What customers think about when choosing a product or service provider
We all want to win new customers and clients, but acquiring them is a challenge. Too many organisations invest heavily on advertising to generate the revenues they need, yet research and experience shows that without a true understanding about what motivates customer decision making a lot of that investment is wasted.
Clients make buying decisions based on five key considerations:
- Expertise of the seller: Does the company have its finger on the pulse of what is happening in their industry? Think: thought leadership articles, piece to camera videos, owned podcasts.
- Experience: What evidence can they show of having worked in this space with similar business to ours? Think: case studies, client testimonials.
- Authority in their space: Has the company and its key people been quoted, cited, or reported on in relevant media outlets? Think: press releases, authored articles for the media, guest appearances on podcasts, speaking at events.
- Risk factor: If this goes belly up and fails to deliver what we need and want as a business, what safety net do we have or will we simply have to write it off as a bad investment?
- Trustworthiness: What is their track record in this space, are they considered to be a go-to provider of choice? Think: percentage of current clients won via referral, public profile of the businesses’ key people.
Take the latter point as a case in point. PR agencies always talk about the positive impact that generating media coverage can and does have on businesses and brands, but how many of them actually do it for their own PR agency?
We treat Clearly PR as a client in itself and seize as many opportunities as we can to get ourselves in the media where our target customers hang out. Recent examples include coverage in PRWeek, The Express, and The Daily Telegraph.
We do this because it builds our brand awareness and adds values to the business. This in turn attracts new customers who see that by practicing what we preach we clearly (pun very much intended) believe in what we’re selling.
Get in touch if you need support getting in front of your target audience.
