Building your business has taken a lot of effort to get to this point. Through it all your marketing plan gets attention as time allows, which means fits and starts. The copious options available to deploy your marketing plan don’t make it easy. There is no better time to focus on the fundamentals. Understanding your customer’s buying cycle brings clarity to your marketing plan. It makes deploying your marketing plan effective.
The second stage in your customer’s buying cycle is The Situation. Understanding the situations that propel your customers into a buying mode will transform your marketing plan.
If you have not read the previous post, Stage 1: Life, take a moment to read it here. You’ll get more out of this post having read it.
For your customer, The Situation is the event that moves them from being a likely buyer to an active buyer. For you, The Situation is the event(s) that inform how you need to be communicating with your target customer profile before they experience them. It is a tool to hone in on your most profitable customers.
The Scenerio
Today, we’re all realtors. It is our job to help people buy and sell homes. Our competition will take the job description and apply it to their marketing plan. Come one and all to ABC Reality. The very best in real estate generalist. Not us. We are not generalists. We know there are many situations that motivate our customers to buy or sell.
Getting married, having a baby, and retiring are three situations that motivate people to be in the market for a house. Each has their own variables and emotions wrapped up in them. Evaluating each situation thoroughly allows us to create an effective marketing plan to communicate with the best one(s) for our success. If we pursue one, we can dial in our messaging to resonate directly. If we choose multiple we’ll avoid the trap of creating a single message for all our target profiles.
The Importance of Connection
Just like in stage 1, details do not carry the weight and importance of emotional connection at this point. A newly engaged couple to be married does not sit down and begin filling out pros and cons of buying a home. They laugh, cry, and enjoy the moment. They begin thinking of the wedding and what their life will look like together. This is a target customer profile we can build a marketing plan around!
In time the specifics about home buying will be needed for our target customer. For now our marketing communications will focus on the emotions they are experiencing. While our generalist competitors are presenting buying guides, we are presenting marketing that fits right in with the dreaming of the bright future ahead of our engaged couple. The details our competition peddles are purged after a night or two of sleep. The imagery we deliver is compatible with our engaged couples state of mind. This locks us in their memory as the realtor who makes their dreams come true.
Back to Your Business
Ok. We are not realtors anymore. You are you again. What are the situations and events your customers experience to begin the move from a likely customer to a buyer? Of all the possible situations, what are the characteristics of each target customer profile? Of those, which are the most profitable for you? With the most profitable identified, what are the emotions elicited by the situation or event? Those emotions are what you need to be building your marketing communication around at this stage.
Combining your new understanding of stage 1, Life, and stage 2, The Situation, of your customer’s buying cycle is shoring up your marketing plan in an intelligent and sustainable way. You are beginning to create strategies in a way compatible with natural consumer behavior. You are also reducing the fits and starts in your marketing efforts by building on each stage of the buying cycle. You are ready to move on and learn the next stage, Options.
If you would like to learn more, I would love to talk with you more. Contact me to have a deeper conversation.