OPTIMISE for Success... Know What your Customer Wants and Understand What Works

Understanding the buyer journey is key to creating great campaigns that your prospective customers should – in theory – love.

 

But the truth is that you never really know how your leads will respond to your efforts until you put yourself out there. Generating results-driving campaigns is about building, testing, and adapting.

It’s about learning from the real-time data available to you, and optimising your efforts to ensure your campaigns are always achieving the very best results.

By optimising your campaigns to best meet your audience’s needs, you can empower your sales team to do more, and truly win over today’s buyers.

 

 

Why does optimisation matter?

 

What happens if you’re not tracking campaign performance? If you’re not optimising efforts to make sure you’re always getting the most from your digital marketing investments?

In that case, you’re driving your financial resources – and your human resources – into marketing and sales activities that aren’t having any impact on your bottom line.

Today, in a landscape that’s always shifting and evolving, there’s a huge need for organisations to ensure they’re tracking their campaign performance.

 

Have you got a process to measure the success of your sales and marketing campaigns?

 

A lot of organisations use methods such as eye-tracking, which is a pretty standard feature in a lot of analytics software today. It’s one way to try and measure how campaigns are performing; to see which aspects are engaging with audiences, and which aspects aren’t. But the reality is that there can often be a big difference between eye movements and conversions. That’s why it’s often better to use a more advanced technique, such as A/B testing or more in-depth multivariate tests that give deeper insight.

If you’re using processes such as these, you’ll probably be seeing one of two things:

1. That your campaigns are succeeding in driving the right traffic, at the right time, to your conversion-boosting landing pages, helping you to monetise your marketing efforts and increase sales.
2. That your campaigns – while powerful – are failing to really hit the mark. They’re having trouble connecting with the right people, meaning they’re not generating the kind of results you wanted.

If you’re experiencing the latter, it’s time to optimise. How? Through content.

 

Optimising through content

 

The reasoning behind building, developing, and launching a campaign is to share a standardised message that can be delivered – in one way or another – throughout the buyer journey. And so, if you discover that your campaigns aren’t quite succeeding at getting this message across, optimising your content is what’s going to help you to share this message more effectively.

You need to adapt to ensure you’re creating content that your buyer wants.

After all, personalisation is key. But how can you personalise and optimise your campaigns to meet the needs of your audience, if you’re still not feeling 100% confident that you know what your buyer is looking for?

 

Know what your customer wants

 

Have you created buyer personas for your ideal types of customer? If not, now is the perfect time to do so.

Buyer personas are essentially marketer-generated profiles of those people most likely to be interested in buying your product or using your service.

The concept can be traced back to the 1960s, when two professors collaborated on a research paper titled Buying Behaviour and Marketing Decisions. They concluded that customers don’t want products; they’d rather have ‘satisfaction bundles’.

Marketing and sales are evolving. Today, there’s so much insight, so much innovation, so much data, and so much technology that we often forget to go back to basics.

We need to remember that’s it’s not about our potential, or what we’re capable of; it’s all about how we can solve a prospect’s need. How we can satisfy them through our offerings so we’re giving them exactly what they’re looking for.

And so, developing personas, and getting a deeper understanding of your audience, is key to optimisation.

 

 

Understand what works

 

Customers obviously want different things – and expect different things – at different stages of the buyer journey.

While the buyer journey certainly isn’t linear, every customer will ultimately go through the same three steps: awareness, consideration, decision. At the awareness stage, they’re looking for introductory content that positions your business as a solution to their problem.

At the consideration stage, they want to know more about your products or services. At the decision stage, they want to know why they should choose you.

What makes you the right fit for them? How have you helped others in the same situation to address the biggest challenges affecting them?

At the end of the day, prospects in the decision-making stage want success stories. They want social proof.

Do you create case studies for the customers who buy your products or services? If so, you’re on the right track. But it’s important to remember that case studies alone aren’t always enough to optimise your campaigns for best results.

You need to create case studies that really speak to your prospects.  

Customers are becoming increasingly aware, and more savvy than ever before. They view case studies as little more than brand adverts masquerading as testimonials; a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Businesses need to approach case studies in a new way. Rather than trying to sell through case studies, they should be using case studies to tell tales, and optimise campaigns through storytelling.

 

Optimise for success

 

There’s really no point in going through all the effort to optimise your campaigns if you’re not going to put the effort into showing off these optimised campaigns to your audience.

Creating a great website is useless if you’re not marketing it. And there’s very little – if any – value in developing highly optimised campaigns based on in-depth buyer personas if you’re not going to share these optimisations with your audience.

Do you use PR to shout about your successful sales and case studies? If not, it’s time to make a change.

Optimising for your customers means putting your customers first. It means sharing information with them to help them make the right decision.

 

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