What do your customers want? How to stop doubting and start marketing with confidence.

1. Intro to what do your customers want: Hi, I'm Amy, and I'm here to show you how to find out what your customers want from you. This class is designed for yea if you are an accidental marketer. So over time you've worked away from an administrative or completely unrelated roll into a marketing position without any real formal training. You're learning on the job or you run a small business and you're passionate about what you're selling. But you realize you need to learn a whole new Skilling marketing to make your dream of success. This class is also for you. If you've got no time to waste, you want to learn essential and strategic marketing skills that can be put into practice immediately, and you want to better understand and communicate with the most relevant audience to what you're selling. So what? We learned the benefits of listening to your current customers the one thing in a Jinnai about your customers, if nothing else, how to create your own care factor scale to significantly improve your focus. Stop validating your assumptions with the feedback collector and know when to stop asking and start doing why educated guesses are your secret weapon. So what we take away from this class, you'll be introduced to two simple techniques that are easy to implement for your own situation and will significantly reduce distractions and improve your focus. How to collect everyday customer feedback and then turn negatives into positives. Using the fate back collect it'll and how to figure out your audience is big picture problem so you can focus all your energy on it by creating your own care factor scale. How you'll be supported through this class. In addition to the video tutorials, downloadable templates and transcript, I'll be inviting you to a closed Facebook group. We can ask me questions and for personal feedback specific to any of the adaptation projects. Talk it subjects as well as discuss and share your progress with like minded students. There's nothing like getting encouragement and ideas from others who are in the same bite as you or have already been through what you're going through 2. Why should you care about what your customers want?: Why should you care about what your customers want? Whatever your product or service is, you have customers who are buying it right now. But it might surprise you to hear that some of those customers are buying from you because they haven't found a better who Jennet e. Of you're not solving their problem entirely, but they either can't be bothered looking elsewhere, or they don't even realize they're missing out on a better alternative until that alternative inevitably comes their way. This isn't something we liked would meet or even pay attention to. It's much easier to assume that everyone giving us money is loving what they're getting in return. But unfortunately, that's generally not the way it goes. I've chosen to tackle the question what your customers want first in the strategy talk. It's not because I hear it a lot, but because I actually never hear it, and that bothers me. All too often, we become fixated without product or service, our brand, whatever we're doing on a day to day basis, and we forget that they're real people out there who were interacting with us and having good, bad or even just mediocre experiences that are going to influence whether they end up actually buying from us or come back to us or bother talking to their friends about us for the right or wrong raisins instead of asking, What do my customers want from May, which too busy thinking, How do I get another customer or I haven't heard any complaints, so we must be doing good enough. It costs much more to find new customers than it does to Kate. The ones you have. How do you make sure you're giving them what they actually want? So you can keep them where the first step is to listen to them to understand what they want , or at least what their problem is, so that you can give them the best solution in this toolkit. We have a few simple actions you can start taking today that will help you get more in sync with your current customers to keep them coming back and raving about you for all the right reasons. Say who, my anyway, you know, there's a lot of people out there giving marketing advice, So why should you listen to May and why should you pay for my advice? So I've been a marketer for over 15 years, creating marketing plans, leading product launches, running $1,000,000 campaigns for businesses big and small for products and services in many different industries in the UK, Europe and Australia. I've worked with marketing assistance, marketing managers, product managers, growth hackers. Brown manages heads of marketing at country, continent and global levels on I've seen a lot of different approaches to marketing a lot of people acting like the market is but doing the hard sell rather than building long term relationships with their customers. I don't saw a lot of brilliant marketers who've told me a lot. I've also seen many businesses operating without a plan and the results that come with a staff time and if it's wasted on conflicting activities and confuse customers who put out with the status quo or simply leave having worked in house and now agency side, I've developed a strategy canvas that simplifies the marketing planning process and delivers a single vision for any team to implement with confidence. I've always been a hands on marketer, understanding the process from the very beginning to the finish research and product development to launch customer experience and maturity. And through that process, I know how important it is to get the foundation to your marketing strategy right, which seems to be the bit many try to skip now with the immediacy and urgency off digital marketing. Part of the reason less started creating these talk it's is that I am an avid loner myself , constantly educating myself about the evolution of marketing. And I'm really tired of going to conferences and watching Webinars that tell me what I should be doing in theory, but don't actually tell me how to get stuff done. There is so much content out there about marketing, but I would say the majority of it is just a rehash of everything that's been said before. It's boring. It can be repetitive. It lacks creativity and doesn't get you moving forward. It doesn't develop here in a practical way. So my aim is to share super practical, useful and simple tools with you to help you do more strategic marketing 3. The benefits of listening to your current customers: so one of the benefits of listening to your current customers to make strategic decisions, we need to first understand the current state of play. What are our current strength, strengths and weaknesses in the eyes of the people who are paying us money for a product or service at adaptation projects? The process of building a strategy happens in three loose phases. 1st 1 is exploration, which is researching, listening and understanding. The second phase is to create a foundation on which to build a struggle brand. And the third phase is future proofing for profitable long term success. And so when we think about the question, what do my customers want for May, the best place to start has to bay with a little exploring. Exploration is about understanding the people who can influence, make or even break your business. The success of your business comes down solely to the decisions and actions of humans, so that's why it's essential to make PayPal the center of your strategy. It's not about being an expert in everything about everyone. It's about being informed about just one thing. What's pissing off the people you care about? Because with that simple bit of knowledge you can fake is everything you do on addressing that problem and inspiring those people to engage with you and take action. In this case, the people you care about is anyone who comes between you and your product. They use your product, the customers that should be using your product, the prospects. They design it, your staff. They make it your supplies of manufacturers. They sell it your distributors, and they're talking to the same customers and prospects that you are, which a complementary partners or could be complementary in this toolkit way, concentrating solely on customers. The best thing about finding out what your customers really think is that then you can do something about it, which will make you awoke much more meaningful and give it purpose. You can take real life problems and turn them into positives for your customers and for your business. The most obvious way to do that is to directly solve those problems. By solving real problems for existing customers, you'll learn how to speak more directly with prospects, engaging the merely in their hunt for insulation. You'll be able to find the right words, the right tone and the right channels to reach them. What's more, all that fade back you're getting from current customers will give you a never ending supply of topics to create content for your social media website Blawg. Michael Sheridan is a fantastic example of turning customer negatives into positives. His business, river poles and spires was bad Garda business when he turned to the idea of creating content on his website to try to engage with new prospective customers. His solution was simple tech native, every single problem and question he was hearing from his current customers and provide reliable research in unbiased answers and advice through blogged articles. This step completely turned his business around into a $1,000,000 pool company. Now you can do that with a pool company. You can do that with any type of business. 4. The one thing you should know about your customers: What is the one thing you should know about your customers? Well, find out what's really piecing them off. What is the one real problem they haven't found desolation to yet? What does a really problem look like? There are two ways we're going to look at problems in this toolkit. Big picture problems. The overall problem your company is working to solve and everyday problems related to your customers. Use of your product with service or a competitors product or service. So let's start with big picture problems. Take a look at who gives the craps, bamboo toilet paper and thank you's sustainably sourced nappies. These air to Brown's who act on a common problem to do with poo. Hey, the questions are Why do I have to flush perfectly good trays down the toilet? Why are babies nappies so bold? Him wasteful? And why does my money end up in the pockets of big, selfish corporate? There must be a better way. Having understood these problems, who gives a crap and thank you? Both focus intently on a couple of core areas that produce high quality products. They're made from sustainably sourced materials, and they give back a percentage of profits 50% of 100% respectively, to pay foreign aid. Brilliant thing about the problem is that it's an emotional one, and it aggravates people to varying degrees. It's a big picture problem. Every individual perceives their personal impact on the world, both environmentally and socially to varying too great. So one end of the scale you're going to get some super pierced people who really care passionately about this state of the world and actively adjust their life style to make a difference. They're the ones who do marathons to raise money for the cause on only eight or getting. Then there's an empathic person like May in this case who is concerned about global issues . But they don't keep me up at night. I get a warm and fuzzy feeling to be able to contribute without sacrificing product quality . And then at the other end of the scale, there's the detached person who likes the idea of social enterprise and will buy when the product is in front of thumb and preferably on sale, but won't go out of their way to seek those brands out. Noticed that everyone on the scout has some level of interest in the poo problem. And this is the spectrum of customers and prospective customers that those two brands concentrate on. Anyone outside of that scale doesn't get a looking. 5. Part 1: How to create your Care Factor Scale: So how to create your own care factor? Scout to significantly improve your focus. If you find that you're constantly second guessing yourself, changing your mind about who your customers are and how to talk to them, then listen up. Now, when you're figuring out who your range of customers are and how they feet on your own care factor scalp, you need to question everything when it comes to defining your own care factor scale. You're looking for riel problems, so not the problems that you can coincidentally fix. Or the problem that only your best mate seems tohave but a problem that is fairly common yet unsolved, at least sufficiently, and that you can prove exist with real people that you don't know once you've identified the problem so that you have absolute clarity on when you need to focus your attention, you can start to go down the rabbit hole, understand the motivation for into individual beliefs on valleys, so I own and run an Airbnb apartment. And it's important to me to supply my guests with personal care products that minimize waste, Which is why I added, who gives a crap from a shopping list? My motivation Well, as well as feeling better about my environmental footprint. I also believe that this extra effort will be viewed positively by my guests having some influence over their reviews. Now that's the kind of insight that any marketers should be eager together hands on, because suddenly you understand how to capture the attention off people like May. And here's where perhaps the most important part comes in you discover the rial problems. When you look at everything with an unbiased I'm, which is easier than it sounds, it means you need to put your own opinions, perspectives and assumptions aside and just listen. So the best way to be unbiased told people you don't already know. Expand your circle of reference. Question everything. Don't just accept opinions and statements. Question Feather until you understand the reasons and motivations behind certain beliefs and values. 6. Part 2: How to create your own Care Factor Scale: So now let's create your care factor Skull. First, we're going to start brainstorming the big picture problem. He's a really quick exercise. You can do this wake, which will give you a bunch of clarity and help you focus your efforts and brain energy because you really have enough other stuff going on right now. I know this is where your educated guess is going to kick in from your knowledge and experience. Today, I want you to take a stab at your big picture problem. That's right. I want you to guess your intuition and gut feel is the most important thing you can rely on right now. And once you've defined it, you'll spend the rest of your time proving or disproving it with the hard, cold facts. Okay, so take a sheet of paper and divided into three columns. If you prefer something a little more formally, can download age a ready made template from the website. Set the timer on your phone for 50 minutes without distraction from humans, animals or the Internet and fill it out right. Each of the four questions in column one than alongside H of those right, everything that down that you can think off from two perspectives. What do you already know? Or a Shamy night? And what do you wish you need? It's essential that you only take 15 minutes, please, any longer in the temptation toe. Overthink perfect investigative research will be far too great, and you'll end up never complaining. This task translate what comes to your mind straight away is what's most important right now. Say the questions that we want. Teoh answer. What kind of problems to customers run into that leads them to want your product, for example, Not enough time. Not enough information. Physical pain, stress cravings. Secondly, why is this a problem for them, for example, doesn't waste their time to the impact them not being I wish to other things. Does it make them feel sad? Three. In an ideal world, what would they love to happen when they interact with your business? They get answers they've been searching for. They save time that they can spend with their family. They don't have to waste time searching the Internet. So here's some tips to get the most out of this exercise be as specific as possible, and this is a brain dump. Put down everything in anything you can think off. There is no wrong answer. Do not write down what you wish. The answer. Waas right down the pimply, nasty truth in all its glory. If you think of more stuff later, they can always add to it. If you don't know the answer, that's what column three is full se. If you want to get a double whammy, Aditi's get a colleague to do the exercise at the same time, but in a separate room. Then combine your nights afterwards to get even more from the task. So after you have completed the question it, the next step is to define the one problem that matters from the answers to your questions . What is the big picture problem here for it to be pig? Big picture it could relate to any of the following could be an important relationship. Family friendship, work related personal health, career, the environment, lifestyle, infrastructure, finances, all community. Step five, then, is to create your care factor Skull create a scale of 12 and three using the layout that we've shown you here describe the attitudes and actions for the three levels of caring, one detached to empathic and three passionate. You can then put your scow into action straight away by focusing on finding people who really care about your product, probably focusing on empathic compassionate. At this point, with all of your marketing activity, the best place to start is to create content, blood, post social content that acknowledges and addresses those customers. Customer problems head on like we talked earlier about Marcus Sheridan. Make sure to share the scale with your team so that everyone knows they should be looking out for this type of customer and share your scale and get more feedback. If you're feeling particularly Woolsey, and you should be right now, share it with your customers by your social media channels or your email list. Ask them what they think. If you've got it completely wrong, your followers are going to respect you more for you. Asking and your marketing will be all the better for having clarified with them. And don't forget to share your final version with them. Once you've learned more from their faith back 7. Know when to stop asking and start doing: so know when to stop asking and start doing why Educated guesses are your secret weapon. It's my experience that there is a limit to how much you can ask before fade back really becomes a liability. You can get too much conflicting fade back. You can get biased, uninformed views from upper management who just want to have their say and weighed in on the fun, creative stuff of marketing. It can lead to water down, creative, inoffensive and on effective copy. That just tells the status quo because you're too afraid. She turned any particular personal off to get the most out of exploring. You really can't go past having real life conversations that is 1 to 1 discussions, asking a lot of questions and listening a lot. So let's talk about the drawer bags off, getting too much feedback or the wrong types of feedback cells. Data and statistics can be super useful, but they don't give you the reason behind the number. Focus groups tend to channel the opinion off. Only the loudest person in the room surveys have their place. But let's face it, we've all bent the truth outright lied, given what we thought was the right answer or not, put much thought into her response just to get the to the end of that survey on internal opinion. Part of your job as marketer is to take your tame colleagues and management on the journey with you so that they support you in the execution. This can seriously backfire if you ask her, allow for too much feedback and start listening to internal opinion instead of the audience you're actually trying to relate to. They're two completely different base, Believe me, conversations take more time than more effort, and they laid to riel insights into riel problems. Once you have that deeper understanding of your customers problems, you can start to make more confident decisions or educated guesses around how to address those problems with the knowledge we have. You can assume, for example, that the people at the top of your scale are going to want to get involved with a referral program that rewards them for telling their friends about your new product. You can start to get creative and have some fun with your nation because you're confident you know the people you're trying to engage. I'll show you how have a worthwhile conversation and how to dig deeper for motivations later in another cause. But for now, let's just get started. 8. Start validating your assumptions with the Feedback Collector: So let's start validating your assumptions with the feedback collector. The first thing to do is identify your everyday problems. So download the ready made fate back collector template from the website and save this document in a central location. Google Drive is excellent for this so that everyone on your team can add to it every time they have an interaction with a customer online in person. By fine, however, you talk to your customers after awake fortnight, maybe a month, depending on how many questions you're collecting. Review the list and start categorizing what you have, What broad topics to the questions full under what feedback and suggestions have been given . What are the quick winds that can be easily fixed and would make a positive difference to the products or service? You're providing way up these broad topics against your care factor? Scown. Is there an obvious connection between your big problem on the every day problems you're collecting? Do that everyday problems. Validate the big picture problem if not, make changes to the care fight to scale when necessary. If, say awesome news, keep dying and concentrate entirely on the people who relevant to your care fact to scalp make a habit of regularly adding Teoh the feedback collector and reviewing as a tame so you can keep in touch with what your customers are saying and keep addressing the questions and fade back with content or improvements to your product and service. 9. What's next?: So what's next? Well, Cape collecting feedback Even if you're not quite sure what to do with all this feedback, start collecting it in one central place this very instant. Believe me, you'll thank me for it down the track. We'll be launching more talk. It's in future to help you work out exactly what to do with the fate back and turn both negatives and positives into really rich content. To attract more of your ideal audience. Don't feel you're getting enough fade back organically through your existing channels. Well, try adding one of these quick collection methods. You could add a survey linked to your email signature. We can show you how to do that. In Surveymonkey, you can start asking for Google Review so register for a Google my business listing so that customers can write you and give you public fade back. You can ask actively every customer you talked to you to get your get your staff to do the same. Well, you could run pose on your Facebook page. We show you a bit more about how to do these different techniques on the website, so good luck. Feel free to ask me any questions in the comments section. If yes, stuck on anything and once you've created your care factor Scout, I would love to see it. So please share it with me on the adaptation projects Facebook Page. My aim is to share super practical, useful and simple tools with you to help you do more strategic marketing. Let me know what you like and how we can improve either on our Facebook page or email me directly. Thanks for watching, and I'm looking forward to hearing how you go with a bye for now.