Rule #2: There Will Be A Target Market(s) Part II
I promised to give you the second installment of choosing a Target Market using Demographics, Geographics, and Psychographics. First, some definitions:
1) Demographics – these are objective, identifiable traits such as age, income, education level, family status, marriage status, etc.
2) Geographics – where they are located
3) Psychographics – this is a measure of attitudes, values, lifestyles, and opinions of your ideal customer segment.
Let’s go through them in order…
A straight definition of demographics goes something like this: the objective and identifiable characteristics of a population. Basically, these are the characteristics or traits that are shared in common by a specific group.
Here is a partial list of demographics for consumers…
- physical characteristics (e.g. people with prosthetic limbs, long hair, etc.)
- affiliations with groups, clubs, memberships, etc.
If you sell business-to-business the demographics may include things like…
- size of business (by revenue, # of employees, # of locations, etc.)
Like I said, these are just some of the more common demographic characteristics that you may identify as relevant. There are many others. For example, you may be targeting people that own pets or a certain type of car. You may be selling to a business that has purchased a specific type of machinery or that uses a particular credit card for purchasing. The idea is that you find common characteristics for the type of customers you would like to have.
To put it simply, this is where your potential customers are located. Geographics can be broken down into the following:
- Local: city, county, zip code, certain neighborhoods, etc. (you can even select a radius around these)
- State: can be grouped into counties, regions, etc.
- National: target the whole nation or segment it into states and/or regions
- Global: choose by countries or territories
- Web-based: your customers could be located anywhere but find you mainly through the internet
The third and final piece of the profile puzzle is what we call “pyschographics.” This is the study of “attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles” of a market segment. As you can imagine, getting your arms around the pyschographics of your target market is a difficult task. Difficult, but not impossible.
When uncovering the psychological reasons your potential customers would buy from you all you are really doing is answering a simple question:
Why should I buy from you?
The best way to do that is to tap into the very powerful concept that drives your customer’s buying behavior. And this is the concept of logic vs. emotion. Everything that you buy is bought to either avoid pain or obtain pleasure. No exceptions.
In reality, the only thing we are really trying to do when we are marketing our product or service is to help people see how they can avoid pain or obtain pleasure by using our product/service. If things ever seem to get overwhelming or overly complicated, take a step back and realign your focus on your true goal…helping people avoid pain or obtain pleasure.
Avoiding pain and obtaining pleasure are feelings or emotions so it stands to reason that purchase decisions are made on an emotional level. Again, whenever I make this connection some people recoil slightly at the thought. After all, we all would like to consider ourselves logical, rational beings that aren’t swayed by the vagaries of impulse or rashness.
But men don’t buy Lamborghinis based on logic. Or even shaving cream. And women certainly don’t buy shoes logically. I remember walking through the living room one time while my wife was watching an episode of Oprah. They were talking about shoes and Oprah said something like, “Yeah these shoes I’m wearing now I call my ‘sitting down shoes.’” They were so uncomfortable that she would only wear them when she was going to be sitting down…she didn’t even want to walk in them! That is far from logical. We buy because of what the advertising promises us we will feel.
But it is a monumental mistake to think that only emotion enters the buying equation. In fact, logic does play a part in our buying decisions. Where we buy based on emotion, we justify the purchase with logic. Therefore you must present not only the emotional reasons for making a purchase but also the logical ones as well.
In marketing parlance these reasons are usually referred to as features and benefits. Logic equals the features and benefits equal the emotions. Simply put, features are what a product or service has while benefits are what a product or service does.
The features of a car for example would be 1) anti-lock brakes, 2) a convertible top, or 3) a 300 horsepower engine. The corresponding benefits would be 1) to keep you and your family safe in rainy weather or on slick roads, 2) to feel the wind blow through your hair as you cruise through the summer night, or 3) to feel the exhilaration of accelerating through the deserted downtown streets on a Sunday afternoon.
Notice the differences in the exact same items when describing them as features and conversely, as benefits. The key to tapping your Prospect’s mind is through his feelings or emotions. One of the biggest mistakes that marketers make however, is assuming that they only need to sell the benefits of their products or services. As I have pointed out though, buyers need to justify their purchases with logic.
Imagine a husband coming home and telling his wife that he wanted to purchase that sports car because of the way he would feel cruising around with the top down. I seriously doubt any guy would ever admit such to his wife so he needs some things (read: logic) to fall back on. He might talk about the safety system or that the dealer is running a special price or the better gas mileage it gets over his pick up truck.
Astute readers will see that what the husband is really doing is justifying his purchase to himself logically, but with emotional reasons to his wife. I call this transference of benefits. And it goes to the heart of what I was saying earlier about segmenting your Ideal Customers into distinct groups because what may appeal to some, may not appeal to others.
Let’s go back to the car purchase example. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the husband is buying that car based on how it makes him feel. When justifying his purchase to his wife however, he is using logical reasons to do so. Or so he thinks. Let’s look at each one individually…
Safety system – he is really telling his wife that she doesn’t have to worry about him driving that car since it will keep him safe.
Special price – it isn’t going to put undue stress on their budget. They can afford it.
Better gas mileage – they are going to save money each month, allowing them to stretch their dollars farther.
See, what he is really doing here is taking the logical reasons (in his mind) and transferring the benefits of the purchase to those things that are important to his wife. Do you see how this ties into the idea of segmenting your customer lists? What may be important to some, isn’t as important to others and vice-versa.
Your job then, is to find out as much about your potential customers as you can through your demographic and geographic profiling so that you can start to pinpoint the emotions that might appeal to your Ideal Customer Segments.
Here’s an easy way to do this: take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. At the top of the left-hand column write “Features” and at the top of the right-hand column write “Benefits.” On the left, list every feature your product or service has that you can think of. Now on the right, translate those features into benefits. One way that I do this is by saying the feature and then saying “so that…” and adding whatever comes to mind.
For the car example you might say, “This car has anti-lock brakes so that it will keep you and your family safe in rainy weather or on slick roads.”
Try to link your benefits to as many emotions or feelings as you can. You may also try and create two or three benefits based on two or three different emotions. Here is a partial list of common emotions that you can draw from…
- insecurity - patriotism
- revenge - embarrassment
- loneliness - confidence
- exhaustion - appearing smart or savvy
Or you may choose from a list of reasons people might buy your product or service. In his book, “The Copywriter’s Handbook” author Bob Bly gives these reasons people might buy your product or service…
- to make a task or job easier
There’s some cross-over here but don’t let that bother you. Simply list a feature, pick a few emotions or reasons why people would buy your stuff from that list, and then try and come up with benefits that center around each emotion/reason that you have chosen. If you chose fear, ego, and appearing smart or savvy as your emotions then how do your product’s or service’s features translate into benefits that represent each emotion? Be creative and see what you come up with.
There are no “right” or “wrong” answers here. Remember, what may appeal to some, won’t appeal to others. But if you have done a good job in identifying what is important to your target market you have a much higher chance for success when crafting your marketing messages around these different emotions.
If you don’t take the time to go through this exercise then marketing will be a lot like trying to hit a target with a bow and arrow in the dark. Not only are you probably not going to be able to hit the target, you won’t even know how close you are. Figuring out the emotional triggers that your target market has is like flipping on the lights. You might still miss the target on your first go round, but at least you can see how close you are getting.
The only way to make this work (that I know of) is through testing different emotional drivers through your marketing messages. Let’s go back to the list above and say that you picked the emotions of fear, ego, and wanting to appear smart or savvy to tie your benefits to. Obviously a message that centers around fear is going to be somewhat different from a message that centers around ego.
Back to our car example, if you are pushing fear as your benefit driver then you might center your messaging on the benefits of how safe your car is. If you are pushing ego, then you will communicate how prestigious your model is or how luxurious it is. Either way, your messaging is going to vary greatly between those two emotional drivers.
So which one should you use as your main benefit statement? If it were up to me, I would test them each with a series of marketing campaigns that had each emotional driver as its main theme and see which one pulled best. We’re going to get into the specifics of how to do this best in a later post but for now I wanted to show you the reasoning behind doing all this preliminary work to begin with.
The temptation you are going to face is to brush all this off as too complicated or as too much work. Don’t do it. This is a crucial piece of your marketing plan. If you are going to play with bows and arrows make sure you at least turn the lights on before somebody gets hurt.
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