One thing I’ve really been digging into in the last few months has been marketing fundamentals.

I often say digital marketing is the new and better game because it’s more targeted and can be measured. You can grow your business faster when you use smart online marketing.

That’s a simple fact.

But the reality is, we can stand on the shoulders of marketing giants. We can learn from the greatest marketing minds of the 20th century to knock it out of the park in the 21st century.

Why?​

Because we’re still communicating with our fellow humans. We’re still trying to get them to take that next step to buy from us.

The hardware is the same, and it’s just the tools that have gotten more sophisticated.

So I’m viewing our clients’ marketing (and my own marketing) using the lens of marketing fundamentals. I’m doing this because I see how:

MARKETING FUNDAMENTALS x DIGITAL MARKETING = 10X THE RESULTS

If you’re reading this, then you already know it’s important to compete and earn “impressions.” You need new prospects to see you on search engines, social media, websites they visit, and in their email inboxes because that’s where people’s attention is now.

But you can make your impressions even more effective when you speak directly to the needs of the person who is seeing a link to your website or visiting one of your pages.

So how do you do that?

Create a Persona for Your Prospects

Think about your very best customers or clients.

Draw each of them as a circle, then create a Venn diagram with the overlapping circles.

The part in the middle where all the circles are overlapping is what we’re going for.

• Who are they? What is their role in what kind of company or who are they demographically?
• What are the qualities that are similar between them?
• What are their common struggles when they first come to you?
• Most importantly: how do they describe their problem before they came to you and how do they describe the value your company provided them?

It’s worth reading that last one again, because it’s literally worth millions of dollars.

I’m serious.

Find the Magic Words

When you capture and leverage the voice of your customer (sometimes called VOC), they’ll bring you more just like them.

Here are some ways to find your customer’s language:

• Call your customers and ask them
• Read through your online reviews and testimonials
• Record your happy customers on camera for a video testimonial (which is itself worth its weight in gold)
• Send a survey
• Add a second web form on your thank you page after people submit a form or buy from your website

Here’s another amazing trick​ from conversion copy writing expert Joanna Wiebe from CopyHackers: don’t ask “Why did you buy from us?” or “Why did you reach out to us?” but instead ask “What was going on in your life that led you to reach out/buy today?” 

​There’s something about the construction of that sentence that puts people back in their original frame of mind, rather than just answering “Why?” which might elicit a new answer they make up since they already took the action and are justifying it for different reasons now. 

(Human brains spend a lot of time rationalizing the decisions we already made out of emotion.)

A Few Examples

For my digital marketing agency Get Found Madison, we have a few different types of clients we work well with (and get great results for!), so we are developing a persona for each:

• ​Local Service Business Owners
• Ecommerce companies in the $1M-10M range
• B2B Companies with Marketing Teams eager to learn digital marketing

​Here’s what Katelyn from the marketing team at our B2B client Naviant recently said in my Digital Marketing Mastery​ course. Before working with Get Found Madison, they had another SEO company they weren’t happy with. Specifically, they:

• Didn’t communicate what they were working on or why
• Didn’t achieve results
• Were expensive 

 Then she said, “Honestly, we’ll probably never switch from you guys. It’s been so great working with you.”

I’d trade my kingdom for a video of what Katelyn said that day at the DreamBank in Madison (luckily she’s agreed to go on camera and say something similar again!). 

The headline writes itself:

“Are you tired of your expensive SEO agency leaving you in the dark about what they’re doing and not achieving results?” 

That could go in SEO titles and descriptions, Google Ad headlines, email subject lines, and web page headlines.

It could be the first sentence I speak in my next video.

Because are there other companies out there like Naviant who are experiencing the same pain points right now?

You better believe it.

If at all possible, I always try to speak to pain rather than pleasure. It’s the far greater motivator. (If you don’t believe me, you can read more about Kahneman and Tversky’s work on Loss Aversion.)

Surveys and Copywriting for Ecommerce

While we sometimes run video testimonial contest for my ecommerce company Splendid Beast Pet Paintings, we’re not always able to talk directly to our customers (though I bet we could if we tried!).

As such, it’s important for us to survey our customers (at least) annually to ask them about their experience and how we improve.

This year I made sure to include a version of the magical Joanna Wiebe question:

Think back to when you ordered your pet painting. What was going on in your life that led you to buy one?

If I wrote that question again, I’d probably say “your Splendid Beast pet painting” so we’d get responses the might demonstrate how people see our paintings differently than the competitors.

In any case, the vast majority of people who answered said it was either a gift or a way to commemorate a pet they’d lost.

At first, I was primarily interested in the quantitative data when we manually coded the customers’ free-text responses into birthday, Christmas, wedding and other types of gift.

But perhaps even more important is the qualitative data: the phrasing the customers used.

Check this one out that highlights a pain point Splendid Beast solved that I never would have thought of:

My parents are extremely difficult to buy presents for, so my brother and I got one of your paintings with both our dogs in it (the American Gothic template). Needless to say it now hangs at the bottom of my parent’s stairs and they get to smile at it every morning.

Wow. You can’t buy copy that good.

I’m ready to run that as our Facebook Ad copy right now.

Are there plenty of pet owners out there who are difficult to buy gifts for?

You know it!

And now we know how Splendid Beast can solve that problem.

Ready to do this for your business?

Persona creation and copywriting will be part of a Digital Marketing Boot Camp I’m offering soon. Email [email protected] if you’re interested.