If you’ve ever sat through a marketing agency’s pitch or
seen an episode of Mad Men, you’d think that marketing is all about talking –
pushing out clever messages so that people will buy whatever it is that you’re
selling.
Not exactly.
You’re right that there’s plenty of delivering messages
through email, blog posts, paid adwords, Twitter, TV, radio, or print ads or
whatever media reaches the buyer.
But there’s more to it than catchy taglines, ads, or social
media campaigns.
For any of that talking to work, there needs to a lot of
listening, too.
What should you be
listening for?
When you’re marketing and selling, you’re obviously keenly
alert to a few magic phrases, along the lines of “Yes, I’ll buy it!”
But there are a few other things to listen for as well:
- What problem are they trying to solve?
- How painful is that problem?
- Why is their existing solution failing?
Asking these questions, you’ll hear a lot about who’s buying
and why.
But you can also listen for how they’re buying:
- Where are they looking for solutions?
- What are the selection criteria?
- What other solutions are they considering?
How should you be
listening?
There are plenty of ways to listen to prospects and
customers, from broad-based surveys to small, focus groups. Vendors selling software-as-a-service (SaaS)
solution have the particular advantage of gathering input from customers directly
within the product.
I’ve found that monthly, one-on-one interviews with several
new customers are one particularly effective way of listening. The evaluation process is still fresh in
their minds, and an open-ended conversation can reveal useful insights that
might not surface in a survey.
Companies can conduct these interviews themselves, though there
are certain advantages of having an outside party handle them. Customers don’t think you’re trying to sell
them anything, and they might be more candid about what they liked or didn’t
like when evaluating your solution. (I’d
be happy to talk with you more about my experience with these one-on-one
interviews.)
Listening isn’t a
one-and-done process
Don’t confine your listening to an annual event. Relying on a periodic snapshot or using a
single mechanism to learn what’s on the minds of prospects and customers means
you’ll probably miss a lot. Markets
change: different buyers emerge, new competitors come to market, evaluation
criteria change, and new channels to reach buyers become important.
Whatever techniques you use, you should always be
listening.
What do you do with
all this listening?
The insights you glean from this listening should factor into what you say and where you say it. It
should guide your messages and how you explain your value, and it should inform
what channels and media you use to get in front of buyers.
In fact, a marketing plan that isn’t built on this kind of
solid foundation – without a firm grasp on who’s buying, why, and how – is
likely to fail. Marketing without
listening is a big mistake.
