The 5 Second Question to Test If You’re Marketing Effectively

You have five seconds to answer this question:

Deep down, what really motivates a customer to buy your product or service?

Did that take you longer than five seconds?

If you came up with an answer – no matter how long it took you – congratulations! You’re ahead of most other businesspeople out there. But here comes another question: how do you know that you came to the right conclusion?

We put hours – time and energy – into marketing our business to our potential clients. But even if the message is reaching their ears – how far does it penetrate?

Let’s take you as an example. Think of the last time you bought ice cream in an ice cream shop. Why did you buy it? Try to go beyond “it tasted good.”

Here’s a list of possibilities:

1. “It was hot and I wanted something cold.”
2. “I was in a bad mood and doing something nice for myself cheers me up.”
3. “I have hypoglycemia and I felt that I needed something sugary – quick!”
4. “I was exhausted and stressed from being up three nights in a row with my newborn, and I just wanted to leave my adult responsibilities and be a kid again.”

Very different reasons, no?

If you planned a marketing campaign based around Ice Cream: the Perfect Heat-Quencher – you would likely motivate person 1. You would have little to no impact on persons 2, 3 and 4.

Too often we start our marketing campaigns – whether they be our website content, Adwords, social media or a print ad in a magazine – before identifying what will motivate our audience to respond to our campaign.

Even if we put time into thinking about the question, the answer we come up with will be of limited accuracy. That’s for one of two reasons:

1. You don’t know the product or service well enough
2. You know the product or service too well

The first problem happens when you’re an outside marketing agency. You’re stuck with the task of marketing industries to audiences when you know next to nothing about either.

A comment by Sha Menz to a recent SEOMoz blog post on marketing phrased it well:

You certainly learn on the job, but how long does that take you? Even if you can learn fast, it’ll often just end up giving you the second problem: you know the product or service too well.

That problem happens when you are an internal marketing person – either you’re the business owner, the product manager, or the in-house marketing team.

You know that product. You know it like the back of your hand. You could list all the features it has in your sleep. You know exactly why someone SHOULD want that product.

You just don’t know why someone in fact DOES want that product.

It’s hard to step outside yourself when you know so much.

And that’s when you end up marketing ice cream as a heat-quencher, when in fact it would be much more effective to market it as a way to be a kid again.

So what do you do? How do you find out how to really reach your customers?

Ask them.

Yes, just ask them.

No, asking “how can I convince you to buy my product?” is not what I meant. You’re going to need to be a little more subtle – but I’m sure you are.

We’ve been doing this more and more for our clients, and it’s been an eye-opening experience. Just speaking to a few people can shed light on the heart of an entire customer base. For one new client, we spoke to two people who fit his “ideal customer” profile and from those insights we were able to create his marketing strategy. It was a much more refined and deeper strategy than we ever would have created from just talking to our client.

I’m sure you have a few questions on how this works:

• Who do I ask? Customers I have? What if I don’t have customers?
• How do I find them?
• Why would they want to talk to me?
• What do I ask?

Next week, we’ll be covering these questions, and you’ll come out with a plan and the confidence to get answers from your customers. If you don’t want to miss it, make sure you’re subscribed to our email list (and you’ll also get a free practical guide on targeting your marketing more effectively).

Then it will take you less than five seconds to answer the question:

Deep down, what really motivates a customer to buy your product or service?