Expect me to say you need heart, brains and courage to better understand your customers? While that may be true, that isn’t the moral of this story.
Because here’s the simple truth – this isn’t about you or me. This is about your customers.
Don’t worry. There’s a lot of residue left from an age of advertising, which has made it easy to forget that marketers aren’t the main characters. Your customers are. They are the real heroes. They come to you, hoping you can give them something that makes them feel. Something that makes them smarter. Something that makes them stronger. Or something that connects them with the ones they love.
Finding the Right Road
Marketers are the Wizard, but not the all-powerful, intimidating talking head with the booming voice. Marketers are the meek old man who succeeds only when he steps out from behind the curtain.
The challenge, of course, is that customers so rarely tell us what they really want. When was the last time you had a customer say, “I’m sad,” “I feel stupid,” “I’m scared,” or “I’m lonely”? If your understanding of your customer goes this deep, I apologize for wasting the past few minutes of your life. But if you’re like the majority of organizations, there is a dire need to understand (and empathize with) the basic humanity of your customers.
Yes, humanity. As a pack species, we’re hard-wired to connect, to find a common ground, and empathy is the way to do it.
4 Insights & Benefits of Building Personas
Building personas based on simple psychology nets you four things:
- Context: Not to go all Maslow on you here, but until a customer’s basic needs are met, they have no interest in what you’re selling. Basic needs don’t always mean food, water or shelter either. A basic need can be something as simple as, “I think I’m ready to buy a house. Where do I start?” If the bank’s website leads with mortgage rates (as most do), you’ve failed to understand the basic need of the first-time home buyer.
- Barriers: You have to know the nature of an obstacle before you can maneuver beyond it. What’s holding your customers back? Is it in the cost-benefit ratio? A lack of desire leading to a lack of urgency? Straight-up laziness? Unavailable resources like money or information? Is this their first time exploring your product or service? Have they been burned in the past? It’s amazing how any or all of these factors can race through the mind of a consumer. Knowing the barrier prevents you from getting caught off guard. More importantly, it provides you the opportunity to be proactive and assuring throughout the buying process.
- Behaviors: Understanding customers on a psychological level helps put rationale to seemingly irrational behaviors. The notion of impulse buying and perceived value from a brand’s premium price defies the logic of classical economics. Something else is motivating these behaviors. Focusing on empathy marketing and developing these personas allows us to make sense of it all. And if done correctly, it allows organizations to make more educated guesses and predict future behaviors.
- Gaps: Personality-based personas produce a roadmap for the buying journey. What do customers need to advance to the next phase? What are they feeling? How do they act? What drives them to get what they desire? Finding (and then filling) gaps within your existing processes reduces the rate of dropoff. Gaps in a humanized customer experience may also highlight new opportunities for you to offer additional products or services, and enhance the relationship while earning a little extra to boot.
It’s time for a shift in our industry. It’s foolhardy to assume customers are “off the see the wizard (us).” There are too many options, too many roads. Instead, we as marketing wizards need to utilize digital technologies to create personal, one-to-one relationships with customers. That only happens when we lead with empathy.
