Unlock These Audience Insights to Make Buying a No-Brainer

You’ll make me all blush before I even start.
Okay, so unlock these audience insights and make buying a no brainer. So when we talk about buying here, it’s more really around converting. So I kind of want to stress that this is really relevant I think for everyone in the room having heard all of your introductions this morning. So when we think about conversion, it could be you as a service provider trying to convert a lead because you want to sell your service to that lead.
Or if you work in marketing, maybe you’re writing content for a client and so you’re trying to sell your clients products or services. So when we talk about making buying a no brainer, it’s for all of those scenarios, and this uncovering of audience insights is relevant across the board for all of those different things. So funny because I’ve put Charlotte in here, I was looking through this and reflecting back on that.
And actually it’s a bit of a, this is going to be a bit of a psychology assessment. I was umming and ahhing about whether to reveal this, but I’m going to reveal it. So I say Charlotte across my profiles, but when I talk to clients, I call myself Charlie. This is back from my agency days, and it was my little temperature check of whether I felt like I’d cracked the relationship with that client. When on emails and in conversations, they move from call me Charlotte to Charlie.
That’s when I knew I had them on board. So that’s my trick. That’s what I always did. And I still do that now. That’s also a little bit of insight into my background. I won’t spend a lot of time here because you didn’t come here to listen to my CV. There’s a lot of CV stuff going on for everybody already, by the sounds of it.
But my background is mostly agency side, paid social. I was heading up the paid social team in an agency here in the UK in the leadership team. So I was overseeing 30 clients, 22 million a year in spend, and 14 team members. And then we started doing creative strategy as well, which is where my passions kind of grew in terms of figuring out some of this stuff.
How do we connect with audiences? How do we make them buy? And I only say that really, so that, you know, that hopefully in the next few slides where I share some things and hopefully teach you some things, that it comes with a wealth of experience and you should give them a go. So why do most brands struggle to convert?
A lot of brands tell potential customers what they want them to know, and usually that looks like focusing on features instead of understanding the relevance of the people who are in the market to buy from them. And the brands don’t tend to stop to ask, why is my prospective audience in the market to buy right now? So what this looks like really, is brands can focus really heavily on what they think is important.
So the features, zero grams of sugar, 2.5% hyaluronic acid, and within the brand itself, of course, that stuff is really, really important. It’s the bread and butter of their business. It’s the bread and butter of their product or their service. And so that’s what they want to tell customers about. But people don’t go buying products for the 2.5% hyaluronic acid.
They buy it because they want plumper skin or radiant skin, or they want to have reduced their fine lines and wrinkles, those types of things. And what happens when brands don’t take this into account is they end up really just talking at their customers, rather than connecting with their customers about the things that their customers are actually trying to find in terms of outcomes or solutions.
So how do we change that? We need to think about getting relevance and understanding how we can connect with our customers through that relevance. So people don’t convert, as we just said, based on those functional features. People convert when they feel seen, heard and understood. So if we can get really, really relevant with our customers, we get that point of connection.
If we in our messaging have our end customer thinking, wow, they really understand me, or wow, this is exactly what I’ve been experiencing. That’s when they’ll start to believe that you are the person to solve that problem, or get them to the other side to the solution that they’re looking for. And that’s really important, because that’s when we can get that conversion without having to try really, really hard.
We don’t need to write some kind of next level, you know, copy. We don’t need to find the way to make our features sound ten times better than the competitors. We need to understand how we connect with the audience, and we can do that really, really easily through relevance. One of the things we throw around a lot in the marketing community and space, you might have heard this before, is people tend to buy based on emotion and they justify with logic.
And that’s what we want to do here is get that emotional connection with them, and then the functional features can come a bit later for them to understand. Yes, this was a good decision. Yes, I did buy for the right reasons.
So how do we do that? How do we get the relevance? Another phrase we throw around in marketing a lot is don’t talk about features, talk about the benefits. And so what that might look like here is the feature is the what. So what is the spec? What are the ingredients? What is it in your service that you are delivering to your customer?
Examples of that could be zero grams of sugar. Or if you’re a service provider, weekly blogs written for you. We can take that one step further by translating that feature into a benefit. And this is more of the why. Why should the customer care, what’s in it for them? So instead of saying zero grams of sugar, we could say guilt free treat.
Instead of saying weekly blogs written for you, we can say, saves you time and keeps your content consistent. But we can take that one step further. And this is where the magic really happens. So we can think about the situations and the real life impact of what happens when that customer buys from us. So instead of saying zero grams of sugar, level up might be guilt free treat.
Top tier might be no more 3 p.m. crash when you’ve got to go and pick the kids up from school and make small talk at the gates. Or no more scrambling on a Sunday night to write that blog post. So it’s that level of really, really understanding why does your customer want zero grams of sugar? Why do they want a guilt free treat?
What does that actually look like in their real life? And what’s the impact of that if they do buy from you? So all of that is well and good, but how do we start to understand these things about our potential customers? How do we understand what is important to them and the real life situations? This really comes down to audience insights and really understanding our customers on a deeper level.
I’m throwing around all the marketing cliches today, but quite often, a lot of the brands that I work with, they’ll figure out their demographics, and they might even go as far as to have personas decided. And it might be that the persona is, I don’t know, Tracy, who is a 50 year old woman who drives a Mercedes A-Class, and her first son’s just gone off to uni, and that’s all well and good, but how can we use that information to get Tracy to convert to our product?
We can’t say, hey Mercedes A-Class driver, come and buy this skin solution. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t actually help us with our marketing. But when we start to understand, like what’s keeping Tracy awake at night, what are the things that are really bothering her in her life? That’s more around psychographics, and that’s what we can really tap into with our marketing.
So where do we find them? Testimonials and reviews are absolute emotional goldmines. This is where I start with every single client that I work with, so we can stop guessing about what our prospective cares about, and instead really kind of tap into those emotional cues straight from the words of our audiences themselves. If you shop on Amazon, which I would imagine quite a lot of us do, for me I scroll right down to the reviews before I make a purchase.
And on Amazon you tend to see, well lots of their review services, it kind of gives you that graph of how many people have left five star reviews, how many people have left one star, two star, three star, and what you tend to see is that bar is the biggest for the five star reviews and the one star reviews.
The two star, three star, four star reviews, not many people actually go to the time and effort to put those in, and that’s because they’ve probably had a quite underwhelming experience. People tend to leave reviews, whether they’ve had a really overwhelmingly positive experience or an overwhelmingly negative experience. But either way, they’re in some kind of heightened state, and that’s only when they feel inspired enough or want to go to the effort of actually leaving some feedback.
So if we can start to tap into those five star reviews for our brands or for our customers, that’s where the gold is. When we’ve had such an impact on the customer’s life that they go to the effort of leaving us a review, that’s where we can really start to understand how did we change things for them? What happened?
If you are a brand or a service provider that doesn’t have many testimonials, then tap into testimonials of your nearest competitors and the brands that I work with really hate it when I say that, but the reason why it’s important is because it’s not about what you as the brand are selling, it’s about what your prospective customer is in the market to buy.
So if you are a skincare brand and you say, well, our hyaluronic acid is 2.5%, so we’re better than our competitor whose hyaluronic acid is only 2%. Great. I understand as a brand it’s super important to you, but your customer isn’t looking at the hyaluronic acid percentage. They’re buying something with hyaluronic acid. Maybe because again, they want to reduce the fine lines and wrinkles or reduce the pore size or whatever it may be.
So that’s why tapping into competitor testimonials isn’t as bad or as scary as most brands think. And it’s exactly the same as if you’re a service provider. Don’t please look at any of my marketing assets because I do a terrible job of this. But we should obviously all be asking for testimonials from our customers. If you’re not, make sure you set up a system to do it, collect it, because that’s going to really, really help you to understand the impact that you’re having on them and how you can then frame conversations with future potential customers.
Your emails, your websites, landing pages, comms, everything.
What do we look for when we get to the testimonials? So we really want to look for patterns and not one off phrases. So if you start to see the same problem or the same desired outcome coming up time and time again, that’s where you need to focus. That’s going to be the needle mover in terms of your marketing, but getting super specific,
there are two main things that I look for, when I’m doing my testimonial analysis. The first thing is, what do people want to escape? So what is the pain point? What is the thing that they’re struggling with? What is the issue that they’ve got that your product or service can help them get out of? And this is really important because actually a lot of research suggests that if we focus on relief out of a painful situation, that’s more powerful than promising results on the other side.
So if the product or service that you are delivering is really, really, really solving a painful problem, this is where I would start with your marketing, it’s kind of zoning into that, understanding the situation and the real-life impact that that has on your potential customers. We’re looking to uncover what is painful in their current experience. When you identify that tension, that’s that moment of achieving the relevance, getting the connection and getting your conversion.
The second thing that I look for is what do they want to become? What’s the desired outcome? What’s the aspiration? What’s the transformation you can deliver to them? What we’re looking to uncover here is where do they really want to be? What we want to do with our marketing is make that feel real, make that feel achievable, and show that you are the solution that is going to take them there.
So I’ve got a couple of examples of these in action. These are specifically page social ads that I’ve done for a client because that’s just my niche. But again, can work across anything. So relief here, what we’re trying to do is clearly reflect the current struggle, because people buy what they recognise, as we’ve said, we want the audience to look at this and think, yes, that’s me.
So this is a brand that sells a cleaning product. The cleaning product is an enzyme based cleaner, so it has enzymes in it that will eat anything carbon based. So if there were any stains or odors that are stubborn because of carbon matter, the enzyme eats it and removes the problem at source. So it’s not just, you know, a fragrance that masks the smell.
And it’s not a really kind of chemical bleach product that’s going to kind of burn everything, including the fibers of the carpet that you’re trying to clean. It’s that actually kind of removes the problem at source. When I did the testimonial analysis for this brand, what I found over and over again, in fact in 35% of the reviews was that 35% of the people that left a review said something along the lines of, I’ve tried every cleaning product out there, this is the only one that worked.
And so we tapped into that in the messaging. ‘Pet wee smells that won’t budge? Not anymore.’ Leaning into testimonials, really powerful for paid social, ‘Tried everything. Vinegar, bicarb other sprays. This is the only thing that worked.’ So this is going to resonate. We know this is going to resonate. 35% of people that left a review for us said something along these lines, said that they tried everything, they’re really frustrated with this odor or this smell that they can’t get rid of.
And so we tapped into that, into our messaging here, ‘The last odor remover you’ll ever buy.’ And yeah, just showing the relief, tapping into the pain point, and saying we can be the solution for that. Conversely, on the flip side, same problem. Still got something that won’t budge. I think both were pet pee smells.
Yeah. So still got a smell of urine from your pet that won’t budge. This one is more about wee smells that won’t budge. This one is then on the other side of that, defeat pet, no defeat pee smells. So it’s kind of subtle, there’s a slight change in the language there, but everything, every word here is super intentional, ‘defeat’,
you know, if you finally achieve defeat, it’s a battle that you’ve been fighting for a really long time. And so, you know, we’re using really emotive language, and the language of our customers to pull all of that together into something that we hope is super powerful. And these are the two top performing ads. So it definitely worked.
So in summary, stop creating and start listening. Obviously, as brands and as service providers ourselves, we do think it’s really important what it is that we provide. We’re going to get really caught up in the way that we deliver something, because that’s what we think is important. But that is not what our customers are always in the market to buy.
Relevant starts with what they’re looking for, not with what you’re selling. And I just thought I’d include a little meme here. This might come as a big surprise to you, but it’s not all about you.
And final takeaways for you. So customer empathy and action is how we get that conversion. When we put ourselves in the eyes of the customer and really, really understand what their experiences are, what it is they want to achieve. That’s how we unlock the conversion. Also tapping into their words and not our own. Again, don’t recreate the wheel you don’t need to be an expert copywriter.
There’s tons of language out there from your customers that are literally saying, you’re marketing for you. You just have to take it out there and put it into your own ecosystem and start insight mining today. I would love it if you would go and have a look at some testimonials, either if you’ve got some of your own or from a competitor, there’s always another agency or another consultant that you can kind of go and spy on them and see what their customer said about working with them, and see if you can identify two problems and two desired outcomes, and you’ll be surprised what you find.
And if you do, please share them with me, because I would love to see what you come up with. Does anybody have any questions?