The Most Important Questions to Ask Before Marketing Your Products and Services

While there are a number of popular marketing solutions and strategies, jumping into any strategy without proper planning hardly ever yields the desired result. Before launching into a marketing campaign, I believe you must answer a few simple questions key to any strategy. Check out the video below to learn more.

Video Transcript:

So as I talked about in the opening, we’re going to be talking about three questions with sub-questions underneath that we need to be asking ourselves when it comes to creating a marketing strategy, a KPI strategy that’s going to deliver the results that we’re looking for. Now, there are a number of questions that you can ask, and some of the big ones are who, what, where, when, why, and how? Now, those are really great starter questions, and it helps us dig a little bit deeper. Over the last couple of years, there’s been a really big push on the way, right? Understand why somebody does something. I believe that’s extremely important. There are a number of really good resources on it. Simon Sinek is kind of the why guy, right? He’s the guy that asks why all the time, which is really good.

Ask What Before Why

But I believe that before we can ask why, we have to understand two other things, and the biggest one is this, what? What is your product for? What does it do? What problems does it solve? So problems, what problems does it solve? That’s a really good question. If you don’t understand what problems it solves, it doesn’t matter your why questions or your how questions because people really care about this, how are you going to solve my problems? How are you going to make my life easier? How are you going to help me overcome this whatever that I’m dealing with right here?

Now all of our products, all of our services, should solve the problem. And we understand what that problem is and what we are actually solving and what we’re delivering, and then we can deliver this in a concise way. That’s what gets customers, and that’s what gets prospects’ ears to perk up. They go, “Yeah, I have that problem. You have a solution to that?” That’s what allows them to kind of enter into that conversation with you. This is the thing that you should be writing about, understanding. First and foremost, before you ever get to the other questions, you have to understand what it is that you are doing, and then are you able to communicate that in a clear way.

Once you understand what, you can start to ask yourself, “Who is it for? Who needs this?” So you might have a really good solution, and I hear this all the time, “Who’s your product for?” “Well, it’s for everyone.” That’s not really a good answer because if it’s for everyone, I’ll likely say, “It’s for no one,” because this everyone market is way too big. But if you can understand who that specific person is in the customer segment or in the demographics or in the customer group that needs your services, that’s when you can start to have this powerful conversation about what you do.

What you do is going to influence who it’s for directly. So this is where you start to narrow down and understand your different segments and understand things like demographics, behavioral, geolocation, and things of that nature, which are going to help you narrow down your target. Instead of broadening your reach, you can start to narrow with this who in the segment. You’ve probably heard that term before, and there are a lot of terms, segmentation, personalization, all of that, which is all-important, but really, you need to understand that ideal customer and those buyer personas we talked about before or your target audience. Who are you talking to? Who’s actually going to be interested in your what?

Ask Who

Once you defined your what, once you’ve defined your who, this is when you can go to why. Why should they care? Why should they buy? Why should they visit your site? All of these questions are important, and as you notice, they’re all connected. So you can’t start here with why and expect to have all the answers. Because why should they care? They should care because of the problems it solves and because they are the specific person who has that need that needs to be met. Why should they buy? Again, it’s about the problems they solve, and it’s about, does it meet their specific need. Why should they visit your site? Are you educating them? Are you helping them overcome a problem with your solution or even educating them about a problem that they may not fully understand? We can’t only ask the why question. We have to ask all of these questions in tandem and let them circle around to one another.

When you start to do this and you start to build this circle and this strategy, and again, my handwriting looks terrible here and I’m sorry about that when you start to understand how this works together, you can start to create content on your website that’s going to address these very specific problems that people are having. You’re going to be able to really walk them through the story of what it is that you do, who it’s for, why they need it, and why it solves their problems.

But before you do, before you write any campaign, before you do any SEO, before you do any of that stuff, you have to understand how this questioning flow works. And once you do that, like I said, you’re going to start building real conversations with people. And it’s going to allow them to connect to your business because your business is helping them solve the problem, and that’s really what people want – a solution or a tool to do. It’s going to solve a problem in their lives. If you have any questions on these questions or how to implement them and build a strategy around them, please comment below. We would love to continue the conversation. And until next time, Happy Marketing.