BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Highly Successful Marketers Always Ask These 7 Questions

This article is more than 9 years old.

Many marketers are focused on the trees, not the forest. They’re trying to pick out the best ad size or CTA button color. Those are great things to search for, but I encourage you to take a step back and look at the forest.

Some of the world’s most brilliant marketers think big. Yes, your button color is important, but there are forest-sized questions you should be asking of your company, your audience, and your entire approach.

Here are those questions.

1. How can I get a better audience?

Notice, I didn’t say bigger; I said better.

Marketing is all about the audience. Your audience is the people who listen to your message, consider your product, and give you their money.

Everything hinges upon their attention, receptivity, and response.

But do you simply accept who they are and what they do to you? No. You change them. How?

With information. With content.

Into this discussion comes content marketing, the king of all marketing techniques. More than a technique, however, content marketing is a mode of existence, a way of doing business, and a pattern of thinking that characterizes the greatest marketing successes of this generation.

Take Apple as an example. The frenzied fans of the electronics giant crave information. There are entire businesses built off rumors that come from Cupertino. Apple’s keynote talks turn into headline news. Apple is a company that uses information — via content marketing — to grow their brand.

That’s what content marketing is all about — giving your audience the information that shapes their thinking and purchases.

Successful marketers spend a lot of time strategizing about content marketing. Content marketing is capable of transforming a passive audience into active customers.

That sounds like a pretty good audience to me.

2. What does my target market crave?

Every marketer should know her target market. Your business does not target everyone. Who is it that you’re targeting?

Now ask yourself...what do they crave?

It’s simple truth of humanity that people will strive to obtain what they crave. From the Maslowian fundamentals of food and water, to the advanced nuances of morality and spontaneity, people want to get their needs met.

Your job as a marketer is to meet those needs. Do not assume that you 1) know what your target audience wants, or 2) that you’re already delivering it.

The cravings of your target market are always shifting, even if ever so slightly. The better you can figure it out, the more successful you’ll become.

3. What does my target market fear?

This question gets to the heart of one of the marketer’s most formidable powers — the power of pain.

Pain, and its attendants of fear and anxiety, are powerful drivers of human behavior. When you determine what fears your audience faces, you can then discover how to address those fears.

Here is what happens when you understand and address your target market’s fear:

  • They trust you.
  • They turn to you.
  • They buy from you.

4. What does science say?

The field of neuromarketing is full of findings that should influence your marketing efforts.

Neuromarketing is built upon neuroscience. Neuroscience is a field of psychology and neurochemistry, which seeks to understand the human nervous system and its influence on behavior and cognition.

Lest you think this abstruse field of science seems to be far afield of marketing, think again.

Brands like Coca-Cola, Frito-Lay Google, Yahoo, PayPal, and Walt Disney have poured millions of dollars into neuroscientific research, and have gotten that money back in unarguable ROI.

What does someone think when they look at a dashboard, or a hubcap, or a bumper? Maybe they can’t explain it verbally, but their brain is doing something electronically. That information can be gleaned through the innovations of neuroscientific research. Those findings, in turn, can affect how and what a person will buy.

Maybe you won’t invest in electrode-studded caps, but you can pay attention to the findings of neuroscience, and how these can shape your marketing strategy.

5. What do the case studies show?

Great marketers are curious about case studies. Case studies are detailed, analytical, and maybe a bit dry, but they are sources of valuable marketing information.

I’m a collector of case studies. I write case studies. I self-test my own websites for case studies.

Case studies show you principles that you can apply to your business. If company XYZ was able to use infographics to get 60,000 unique visitors, then maybe you can apply the same to your company. Why not?

A quick caveat is in order. One company’s case study is not your business’s instruction sheet. Keep in mind that a case study only shows the results of one study for one company and one situation. Case studies aren’t marketing laws. They are, however, a great guide for you to follow.

Keep asking, “What do the case studies show?”

6. What does testing prove?

Now, I’ve reached the pinnacle — the question that you should always ask every day.

What does testing prove?

Understanding your audience is awesome. Knowing neuroscience is killer. Case studies are great. But testing gives you knowledge power of what works and what doesn’t.

I’m a proponent of A/B testing, a hugely profitable method of discovering what will give your website more conversions. The more you test, the more you’ll learn. The great thing about this method of testing is that the results are irrefutable, as long as you’re conducting the test accurately.

Conclusion

Marketers can easily fall prey to fads, to misguided advice, and to same-old-same-old methods.

If you start asking the right questions, though, you’ll start arriving at right answers. These six questions could be what your business needs to go from the doldrums of boring to the heights of awesome.

What marketing questions should you ask yourself?