In the past we talked about the importance of ACTUALLY thinking like your customer when marketing. There is no more assured road to success in marketing than doing this. Conversely, ignoring your customer’s thought processes or simply not putting enough time into it is a surefire way to failure.

It’s not as simple as saying posing the question of “what does my customer want” to yourself and attempting to answer it through your copy. You need to know this inside and out.

There is no better way to see a return on your offers than to become the person you’re selling to, and these 5 tips will allow you to think like your customer.

How to Think Like Your Customer

What Is Their Problem

Everyone has a problem, and while your potential customer’s may not be as dramatic as other people’s problems, in the moment they are just as motivated to solve this problem as they would any other.

To effectively sell something to someone, a solution to someone, you need to understand the need for that solution implicitly. This means answering:

• What problem is your customer facing?
• Why is a solution here so important?
• What are the benefits of solving this problem?
• How is your offer a complete solution to their problem?
• Will your problem alleviate your potential customer’s concerns?

Once you can answer all of these questions then you will have adequately solved their problem and can ensure that your offer will convert that much better because it is the definitive solution to that problem.

What Are Their Fears

Just as importantly as understanding what their problem is, you need to understand the motivations or, more dramatically and precisely said, the fears of your potential customer.

Remember that there is no greater motivation in this life than fear. If you don’t solve their problem, what will happen or continue to happen to them?

Really tapping into the fear of your market is the easiest way to both understand their motivations for coming to you in the first place. More than that, you can pitch to them more effectively by explicitly calling out these fears then absolutely explaining how your offer is the one and only best solution to the problem.

Creating a Customer Persona

From all of this, you can create personas of your customers. Meaning on paper you should flesh out and create your typical customer using the questions I presented above.

For instance, let’s a fictional guy named “Frank” (pictured to the right) to represent a typical customer of yours by answering all of the questions I posed above.

Frank is an employee at a small business who, in addition to his existing responsibilities, was asked by his boss at work to take up the online marketing side of the business and improve the online presence of their website and online services.

Frank doesn’t have much experience in online marketing, so after doing a few searches online he finds the 10 Day Online Marketer’s Training Course.

Frank’s motivations here are that he wants to learn about online marketing for his job. His fears are that the concepts will be too difficult to grasp and that he will let his boss down.

From this customer persona we know we need to market the training course as being great for beginners while still offering everything you need to know – a one stop shop course for online marketing tutorials.

Emphasizing these details of the training course will greatly increase the likelihood of a conversion in Frank. This means getting him to sign up for the email course.

Multiple Customer Personas

One oversight which many seasoned marketers continue to make is to squeeze their entire potential customer-base into one persona.

That is, answering all of the above questions (what is your customer’s problem, what is their fear, etc.) only once. Frank isn’t the only customer we can expect. His motivations and fears may broadly represent one third of all of the traffic which arrives at the training course’s page.

Customers come from all backgrounds and more importantly from all circumstances. Not every potential customer is going to fit the mold of every other.

Two customers may have the exact same problem but their motivations for wanting to solve it could be completely different.

Then, if you only address one customer’s fears in your marketing, you leave the other thinking your offer isn’t for them. Your offer isn’t the solution to THEIR motivation, even though theirs could be the exact same problem as the customer which responded to your marketing.

This is the kind of marketing problem which won’t show through statistics, which is why it’s paramount that you avoid this very specific pitfall of tunnel vision in assuming you only have one “persona” of potential customer.

Answer these questions and create unique persona after unique persona until you think you’ve approached these questions from every angle. Then do it again just to be sure.

Then take every one of these personas and ensure that your entire sales page (whether it’s for a product, a service, an email signup, etc.) includes every single potential persona your page could receive in its marketing.

You Are Already Your Customer

Let’s not forget that if you are in any specific market or industry and are creating products, services, or any kind of offers within that niche that you likely already understand that niche as well as anyone. So once your offer is ready to put out in front of an audience, don’t immediately switch to marketing mode and focus on prices and branding.

All of that is key of course; they’re all components of a well oiled machine. But when you’re crafting your copy in particular, go back to when you first got into your industry. Go back to when you first began creating the offer which you are selling. You created it because you were likely once in the same exact spot as your potential customers with the same problem, fears, and motivations.

Call on that specific personal experience of yours and let that version of you speak through your copy; you’ll be amazed at the results when you get personal and speak to your customers as people exactly like yourself rather than a conversion waiting to happen. Everything else will take care of itself.