Do You Know What Your Customers Want?

Knowing what customers are looking for helps you shape the most effective strategic plan and can make your brand stand out from the rest. Our company has researched more than 500 organizations to gain a deeper understanding of what made them successful and how they fueled their marketing to attract and expand their customer base. There are five basic rules that we have discovered for organizations that use content to drive interest in their products and services from their target markets.

1. Make sure all of your market communications are built for multi-screens. Today, the average consumer uses two different devices and business users up to five different devices. Often, they are using them together to seek and find the information and product they are looking for. With a bounce rate potential within three seconds it’s essential that each screen be custom designed, and yet the great majority of organizations today do not have this as a standard operating design procedure.
2. Make sure your content is enjoyable to read. Everyone likes a good story, so why aren’t more companies using humor? Because it’s more difficult to do than straightforward business copywriting. Well, that might be easier for your organization to produce, but you will not experience outstanding results from being the fact giver at the party! Making people laugh and enjoy themselves always makes for a better start of a relationship, which, when you boil it all down, is exactly what a business is built on. Relationships. So make yours enjoyable.
3. Make sure you copy is to the point and short, not long. There is a strong resistance to extremely long copy. People are busy and impatient for the information they are searching for, and if they do not find it quickly, they move onto other sources until they do. A single picture that shows someone what you are saying is often a better way to present the information than a detailed and long description. Also, when someone is searching during an initial investigation, they want high-level facts that tell them they have found the right place and information. Once that requirement is met, they want more detailed information. Being able to provide the information they need in the dosage they want is key to building stickiness with your customers.
4. Make sure you’re not perceived as a burglar. Now that many organizations have discovered how to track their target prospects, they are hanging cookies and other Internet programming onto a person’s identity and “following them” around through their daily searches. Ever search for an item and then found it showing up on Web pages that have nothing to do with your search? Personally, I think this should be against the law. Harrys.com is a great example. Unless you enjoy being stalked, I would suggest never searching this company. I’m happy to report that the majority of people end up resenting this technique, so I think it’s likely the practice will eventually be dropped due to a universal rejection of it. In the meantime, don’t be that guy!
5. Make sure to build trusting relationships. The harsh reality is our culture is one of suspicion where trust is a highly valued commodity. Earning a customer’s trust is not easy to do, but it’s worth every penny once you achieve this vaulted goal. For a prospect to gain interest in your company and content it has to answer the primary questions that long-lasting relationships are built upon: “Who are you” and “Why should I trust you?” The most trusted and successful brands in the world answer these questions and are those that can be trusted to do precisely what they promise every single time. And if there is a problem, they are the quickest to resolve it without complaint or the blame game.

Due to the ever-increasing rise of security fraud, people are emptying their Web browser’s cache on a routine basis and not allowing marketers to be invasive. Smart marketers understand this and support this notion with action by not leaving tracking cookies on their prospects’ or customers’ identities. Customers are rewarding them with their trust.