I was at an event recently and listened to a presentation by Jay Acunzo, award-winning podcaster and keynote speaker. A video of that presentation is featured below.
I thought he brought up some great points. If you don’t want to watch the video, I’ll summarize for you:
He speaks on how we live in a time where it’s so easy to get the information we need online. Because of this, marketers have access to the same information, follow the same best practices, and produce lookalike material. So he encourages marketers to stand out by finding their own answers. He sums up how to do this by advising us to decide on what we want to accomplish, learn what our audience wants, and realize our constraints and learn how to work through them.
Acunzo told of one coffee maker who defied conventional wisdom and made his coffee from robusta beans instead of the more popular arabica bean. Why? Because the robusta bean had more caffeine. Death Wish coffee was born around the idea of the world’s strongest cup of coffee. His business took off!
Jay Acunzo’s presentation and that specific story led me to a question…how is following the best practices of others hindering your marketing? You may be struggling to find success or may have reached a certain level of success but are finding it difficult to improve. Are you roasting an arabica bean when what your audience really needs is the world’s strongest cup of coffee?
Here are 3 ways to find what works for your audience:
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1. Understand your specific audience.
It’s easy to spend all our time learning how to be better marketers. The problem is that knowledge tells you nothing about your audience. Learning who they are lets you know how best to approach them and how to get their attention.
So how do you get to know your audience? One of the ways is to harness information based on social media use and online behavior. This will provide more insight into your audience’s interests and habits than basic demographic information or purchase history. You can also have A Day in the Life of Your Customer, that could mean drawing a roadmap to what their daily life is like or visiting the business of your clients to gain insight of their day-to-day.
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2. Know what your audience wants.
Human beings are emotional creatures. So you have to understand, when a prospect interacts with you, it isn’t solely based on logic. It’s based on how your method of getting their attention makes them feel. Are you touching on a pain point? Are you catering to your audience’s interests? Pain points, interests, education, etc. these are a few sources of your audience’s wants.
Going back to the coffee maker, it was easy to think that simply adding a little more caffeine to his blend would be enough to satisfy his audience. Instead he took a deeper look to find the reasoning behind their want for stronger coffee. He found that what his customers’ actually wanted to keep going no matter how hard they worked. So he catered directly to that pain point and came up with the world’s strongest coffee.
Take it a step further. Learn why your audience wants what they want. This can lead you to an even deeper need your audience has and could be the key to you standing out among other marketers.
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3. Listen to your audience.
Death Wish blend was created by roasting the very type of beans conventional wisdom warned against. The decision was made because of the audience. Are you following conventional wisdom instead of your audience? What would this look like?
By following conventional wisdom, you could be forcing your audience to do what they don’t want to. Like providing customer service by phone when your audience prefers chat or vice versa. Or using long form applications when your audience is engaging through mobile. Is conventional wisdom encouraging you to focus your marketing on you and your products instead of showing your audience what relevance it has to them?
Go by what your audience and their actions are telling you. What platforms are they engaging on? Make sure your marketing is present there. What devices are they using? Cater to those devices. Find what works best for your particular audience and don’t worry about whether it’s popular for everyone else. If it works for your audience, that’s what’s most important. Follow Jay Acunzo’s advise and base more of what you do on results instead of trends.
Understanding your specific audience, knowing what your audience wants, and trying something different are not things any maker of best practices can do for you. Finding what works best for your audience is not only something you need to take into your own hands, but is something you are more than capable of.
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