You have spent time and energy tracking keyword performance, creating fantastic content, and doing everything you can to gather leads with the hope they turn into customers. Your website may be ranking well and traffic is high, but the problem is those site visitors just aren’t converting.
Does this sound familiar?
As a digital marketer or business owner, the reason you may be falling short is that you’re asking your audience the wrong thing at different touchpoints of the purchase funnel. Your lead may make their way down to the evaluation stage and decide that another company is better suited for them simply based on the competition’s messaging.
Why? Because there are specific questions you should direct towards your target audience and special ways to word them. Ones that prompt leads to dig beneath the surface to understand what they want to get out of your brand. Let’s take a closer look at how to address the social and emotional needs of your audience during the buyer’s journey:
Top of Mind Questions vs. Subconscious
When marketing a brand, you want to attract potential prospects down the purchase funnel to buy your product or service, all while making a connection. To do so, you need to avoid top of mind questions. These types of questions are what we call the traditional “voice of the consumer” methods. For example, anyone who consumes media will see this method in something like a paper towel ad explaining how their product cleans up messes or painting services saying they can paint your home, and so on.
What exactly makes these examples top of mind questions? Well, quite simply, they state the obvious. As a marketer or business owner, your goal is to use your brand’s messaging to go beyond the top of your audience’s minds into their subconscious to provide solutions to questions they didn’t know they needed answers to. By changing the way you frame your messaging, you can make the difference between a lead becoming a conversion or deciding they connect better with the competition.
When vs. Why
Whether you are trying to learn more about your target audience, nurture leads, or continue to impress loyal customers, you should be asking when not why. For example, if you are a heating oil company that offers oil delivery all year round, common question business owners may ask their audience is, “Why do you use heating oil?”
This is where top of mind questions come into play. Asking these questions only scratches the surface of understanding how a product or service can solve a customer’s problem. Someone seeking heating oil for their home already knows why they need this delivery — to heat their home! If you ask questions and answer ones they’re already aware of, site visitors won’t believe they need your service as much as they actually do.
By framing your heating oil company’s questions in a way that pushes past their top of mind thinking, it will result in your customer realizing that they have a need that your business can fulfill. You can do that by asking, “When do you use heating oil?” This slight change is significant because it immediately makes people reflect on when they use that product or service, leading to a more personalized connection.
A question formatted like this sparks unconscious thinking and actually helps businesses, too. How? Because the answer will help inform them of services they can implement. In this case, if someone realized they use heating oil often in the winter but are always too busy to call for it, the business can begin offering online scheduling or automated deliveries.
Get Into the Brains of Your Site Visitors
The strategy in which you advertise a product or service is always changing based on your offerings, the social climate, and new marketing trends in the industry. However, one aspect that will always stay the same is establishing a personal connection. By asking when rather than why and pushing past the top of mind thinking will result in customers discovering they need your business.
To learn more about expert marketing strategies, contact Zero Gravity Marketing (ZGM) today!
