One of my favorite parts of Tim Ferriss’s book The Four Hour Workweek is when Tim talks about knowing your customer.
The bare minimum that any company or business should achieve before they even start throwing around the idea of marketing anything is:
Who is our customer?
What is important to them?
What is valuable to them?
What is bothering them?
How can we create value?
And, so on.
Unfortunately, marketing seems to be one of those things that seem so simple that people forget that you need to know your customer to make your marketing valuable.
The key question should be for everyone involved in any marketing decision is:
“Why should our customer care?”
Here are a few ideas to help you be able to answer that question in a meaningful manner.
1. What’s the environment like for your customers and prospects:
We live in a world that is very much self centered.
Which is fine.
You do you.
But when you are working on getting someone to make a buying decision that includes you, you better be focused on your partners more than you are focused on you.
If not, you are not going to have any idea what your customer wants or needs.
2. What do they look to for their information:
Where do your customers and prospects go to find out things?
To learn?
Who influences them?
3. What drives them to make decisions:
Are they concerned with loss or gain?
Are they in a position where short term pain is going to give way to long term growth?
Are they in a rut?
What big changes are going on?
There are many more tools and questions to ask yourself to better understand your customer, but these are good to start with.