Marketing psychology is a complex subject that can be broken down into a few sections:
- Identifying traits of your ideal client
- Asking qualifying questions
- Generating trust in your ideal clients by using prior customers’ comments
- Offering something that can’t be refused in your call to action
- Making your call to action simple and easy to execute for little or no risk at all
This post will focus on identifying traits of your ideal client. Subsequent posts will cover the other four topics.
Everyone in business or marketing has at least some inkling of who they want to sell to and what their products or services can be used for in the marketplace. But do they know enough about demographics and psychographics to sell a premium amount to the ideal number of clients that the owner or marketing manager want to sell to?
What are demographics and psychographics you may be wondering. Put quite simply, demographics is a set of statistics about a person that tell businesses whether you are a match to sell their products or services to. For example, if your ideal client has a growing family and babies and toddlers around their home, they will be in the market for all kinds of baby and toddler supplies for at least a couple of years and may even be interested in looking at daycare so they can go back to work for a variety of reasons. In reference to demographics, this would put them in the family-rearing time of life (age), gender could be either male or female, education level is irrelevant if they are raising a baby and a toddler and income level is of utmost importance right now for them because they need to be able to find a way to afford all that they need to provide for their new (possibly growing) family.
Psychographics simply defined is the psychology of sales and marketing. Put another way, you could say it is what motivates people to buy from you. When considering what motivates people to buy from you, look at the problems your product- or service-set solves for your customers and how small the cost or risk associated with buying your product or service. So to go back to our example of a growing family from our demographics paragraph, the psychographics could be that the mother is exhausted from having a newborn and a toddler in the house and wants quick easy feedings for the infant but has to use formula in bottles with a premie nipple to feed her fussy premature baby. In this case she would want to choose a premie formula that is easy for the infant to digest and easy to mix and get to the right temperature for the infant to feed on. So to get the mother to buy your formulation, you would want to start with a qualifying question such as “do you have a fussy premie that is having a hard time feeding on regular formula?” Then go into a suggestion about how your premie formula is easy to mix and warm to the right temperature for the baby and prevents bloating and minimizes gas in the infant. You could end your marketing with a piece on how affordable your formula is while minimizing the common digestive problems of a premature baby.
So in short, you can identify your ideal clients by performing a simple analysis on them and thinking about what demographics and psychographics your ideal client has right now while considering a product similar to yours or perhaps is considering your product/service-set.