June Monthly Meeting, Sponsored by SmugMug
Speaker: Dave Barnhart from Business Blogging Pros
Thank you everyone who came out to hear Dave Barnhart’s presentation discussing how to use social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest in order to draw your buyers to your business and make it profitable. It was a great time, as usual and we learned a lot! Pizza was provided, Stacy moderated the games and introductions, Nick gave out new SmugMug prizes to the winners of the business card drawing.
Dave Barnhart’s presentation on “Mapping Your Buyer Highway” had some interesting topics. Here are my notes and take from the presentation:
1. Who are your customers?
2. What problem do you solve for your customers, in their words, from their perspective?
3. What motivates your customers to seek a solution to this problem?
4. How do the customers search for a solution? What do the customers want to know?
5. How do the customers select one solution provider? What is the customers criteria?
6. Are there any barriers to purchasing your product or service?
7. Are there multiple buyer personas involved in the buying process?
8. What are the emotional factors?
9. What are the logical justifications?
The following are my notes from the presentation:
Focus on the customers buying process. Don’t sell, help people buy.
Generally speaking, most seniors and babyboomers are going to prefer the clean, simple, corporate looking sites, while generation Y is going to enjoy the sites with lots of things to click on, experiment with and play with.
Get inside your customers head and how they think.
Oribitz.com is a great example site that did their research and development. They discovered that in most cases, the 4 and 5 star hotel reservations were being booked by Mac users, while PC users make more reservations on the 1-3 star hotels. Because of this, Orbitz decided to reorder how the hotels are presented to the customers, based on which computer their using, which is tracked by cookies.
Yogi Soap (a soap marketed to yoga students) uses a unique marketing approach. It markets to studios instead of the customers. The studios will get a better marketing advantage if the customers come in to buy the soap. The studios get more shots at selling classes to the customers this way. One of the barriers the yoga studios started having though was customers were coming in, buying the soap and also to promote the soap, the studio decided to put the soap in all the showeres. What started happening was the students would bring in their empty soap bottles and start to refill their soap containers for free. At this point, the studio would need to decide whether they’re making money on advertising with the soap, keeping the customers happy and buying more classes. Or if this is a barrier that they’ve run into that needs to be approached differently.
Other tips and notes from the presentation:
People buy from emotions and then justify from logic.
Interview over the phone works better than email or even face to face.
If you’re sending a card and being personal, that’s not the time to hit your customers with coupons and try to sell something. The same goes with a survey. If you’re asking the customers questions to find out more about them, that is not the time to sell your product to them, otherwise those things just hit the trash.
Don’t recommend to your clients what you don’t believe in. Have integrity.
If you’re going to send your customers an “interruption email”, make your point in 20 seconds or less.
Own your name on facebook. Your social media objectives should be: Tell your story, reach out to prospects, get referrals, share customers, recommendations and relationships.
For more on Dave Barnhart and his services, please visit www.BuyerHighwayWebinar.com
Join us for our next monthly meeting. Sign up at http://www.PhotoAdvClub.com for details and events. We’re one of the largest and most active photography clubs in Arizona.
As always, feel free to leave comments and questions on the blog. See you next time!
-Seana
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