|
Connie Chesner, our Director of Discovery, authored the following article for Loyalty Management Magazine, Vol 1, No 1, January 2009 Dialing in on relevance.Think like your audience. Talk like your audience.As customers we all have been on the receiving end of some really bad marketing. We've seen marketing communication that clearly misses the mark. Whether it is the direct mail package from your existing credit card company treating you like a brand new prospect, or the poorly timed "would you like an apple pie with that?" you hear just after ordering a salad - we know what an irrelevant message is and what it does to your perception of a brand. To hit the mark, a message must be relevant to consumers. But what are the hallmarks of relevancy? How can we be sure that our communication is on target? And what are the associated benefits for your product, service or brand? When a message truly connects with its intended audience there are two principles at work. Relevancy is achieved when:
How to get started: think and understand.Learning how to think and talk like our audience begins when you engage consumers in strategic conversations with two overarching strategies. First, determine who to talk to. You need a diverse group of customers to ensure that the insights gleaned from your conversations are applicable across your markets. Next use trained researchers to ask pointed questions and probe for information in areas of additional insight. Leave bias out of the conversation by engaging outside resources not entrenched on a day-to-day basis with your industry. During analysis, look for commonalities in thoughts and language across customer segments. In structuring your conversations you may end up asking questions similar to those that led to the development of your products and services. In addition, you’ll delve into customer psychology getting to the core of what really makes them tick, even in areas of their lives which may seem only tangentially related to your products or services. These areas often prove to be the most valuable in effective communication. Understand how customers think about your category and then your product, service or brand. How do they make decisions specific to your category? For instance, someone who values independence is driven by different motivations in making financial decisions than someone who places a greater value on family security and work ethic. When underlying motivations for the same action are different, uniform messaging will not be very effective. By taking the time to truly understand your customer's motivational drivers via these conversations, your efforts will be appreciated and rewarded. Engaging customers in a meaningful dialogue and then messaging back to them in terms they are familiar with, creates a sustainable point of differentiation. When customers know they have been heard, they will flock to your brand. The idea is to know what to ask, how to ask it, and then develop your marketing communications accordingly. Then talk in a familiar voice.Your customers likely do not think about your products, service or category in the same way that you do. The words and phrases they use will vary, sometimes dramatically, from yours. For instance, most customers do not use phrases like "financial instrument", "service area" or "share of requirement". Relevance comes when we actively seek to understand the customer's language and adopt it in our communication. It is about moving from corporate-speak to a tone and voice that customers can respect and relate to. In order to do this effectively, you must carefully listen to how your customers are phrasing their talk around your category, products, and services. Don’t judge their choices, embrace them. After all, your goal is to learn about the world from THEIR perspective and to then mirror that back to them through your communication choices. Because this can be difficult to do, trained researchers are often brought in for their active listening and interpretation skills which reveal language choices and patterns of the audience which can later be engaged during message design. Caution: Know your own voice.Does this mean you should inject "dude" into every communication? Should you defer to using slang or even crass language because of common usage among your target audience? Of course not. The important thing to remember is that relevance is about context- how your target audience thinks, talks and makes decisions and how this impacts their perceptions of your brand and how your brand is expressed via different communication channels. Thinking like your customers and picking up on language cues can help you understand how to make a compelling connection between your brand and your audience. However, what you say and how you say it must also be brand appropriate. Otherwise, you end up with a transparent attempt that panders to your audience- a mistake that most audience segments will recognize and reject. Take the process further.Now that you are thinking and talking like your audience, what can you do to move these ideas into actionable strategies that can improve your business? Consider these two general approaches. 1. You now understand that your customers do not think and talk about your products, services or category the same way you do. Also, your customers probably differ from one another in terms of how they talk and think about your products, services, or category. Often you can segment customers based on motivational drivers and the language they prefer. For example, not all customers within the same financial institution are enticed by the idea of consulting with an investment group. Some customers view the term “investment” as riddled with risk. Therefore, any mention of “investment” in messaging will turn them off right away. To keep customers engaged, the message must be relevant and individually tailored. Knowing how best to segment and customize communication to an audience based on motivational triggers can be a challenging task. Identifying existing customer segments through conversation is the first step—an actionable step toward making your messaging most effective. Then develop a strategy to get the right messages to the right customers. Your strategy will vary based on the specifics of your project and objectives, but will get your brand noticed and promote loyalty among your customers. 2. Use customer conversations to help you assess their desires, then improve your current offerings to better align with your target audience. For example, in a healthcare setting, it was found that minor changes could be implemented in routine patient-staff interactions to greatly improve the patient experience, thereby increasing satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. A sports nutrition distributor learned that retail customers desired to have persons educated on product offerings to make deliveries to their locations. By making a small change in operations, great gains in customer satisfaction and loyalty were made. Once changes have been made to align with customer desires, communications to existing customers and prospects alike can inform them of the availability of desired products and services in language they understand. With little effort, your product or service now aligns with customer desires making your offering closer to customers’ ideal image than the offerings of your competitors. In the end, the goal is to make consumer messages highly relevant. When marketing messages are highly relevant and brand appropriate, the connection is made with your brand and the relationship begins. By continuing to use highly relevant messaging over time, the relationship will evolve and customer loyalty will emerge. But it all starts with a conversation and careful listening which focuses on your customers and what it’s like to live in their worlds.
|
|
© Copyright brandMIND Group 2009 |
|
