Are you having trouble detailing your marketing campaign for your target audience? Are their needs a mystery to you? There’s a good chance you’re not selling to what your consumers really need or desire, and that could end up costing you big bucks.
Back when I was a new, struggling entrepreneur, I struggled mightily with trying to understand what the needs of my target market were. I stumbled across a hierarchy of need created by psychologist Abraham Maslow.
He outlined this hierarchy in a pyramid as such:
• At the base of the pyramid is survival
• Security
• Relationships
• Self-esteem
• Self-actualization
For almost every human being, the needs that precede other needs will always come before what follows. In other words, a consumer won’t focus on security until they have survival covered. Most people who are out there looking to buy are operating under their desire for increased self-esteem. And typically, the wealthier a consumer is the higher up on Maslow’s pyramid they operate from.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t market from a standpoint of self-esteem or relationships to the most affluent people in the world. In fact, if you can get more basic and convince people that they need your product to survive, which is the lowest level on Maslow’s pyramid, your product could stream in some serious revenue.
What can you do with this information?
You can understand where your target market is coming from, which is absolutely paramount to creating a successful marketing campaign. Look at the pyramid and try and match your target market with the level that most influences them towards buying the type of product or service you are trying to sell; it can even be a combination of two or more.
Consider each of these sections of the pyramid as simply the most prominent motive behind the reason for a purchase. Often times, people don’t necessarily buy based on logic, they feel compelled to make a purchase based on one of these strong emotional factors. People then rationalize their decision with logic after they have already made an emotional decision.
In conclusion:
So if you can understand this type of reasoning behind what makes people buy, you can understand how to sell to them. You’ll be able to offer them the solution to their problems whether or not they even know what it is themselves. And finding a benefit-oriented solution to what people really want and need is the essential on the path to successful marketing.