How to Get Emotional and Get Customers

(Photo by)by aphex08.

It’s not enough to know that you want to create an emotional response to get customers.  You have to know HOW to do that.  And, if you’re anything like me, life is just too complicated to always think things through yourself.  Sometimes you just want instructions.

So here they are.

Instructions for creating emotional triggers as part of your marketing strategy

Tools:

1. Index cards or sticky notes
2. Lots of floor or wall space
3. Maybe a friend or "sample" customer.  Another good person to join you might be any person under the age of 12 that might have some experience either with your product or with the emotions and benefits you’ll be talking about.
4. No more than two hours of time.  If you spend too  much time on this, you’ll over-think the whole thing. Or, if you spend more than one hour with someone under 12 talking about what you’ll do, they’ll never talk to you again.

Process:

1. On each card or sticky note, write what emotions your customers are feeling.  I like to work with 3 categories: before they buy what I’m selling, during the time they are using what I’m selling, and after they use what I’m selling.
2. Make some cards that list when your customers are thinking about buying what you’re selling.
3. Also make some cards that list or rank how important it is to them to get "satisfaction" or gratification around your product or service.  For example if it’s 7pm and you promised a package will be delivered to Los Angeles by the next morning because a million dollar deal depends on it – that’s important.
4. Frequency, Intensity and Length of Time.  Your next step is to give a rating to how strong this emotion is, how often it happens and for how long it happens, every time they are in a situation where they are making the decision to purchase what you’re selling.  For example, if you find yourself constantly promising packages to LA the night before they’re supposed to get there, you have issues. You either need to adjust your planning or find a service provider that easily and effortlessly deals with this business circumstance.
5. Start laying these cards out in groupings that seem obvious to you.
6. Enlist the help of your objective observer and have them give simple, names or sentences describing the groups.  SIMPLE is the critical word here.  If a 10-year old doesn’t understand it – neither will anyone else.
7. Now you can run the "feature/benefit" exercise.  All you do is start creating clusters of cards that include Customer Circumstance and Emotion, connected to Feature, connected to an "immediate gratification offer" that you come up with.
8. Voila!  You’ve got yourself the makings of a killer, irrisistable offer for a target customer.  You can now hit the streets with that using a direct marketing strategy, online strategy (where you’ve now saved yourself tons of dollars on SEO consulting because you’ve done the work), or any other creative marketing ideas you will have gotten from this process.