generation.
This is how you adopt consumer-based strategies for your business. If your marketing doesn’t revolve around your customers, it is bound to fail. To avoid such a pitfall, adopt the following strategies
Know your customers
Since your marketing strategy has to revolve around your customers, it is essential to know about them. Knowing in detail about your customers helps you in formulating strategies and modeling your products in the best manner.
Collect data regarding your customer’s age, gender, the social platforms they frequently use, their surfing device, their income brackets, how much they are ready to spend on your product, etc. All this information can be collected through survey forms and your customer’s purchase and payment history during the past several months.
At initial stages, collection of this much information may seem a bit tedious and useless, but it will help you with your marketing strategy at many levels in the coming times.
Categorize your customers and identify their pain points.
Categorizing your customers is very necessary for devising an effective marketing strategy. The categorization of consumers here proves to be more beneficial for your business than to the consumers.
You can categorize your consumers in accordance with their level of loyalty towards your brand. There are consumers who are completely satisfied with your brand and are sure not to switch to your competitors. These lot of consumers are safe for the business and you need to put efforts on amplifying their loyalty with product satisfaction and perks.
The second category of consumers are the ones who are unsure and doubtful of your products. You might lose them to your competitors and you need to invest efforts in persuading them to buy your products.
The third category is more of the window-shoppers. You do not need to waste your efforts on them. Even if they buy your products for once, you can never be sure to keep them coming back for more.
After categorizing your consumers, identify their pain points and address them with your products and services. Your consumers will instantly fall in love with you if they believe you are there to solve their problems with a solution that is best suitable. Continuing with the above-mentioned example, a consumer’s pain point in that scenario was to generate leads. This issue was acknowledged and resolved by https://designrr.io/, with a solution of generating e-books, flipbooks, and PDFs out of meaningful content that is bound to generate leads.
Put yourself in your consumer’s shoes to identify their issues and then come up with the suitable solutions.
Do not sell
This might sound counter-intuitive but it is effective at the same time. Too many messages urging your consumers to buy your product are bound to scare them away. Today’s consumers are smart. They want to be educated, informed and then take decisions on their own. They do not like to be directed.
Rather than investing your efforts on bombarding your consumers with messages urging them to buy your product, educate them about your product. Invest in advertising campaigns that speak about the virtues of your product. Let your consumers take a decision on their own; this makes them feel empowered. This is called mission-based marketing.
The more you focus on educating your audiences, the more your sales will grow.
Build a relationship with your consumers:
Building a relationship with your consumers is rewarding in a number of ways. It gives your consumers a sense of importance when you connect with them on a personal level.
There are many ways to connect with consumers. You can stay in touch with them through personalized emails or messages. Addressing a consumer with their names is extremely impactful as it makes them feel special. You can also send birthday and anniversary wishes through emails and messages. These gestures towards consumers are always reciprocated in the form of loyalty towards brands.
Apart from relying on emails and messages, you can make use of other social networking portals like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and the likes to form a community of your consumers. You can ask for their feedback and ideas for improvement. Make sure to reply to each consumer on an individual level. This makes them feel their voice is heard and their opinions matter. After all, that is what your mission is all about. You want to know what your consumers want and come up with solutions to ease their problems.
Make sure to be easily reachable to your consumers. All your contact information should be laid down on every social platform you use. Aberdeen research group have released a study stating that the sales representatives who leveraged social selling in their sales were 79% more successful in attaining their quota than the ones who didn’t use social selling.
Delight your consumers:
We all love people in our circles who are quirky and witty with their words, have a good sense of humor and bring a smile on our faces. Who doesn’t?
The same goes for the brands. People love brands that bring them joy and delight. Apart from impactful content and strong product building focus on ways to be a happy place for your consumers. Go an extra mile with ideas that are sure to make your consumers happy. These are the marketing strategies that impact consumers emotionally and psychologically.
A sudden upgrade by an airline, surprise gifts, free meals, and discount vouchers are some of the examples to win happy customers. Apart from this, you can arrange entertaining events for your consumers. The event can benefit your brand by letting your consumers know more about the things you offer and at the same time guarantee and fun-filled time for your customers.
Today’s consumers are smart and know what is best for them. They might not be easy to please but they deserve to be heard and their issues need to be solved in the best possible way.
