Jack Dorsey is not just some lucky young tech entrepreneur who stumbled across a big idea. From an early age, the 37-year-old founder of Twitter and Square Reader was fascinated by the way humans interact.
He created a system to help dispatch taxis when he was still in his teens. During this time, he became fascinated by the way taxis could briefly update each other about their whereabouts. This led him to ultimately develop the concept of Twitter.
Dorsey's brainchildren — Twitter and Square Reader — were both developed from "user narratives," descriptions that map out a user's day-to-day life and priorities. This simple but revolutionary idea challenges entrepreneurs to develop products that are designed to fill a specific need in a user's life.
Similarly, marketing efforts can flourish when organizations understand their customers' backstories. Creating "customer narratives" will help you better tailor your marketing messages, improving how customers react to your efforts and ultimately increasing sales.
If you can answer these five questions, you can construct a comprehensive customer narrative for your next marketing initiative:
How does your customer spend his/her day?
The average person is bombarded by thousands of messages all day long. What makes your message different? Why will your customer read it? Most organizations don't appreciate that customers are busy, and they don't have time to read every message they receive. If you spend more time thinking about what your average customer does throughout the day, you can develop a more effective message that will break through the clutter and inspire action.
What does your customer care about most?
The majority of companies market products by focusing on their top features. This approach is completely off-base. Customers don't buy products or services; they buy solutions to the issues they care about most. By figuring out what is most important to your ideal customers, you can craft a message that will appeal to them in the most effective way.
What is your customer looking to accomplish?
Because most companies focus their marketing messages on a specific offering, they miss a huge opportunity to connect with customer goals. If you can understand what your customers are looking to accomplish, you can connect with them in a way that will be more memorable.
What will catch your customer's attention?
Most marketing messages don't make any headway because their creators fail to consider what will catch the customer's attention. By figuring out what types of messages and mediums your customer is most likely to respond to, you can increase the success of a marketing campaign many times over.
What will keep your customer engaged?
Top marketers spend a great deal of time thinking about how to keep their customers engaged. Real customer engagement requires an organization to think beyond getting in front of a customer once. Consider what will keep your customer coming back time and time again. After you figure this out, you will reap huge dividends throughout the customer's lifetime.
Fully map out the answers to these questions to create a rich customer narrative and dramatically increase the effectiveness of any marketing initiative.
