What motivates you? You’d be surprised. Some people are motivated by moving away from pain. Others are motivated by moving toward pleasure. Only by understanding the true motivations of your customers can you present your product in the best possible light. This is where a lot of marketers make a big mistake, and consequently miss out on a lot of business.
First of all, think of your favorite food. Got it? Good. Now imagine that you are going fishing. Would you use your favorite food on the hook? Why not? Obviously, fish don’t like that. When you go fishing, it’s obvious that you bait your hook with what the fish want, not what you want.
But so often, marketers try and sell their products based on what they want rather than what their customers want. If you do this, you might as well go fishing with a big fat bacon cheeseburger on the hook.
So what’s the difference between pain and pleasure? Some people are only motivated to do things when the pain gets to be a certain threshold. They may be overweight, but they don’t care. Only when they bend over in public and rip their pants to they feel enough emotional pain to do something about it. Once that pain is gone, so is their motivation. That’s why many of us have huge ideas and dreams, but then they fizzle out once we get started.
Once we move away from the pain, we lose interest.
People on the other end of the spectrum are after pleasure. They see that huge goal off in the future, and keep on chasing it. They don’t even notice the bad things around them. They see a million dollars in their future, and will do anything to get there. These are the folks that start five failed businesses in a row and finally hit the jackpot.
Of course, most of us are a mixture of both. Knowing where your customers lie on the spectrum will help out a great deal when selling your products.
If they’re motivated by pain, it won’t do you any good to promise them a bright future. It will have a neutral effect. It might give them an interesting read, but it certainly won’t spur them to action. With these folks, you’ve got to turn up the heat on their current discomfort, so they take action to get rid of it. Show them they’ve got a problem, intensify it, and then show them how your product can take away the pain.
People that are motivated by pleasure, on the other hand, are the opposite. If you try and motivate them by pain, they’ll get angry. They’ll leave your site and never come back. They need to be promised a huge, bright, colorful future where all there dreams are coming true. These customers are pure gold. Because once they buy from you, they’ll keep buying from you so long as your products are leading them to the promised land.
Understand your customers, and you’ll make a lot more money.