Should you be Data Driven or Customer Driven

                               Should you be Data Driven or Customer Driven

Let me just get this off my chest...

I've really had enough of hearing Digital Marketing Experts repeating the same thing over and over again.

You know, saying: "You MUST be data driven!".

Everywhere I look there's someone else telling business owners and marketers to focus all their energy and time on numbers and statistics.

THIS is why so many businesses are failing at digital marketing.

Because all they see is numbers, graphs and budgets.

They've completely forgotten there are people behind those screens.

No, you shouldn't be data driven.

You should be data INFORMED.

You must be able to track, analyze and understand your data to identify the leaks in your digital marketing funnel.

BUT in order to fix them, what you must be is...

CUSTOMER DRIVEN.

• Know thy audience
• Understand their intent
• Understand their challenges
• And optimize your website and funnels for them, not the numbers.

That's how you stay ahead of the game.

"Ok Wasiu, we get it... but how do we do that?" (<-- That's me imagining what you might be thinking to yourself right now.)

Customer data is the key to understanding the emotional component of conversion – why people buy from you.

This requires qualitative research involving these three questions:

• Why are your customers buying your product?
• How do your customers feel when buying your product?
• How do they want to feel?

Within the qualitative answers to these questions are your most compelling emotional payoffs (aka. benefits) – the ones around which you can form your entire marketing strategy. But you can’t just come out and ask “Hey, why are you buying my product?” Let’s see how that would go:

Question: ״Hey, why are you buying my product?״

Answer: ״Because it’s a toaster, and I wanted toast? Why are you asking me this?״

Question: ״No, I meant, why are you buying this particular product? There are a ton of toasters out there, we don’t even offer the best price. Was it because it’s red?״

Answer: ״Crap, there were cheaper toasters? Um, is it too late to cancel my order?״

Does not work. So you have to be subtle about uncovering the deeper motivations of why customers are buying your product, how they feel about their purchases (and their purchase experiences), and what they’re really hoping to feel as a result.

“When we buy something, we don’t purchase a ‘product’, a special price or features; we purchase an experience and a better version of ourselves.”

Let’s look at some ways to find out what “better versions” our customers have in mind for themselves.

Use voice-of-customer (VoC) data to gain insights:

If you don’t have any emotion-tracking programs or surveys in place yet, you can get a pretty good idea of what your customers are thinking by seeing what they’ve already written about you.

1. Testimonials from your best customers can yield common themes as to why they buy, why they love you, and what desired (emotional) outcomes they’ve achieved.
2. Reviews are also rich in emotional feedback – good or bad, they’ll tell you what the customer was hoping for every time.
3. Also look at comments and social media posts with an eye to categorizing common themes, frequently used words and phrases, and their associated emotions.

This research goes beyond ‘sentiment’ analysis – though sentiment analysis tools can help if they include exact phrases, not just scores. From this foundation, we can start to form hypotheses for how to use these emotional needs to increase conversions.

However, knowing how to accurately get customer's insights on why they buy from you and how to use it to increase your sales and make more money online.

To your success, 

Emiola Wasiu Folorunsho

 Founder 

 W3FEnterprises

Questions? Call me directly +2348079791052