How To Be A CIA Agent When It Comes To Your Customers
By: Felicia C. Sullivan
Tags: Marketing, Content Marketing, Customer Experience, Business, Startup Lessons

Brands are obsessed with being relevant and cool at the expense of delivering value to their customers. Their content calendars devolve into a cringeworthy June George-fest, complete with “Wine Wednesdays,” fuchsia soft pants, and emojis because they want to be relatable.

They don’t want to be a regular brand, they want to be a cool brand.

Here’s the reality — your customer is selfish and solutions-oriented. They don’t want to hear your chatter until you’ve proven that you’ve not only solved their problem, but you’re also not a garbage company. COVID brought what had been simmering for years to the fore — people buy from brands that align with their values and expect brands to not only solve their personal challenges but to affect positive societal change. Brand magnetism no longer holds — the reasons consumers buy has shifted because their priorities have shifted and this isn’t going away anytime soon.

Two-thirds of consumers worldwide now buy on beliefs.

Often, brands skip to the bestie part and ignore the foundation they’ve should’ve spent more time building. Be intentional with the stories you tell, not arbitrary. Are you solving problems? Are you providing solutions? Does your business embody its values? Do they impact the communities around them beyond digging their paws through their pockets?

Look at Burger King not being a trash brand! Credit: BurgerKingUK

You don’t need to be your customers’ best friend — in fact, they prefer you not be — you need to be human, relevant, and solutions-oriented. What they want to see is how your values show up in how you do business, treat your people, and tell stories that matter.

When I design story strategies, I think about what a customer is thinking, feeling, and doing at each stage of their journey to buy and beyond — even if that journey is with a competitor. Some fancy people call those empathy maps — I call it paying attention. I pay attention to the questions they ask throughout the process and how they talk about their experience with the brand and its products to their peers. I read reviews. I lurk in forums and on social media. I listen without waiting for my turn to speak. If I want their attention, I have to be willing to sacrifice mine in equal measure.

Let’s take this a step deeper. Old school marketing focused on one ideal customer. If you could know everything there is to know about that one person, you can market to them. I used to do this because it was the way I learned how to craft personas.

But here’s the thing — that person is usually white. That person bears what’s familiar to the marketer creating the persona even if they’re unaware of their bias. Now, I embrace a community approach, where customers are reflective of a diverse group of people who have varying motivations, triggers, behaviors, habits and influences that drive them to make a choice. Let me give you an example.

For a few years, I was the lead strategist on a famous pancake brand. All of their media — TV, out-of-home (OOH), PPC, the whole smear — showcased white, upper-middle-class families treating the kids to a stack after the Saturday soccer game.

But when we analyzed thousands of pieces of data from surveys and CRM to point-of-purchase and social media, the face of the customer wasn’t that simple and that white.

We found there were four distinct segments that visited this fast casual spot and the driving force behind their behaviors were frequency, i.e., how often they went and income. The higher the frequency of visits, the lower the income. The most frequent customers tended to be African American, Hispanic, and Asian and didn’t make the big bucks but found the joint affordable. It was also a place where they could gather. College kids came a little less frequently and it was a late-night munchie kind of affair.

TL;DR: We devoted a lot of money attracting a group of people who rarely dined at the restaurant. Instead, we should’ve widen our scope to understand there was a more complex community of customers who were driven by income and frequency.

That shift not only makes performance marketing effective and efficient, but it also guides what stories we tell, to whom we tell them, and on which channels we tell them. Now, we get specific in our message and where that message lands.

Once we know more about our customers — their motivations, pain-points, challenges, wants, needs, behaviors, habits, influences, and preferences — we can start to create a map of how they buy from us and proactively address what they’re thinking/feeling/doing each step of the way. We define what will propel them to the next step. Through this exercise, we also have to address why they wouldn’t buy from us, what’s holding them back, which is mostly in that evaluation stage when they’re thinking Papa John’s, that famous pancake place, Five Guys, or a pizza we can make at home.

Customer Journeys get a bad rap because many marketers don’t know how to use them. They’re usually found in a pretty slide deck, gathering dust. My CJ maps don’t fit in a deck. They’re not neat and pristinely designed. They’re on paper or on a white board. They dissect the prioritized communities into varying groups based on any number of psychographic factors.

Here’s one way to learn more about your customers and map their journeys without dropping a ton of cash on a segmentation study:

For example, think about a fancy designer handbag brand. Twenty-five-year-olds to women in their 50s buy the brand. They’re unified by an expression of status or an affection for a particular look, but their behaviors and demographics are at either end of the spectrum.

We first identify what unifies the community as our point of entry, and then use that to get specific about how that applies to each group of customers. How we message a twenty-five-year-old who doesn’t have as much discretionary income and will save up to buy the bag versus a woman in her fifties who might buy across the category because she can afford it. These are generalizations, for sure, but I’m doing this so you get the idea.

Regardless of who they are, every customer goes through a trigger moment (they need/want something for a reason), which has them:

asking around/searching for options, evaluating those options, choosing one of those options, experiencing the aftermath of that option, i.e., the post-purchase and between-points-of-purchase experience.

People call this the funnel, which is reductive and linear. A customer’s experience buying a product or service is more of a complex, looping journey because we don’t tend to buy in a straight line. We’ll veer off, do some more research, change our minds, cancel purchases, return products, end up hating the brand because we find out they treat their employees like garbage, etc.

Credit: BeInTheKnow.com // This is one of the best CJ maps I’ve seen in a while.

How our senses are activated — what we’re thinking, feeling, doing, seeing, hearing, at each stage may be different depending on the segments you’re targeting (with overlapping similarities, naturally), and that’s when our storytelling gets laser-focused.

Before you throw up a puppy post on social media, first ask yourself — did I proactively connect and communicate with my customers each step of the way? Did I educate them? Provide value, utility, or reciprocity? Did I create content that speaks to their wants, needs, goals through their buyer journey? What they’re thinking, feeling, and doing?

That’s the foundation you have to create before you can get friendly. You earn a customer’s trust by showing them you’re the solution and you value the totality of their experience. Once you’ve got that down, you can firehose all the puppies you want.

Be deliberate and intentional in the stories you tell, and make sure they’re rooted in the communities that are buying from you. Do the legwork and research. Listen to what your customers say — the good, bad, and violently ugly. Create stories that connect with them, cultivate a relationship with them, and convince them you’re THE ONE.