TL;42*
Things change all the time. The fact that the best way to understand and motivate customers is to focus on reality does not. This week’s issue includes common marketing fantasies, an outline to map campaigns (and customers,) and stories about Roman emperors.
Understanding your customer’s motivations is the greatest superpower in marketing. It allows you to connect in a way that makes them click, ideally not to manipulate them, but to honestly satisfy their needs and wants.
But it’s not easy. Most of the time, we’re not even aware of our own motivations. Let alone those of anonymous visitors to a digital, intangible website.
When in Rome
There’s a common trope we’ve all seen in TV, movies and stories from “Superman” to “Boss Undercover“: Someone rich, famous, powerful, or a combination of all three, hides in plain sight with a half-baked disguise of some kind as she walks among the regular people. It’s known as the “King Incognito” plot.
My favorite version tells the story of Caesar Augustus, heir to Julius Caesar and first Roman Emperor. This guy was so big he named a month after himself. Once a year, the mighty emperor used to disguise himself as a beggar to walk the city streets and mingle with the common folk. Not a bad way to stay grounded for the biggest ruler of the known world. He experienced first-hand what worked or not. The pace of the streets, their food, smells, joys, frustrations, complaints, chaos, obedience, life and death.
The Romans were his customers. And he listened carefully. Asked the right questions. Looked for the hidden motivations. Found the patterns. It was pure, old school research.
And with it, he made informed decisions that raised an empire.
Who's our customer?
Fast-forward two thousand years. We have more tools than ever to understand the people we need to persuade and enchant. Some of these are amazing. Others, very popular ones, don’t make sense anymore.
Buyer personas are useless. They’re fun exercises for marketers with a taste for world-building. And good for agencies that want to grow the retainer with vague services.
Laura, 42 years old, mother of three, likes spontaneous trips and knows krav maga. She’s quirky but professional and doesn’t consider herself a tech person, though she’s tech savvy.
How on earth is this useful? I analyzed dozens of leading marketing and UX research websites for this article. There are a handful of arguments in favor of buyer personas that are persistent on every one. Examples include:
Knowing who visits your website allows you to create personalized experiences
Unconvincing.
Personalization is programmatic. Group-based, not person-based. Having a welcome text saying “Hey, *|FNAME|*” on your favorite marketing platform is no longer impressive. More advanced personalization through tools like Bloomreach, AdvancedCommerce and the like is based on your specific shopping activity and predictive, self-correcting algorithms. It allows you to use real-world merchandising techniques on a website, altering item or category positioning for easier access and conversion. In a nutshell, what you want to see automagically appears first.
When it comes to personalization, demographics, religious ideas or cooking tastes are totally irrelevant because we have stronger tech to figure it out for ourselves and for every single user.
Having a customer story helps you empathize
Bullshit.
Let’s consider our work. Marketing is about three simple things: Having an accurate diagnosis, developing a clear strategy around it, and executing it using the best possible tactics.
Advertising is about telling stories that create empathy.
Design is solving problems in a way that’s beautiful and, hopefully, memorable. Tech is nothing more than another design tool.
Sales is the discrete art of seeding a need of consumption on someone, and then creating the environment to satiate that need.
Anyone working on any of these areas is required to have a decent ability to empathize. If we need a collection of post-its and molds to be reminded that we’re talking to people, we are in worse trouble than we think.
Buyer personas help you make design decisions
Nonsense.
Design is guided by a mix of trends, personal preferences and -unless you’re dealing with a truly exceptional designer - the boundaries of our own tech skills and creativity. User stories (the list of what a certain user type might want to do on an app or website) guide design decisions. User personas, whether entirely fabricated or inspired by real life, do not.
Fostering collaboration: User personas unify teams under a shared understanding of who they're designing for, breaking down silos and aligning goals.
Verbatim.
I don’t even know where to begin with this one.
Let’s move on.
Barney comes to play with us
Whenever we may need him
Barney can be your friend too
If you just make-believe him!
Funnels and fictional characters
Aside from the fact that Bofu, Tofu or Mofu could make amazing cartoon character names?
We’ve been up to our eyeballs in Omni-everything for five years. Your company no longer sells in one place. Touchpoints are everywhere. Brick and mortar, website, marketplaces, social, ads, apps, resellers: Everything is a shopping cart.
Your customer is no longer a predictable demographic. Generations don’t matter anymore (did they ever?). And their journey from awareness to purchase is everything but lineal.
This is even more categorically true in B2B. We know for a fact that, on average, barely 5% of your potential customers are in the market for a solution. We can’t shove them down a funnel, because there is no funnel, and if there was one, they’re not in it.
You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.
There is a spoon
There’s a 99.9% chance that you want to sell more. Some people are great at selling mirages. Fata Morgana. Most of us do better when we can sell a good product, from a smart brand, acting purposefully, for a customer that needs it.
We’re big fans of the real. Actual businesses doing quiet, simple, good work.
You have campaigns. You have data. Those are very real too. One is subjective, artful, persistent, and requires a marketing strategy that believes in itself. The other is objective, actionable, measurable. We can understand the fluctuations if we analyze causes and effects.
A map for your campaigns
I often see a distinctive pattern in clients’ strategies: A disconnection between old fashion media (TV, radio, print, ads), digital ads (from Google to TikTok and from PPC to programmatic) and digital marketing (email, social media, SEO, inbound marketing).
Traditional marketing is the long-term game. Ads are tools for short-term activation and sales spikes. And everything else is kind of branding-in-between filled with “what needs to be done”.
Companies struggle to make long term plans and fail to stick to them. Particularly when results are not what we envisioned, usually too small or too slow. We need a goal, a compass and a map. A great place to start is Gini Dietrich’s PESO Model. Essentially the model maps out every media channel available into four categories: Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned. And it gives you a better understanding of how to distribute the efforts (time, budget, creativity) into these channels and categories.
We apply it to our own strategies. Key results:
- We needed a framework that could be flexible and adapt to changing priorities. Now it’s easier for us to know which channels we’ll explore next. What to chase, who to meet or shake hands with, where to invest our effort and resources.
- Our content is more streamlined and we can re-utilize a lot of our IP for different purposes, media and audiences.
- We can push marketing tactics for long and short term strategies simultaneously in multiple channels. The disconnection is gone.
It also allows us to plan small campaign sprints and measure results. A popular post feels good but will hardly make an impact. It’s more vanity than branding. Results come when you achieve a long-term streak of “good enough” actions that feel ubiquitous and are planned, purposeful, tailored, broad yet specific, and share a common plan.
And a map for your customers
There’s a way to group customers and it’s much better than personas.
It’s called RFM analysis and it’s been around for a few decades, since its adoption by direct email marketers.
RFM is key to group customers based on more than hunches. It stands for Recency-Frequency-Monetary. How recently, how often, how much.
This client scoring model helps us predict with reasonable accuracy when a customer will make a purchase and how connected to our brand they might be, and do something specific about it.
The beauty of adaptable models
No two companies are the same. And every vertical comes with its own set of challenges, buyer cadence, recurring buying scenarios, variability or predictability, and so on. The good thing about RFM is that, once you understand the scoring model and find adequate software to qualify, you can tailor your groups in any way you want. This, in turn, allows you to create subsets of activation tactics that fit for each of these cycles.
You can even create categories based on songs by The Killers.
Like for instance:
- On top. Customers who bought recently, who do so frequently and generate more revenue. Strategies might include rewards or promoting user generated content.
- Read my mind. They spend a lot and buy frequently, but have not bought recently. You can nudge them with upsells, engage for reviews, and promote high-value, high-margin products.
- Enterlude. They spend just enough, but frequently, and we can tell their activity is reduced. Reactivate through limited-time exclusive offers.
- Change your mind. Big and frequent spenders no longer buying. We seriously want them back. Get them on a tailored nurturing campaign about new product lines. Remind them of your value promise. Throw a party.
- Losing touch. They haven’t purchased in a long time but they were never big spenders or very active. Send specific product-driven campaigns, special discounts, last item alerts, or run post-sale follow ups to identify future needs.
- Runaways. They have the lowest scores on all categories. Try an aggressive reactivation campaign and if it doesn’t work, forget about them.
You can do this until you’ve covered every group or range of low, mid and high rankings on recency, frequency, money. Specific, data based diagnosis and laser-focused tactics that are measurable.
See? It’s a killer framework. 😎
Our team can help you analyze and create the groups, set up the RFM framework and PESO model, integrate the proper software for analysis and tracking into your ecommerce tech stack, and train your team. Get in touch.
All roads lead to this
The fact that something is mainstream or widely accepted as a best practice doesn’t necessarily mean it works.
We never had more technology to service our ideas than now. And yet, it’s easy to get lost in endless choices, and even easier to fall into default, generic solutions.
But things have changed. You can’t shove money into any one channel and expect results.
It’s a game of being everywhere, doing everything, and everything right.
It takes courage, good partners, and a lot of persistence to implode the mirage. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Until next time.
Santiago.-
* We like our TL;DRs in 42 words.
