How to discover what truly motivates your customers with this one question, and motivation's importance in your marketing strategy.
“We need to get our audience motivated! Let’s offer a time-based incentive to get them to sign-up today!”
Sadly deals (often gimmicks) are what businesses turn to to try to generate motivation for buying.
Sure a deal might push someone over the edge to actually say YES, but it’s not the attention grabber needed for those who truly need your product or service.
Motivation goes much much deeper
Motivation dives into the pain.
Motivation understands how that pain feels.
Motivation is gritty and raw.
I may hop onto your fitness website because I want to get in shape… However motivation understands my true drive for losing weight is because I secretly hate the fit couple at the pool who are the same age as me and my wife!
Yeah, you guessed it. Motivation has a touch of jealousy wrapped up in it at times … but enough about me!
Motivation is all those inner desires and feelings.
True persuasion or motivation has little to do with the actual product or features we are trying to sell. We aren’t selling solutions or services. We aren’t selling software or widgets. We aren’t selling apps or shoes. Keep reading to find out :)
The problem is, most companies simply try to creatively motivate their customers on their own by listing out the features their product has and then try to create a compelling case as to why one couldn’t live without these features.
Other times they hire a “wordsmith” to sell their product. This is effective to a point, because hopefully a copywriter has studied methods that work…
However both these solutions fall short at truly motivating their audience.
Why?
Because the best messages to your customers don't come from inside your head.
They come from your customers.
Getting inside your customers head helps you understand their true motivations and desires. It connects with their pain, their true motivation for buying.
Motivation is what you are selling..
Motivation is connected to these two things:
Finding out these two elements taps into a goldmine of memorable words your customers are actually using. They become your headers, sub-headers, tag-lines, and examples in long form copy. Listening to what your customers are actually saying makes the task of writing compelling copy far easier… because the foundations of your marketing strategy are no longer coming from your head but from the customers heart.
With the proper research into your clients driving motivation, they will hop on your website and proclaim: “It’s like you were reading my mind!”
So how do we tap into their pain?
One golden question is all you need:
If you are a physical storefront ask this question to customers who come in.
On your website use a pop up service like Qualarro and ask this question.
If you are a business to business and your first point of contact is a scheduled sales call, make this the very first question you ask.
Once you get enough feedback do these 2 simple things:
At BigBigStory we walk the customers of our clients through a series of interview questions to help us truly understand the secret messaging motivations that drive action. Each and every time we find valuable insight that changes or refines their messaging and in turn helps us create winning websites.
Without diving deep into your customer’s backstory you truly are just guessing, throwing things at the wall to see what sticks!
I’ll leave you with this, especially If you are the introvert on the marketing team whose ideas take a backseat to all the loud opinionated people (whose ideas aren’t as good) … Suggest when there is a break in the conversation, “Why don’t we ask our customers?”
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