When you have something to sell, be it a product or a service, you need to get familiar with the art of persuasion. A bludgeoning approach rarely works – and when it does, it’s because it’s ben carefully considered and is the right thing to do for that specific market.
If you want to persuade your customers you need to learn what works for them: what they want, what they value, the language they speak, and put all of that information into creating a strategy that appeals persuasively to your customers specifically.
Data
The first thing you need to know is who your customers actually are. This is always a valuable area of market research to engage in: if you don’t know who you’re selling to, you might find at any moment that your understanding of the market is lagging behind the reality calamitously and you’re just not offering what people want anymore.
Working with a market research company can get you this data: they have the expertise and reach to perform useful, statistically representative surveys, and turn the results into insights that you can work with. Click here to find out more about working with a market research firm.
A demographic work up of your market shows you who is buying your products, and also lets you know how deep that market is: how many more people in your area match that profile. If your current customer base is close to the total number of people in that demographic within reach of your business, then you’re going to want to either try and break into a new demographic market with a new marketing strategy or product range, or spread your reach geographically to access fresh reserves of your core demographic.
Persuading Them
Once you’ve identified your audience you need to settle on just how you’re going to persuade them. One of the biggest questions to settle is what voice your brand will have. What personality are you going to use to speak to your customers, essentially. Consistency is important here, almost more so than something that immediately appeals. Customers can grow to love almost anything familiarity but if you’re not consistent they won’t have anything to latch onto. Changing from ad to ad or running campaigns in different voices simultaneously will just confuse customers.
You also need to pick the major way you’re going to appeal to them: what is the persuasive force you’re going to channel?
If you know your market is broad but without much money to spend, you’re going to want to stress the value proposition of what you’re selling. If you’re appealing to an older audience, you’re going to want to emphasise reliability.
Deciding what works specifically for your audience and then appealing to them through that value is what makes for a successfully persuasive campaign, and a great return on investment!
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