Guide to Opening Up Markets

The big picture

Any business wants to be more profitable, and there are a number of ways to achieve this goal. One of the most important is to focus on their customer base. After all, it is customers who buy products and services, so it stands to reason that increasing the number of customers will increase profitability. There are a number of ways to increase the customer base, such as expanding into new markets or developing new product lines and marketing is the key to both -emotional based marketing specifically.

Emotional Narratives Influence People

Marketers today understand that the reasons we purchase a product or service is to meet our needs and they have bifurcated these needs into either an objective or an emotional need. Objective needs are things like when someone’s cell phone breaks and they find myself with an immediate objective need to buy a new one. Marketing cannot significantly influence this need, accept perhaps intercepting them at the right moment and offering them a coupon. Emotional needs on the other hand can be heavily influenced by marketing by generating desire for a specific experience. For example, let’s say someone want to buy a new car. The objective need is for transportation, but the emotional need is for status, independence, or prestige

Creating Emotional Content

So how do marketers determine which emotional need drives someone to purchase? The answer is developing a content marketing strategy whereby several different types of experiences are imagined and expressed thru content and then measure who and how often people respond to the various experiences. A persona is a fictional character that communicates the primary characteristics of a group of users and provides insights into their emotional needs

The imagination process begins with the development of personas. Certainly start with your existing customers to gain practice and then begin to imagine or guess who also may be a potential customer and create a persona for them. The persona discovery process includes many questions. Here are few examples:

Can you describe the challenges faced by each customer group?

Can you recall a time when a customer solved their problems using your product or service?

What content do you have that helps articulate the challenges faced by these customers?

Do you have a solution- generation process?

Where is the ideal customer located (school, work, home)

What blog, magazine, social media account could I use to see a picture of this ideal customer?

Imaging Your Customer's Path to Purchase

Next you imagine your persona’s path to purchase often referred to as a purchase funnel which outlines the steps along the path:

Attention – At this step of the process, the user is called a anonymous visitor. They may or may not beware they have the challenges so your content at this stage is about educating them on the challenges they face.

Interest – This step the visitor becomes a lead. They are educating themselves about your solution and if makes sense for them.

Desire – Convinced you have a solution, entering this stage means the lead is exploring the experience offered by your solution. They are discerning if they can trust you and does your brand values align with their own.

Action – They become a customer!

Getting Customer's Attention

After identifying each persona, their challenges, and the path to purchase, you are ready to create a content plan. The content is the way a customer discovers you understand how they feel and that others have felt the same way and when these other people used your product / services they had a satisfying experience. The content plan defines the content that is limited to only the information need that their specific stage of their journey. The tone of the content is tailored to their persona.

Content can be a difficult process for companies especially without a full time marketing team. Luckily there are many tools that help create the content using generative AI <insert blog post>. Using one of these tool, insert the problem statement identified for a persona, generate a paragraph, edit the contents to meet your needs and repeat until all personas are completed. Each of these paragraphs represent a blog posts targeting a specific customer group. I like to think of them as a bunch of digital honeypots that are now used to attract visitors.

Cultivating Customer Interest

When a visitor arrives at a particular blog post you begin the visitor profiling. Already, each blog post has an assumed persona and based on the visitor duration and frequency on a page it becomes more likely they are connected to that persona. There are many automated marketing tools that can track users to assist in the development of the visitors profile. To accelerate the number of visits there are several paid advertising techniques using search and social media can be applied to the posts received a higher interest.

Since the posts are describing the user challenge, these posts are design to attract visitors. The next step is to draw their interest and this entails providing additional posts related to your solution. Often these posts are linked from the attention getting posts and provide some type of incentive to courage the visitor to provide their contact information. At this point you have the visitors profile and their contact information. It’s now time to advance to the desire stage

Building Customer Desire

The desire stage is where you build the experience in the contact’s mind eye and again the persona are useful to determine meaningful approaches. A contact may remain in this stage for a little longer but your investment in building up the experience will be worth it. This stage where brand loyalty is created.