Great info on “we need to reach more people”. that struck a cord with me.

Yes they always keep us on our toes

Thanks Bryan

Cheers Kevin

Jeffrey

In which of 5 stages is customer currently present, is it need recognition or evaluation of alternatives (one step before the purchase decision)? Or is he or she already at the stage of purchase decision? In my point of view, every marketer should understand their visitors; segment the visitors by the different stages within the buyer decision process, to provide an appropriate solution.

I’ve tried to segment the referral traffic to analyze the current customer needs. Just looked at the forum posting, twitter accounts and all this social networking stuff, to understand what the potential customers are looking for and in which current stage they could be. And I could say, that this approach works very well, additionally I’ve looked at other metrics like time on site, bounce rate etc.

The result of my study was that identifying the current stage of this process, can improve not only the conversation rate but also other important metrics. It is possible to apply this approach to other Traffic Sources e.g. newsletter, paid search and organic search.

Dimitri

What is the buyers pain? In life, creatures are motivated by escaping or avoiding pain and this basic, biological instinct is a fundamental driver for purchasers also. So, look at your target market and understand what pains it is that your problem solves for them?

Then, when you want to communicate your product to your target market, think in terms of benefits, not features. Benefits speak to their pains and explain what the customer will get from using your product.

I often create a Feature/Pain/Benefit matrix before ever doing any marketing work (even before website content creation) and then we can draw from that matrix to put together all marketing content/collateral.

Here's an example:

Feature – Can send a reminder to your phone (make your phone beep) to remind you of a meeting.

Pain – I put meetings on my schedule, but I am so busy that I still am late to meetings, which is embarrassing and gets coworkers/managers mad at me

Benefit – No more being late to meetings.

Doing a matrix like this can also spur great advertising since you are creating mini scenarios for product usage.

-Carrie

This problem relates too often to being fast at any price; "just do it" and we'll see what's sticking, "let's iterate fast", etc. Focusing too often and mostly on the outcome without thinking about the why and how leads companies to move faster but also waster precious resources (time, money, etc) working too rapidly on the wrong element based on the wrong assumptions.

Should be printed and put in front of every online marketer. Kudo.