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Established 2009

A 3-Step Analytical Process to Link Emotional Buy Buttons and Your Strategy

Emotional Buy Button Research

Your own customer data is the missing link between finding out your best customers’ emotional buy buttons and fine-tuning your marketing strategy to acquire more customers just like them.

Do you know your own customers? Probably so. In fact, you probably know them quite well. For example, you may know your best customers by name. You may even know their kids’ names. You may know their favorite (color, size, style, flavor) of products you sell to them.

But however well you know them, it is likely that the types of things you know about your best customers is limited in its range. In other words: your knowledge about your best customers is more than likely “a mile deep but only inches wide.”

One of the most important types of information that you probably don’t have a handle on is what their emotional buy buttons are. What are emotional buy buttons? These are the underlying emotion-based motivations that, when triggered, make the difference between “sale” and “no sale.”

The most direct way to revealing your best customers’ emotional buy buttons is to engage in a three-step analytical process.

Step 1: Find Customer Types

Find out what type(s) of people your best customers are (i.e., assign each one to one of a finite set of general segments, or customer types); these will often be rolled up into one or more “personas”

Step 2: Discover Psychographic Profiles

Find out the psychographic profiles associated with these top personas

3. Determine Customer Insights

Psychographic profiles give insights into the motivations, opinions, interests and habits of a given segment. From these, you can extract what makes your customers buy what they buy, and why.

Examples of the hundreds of possible data points that can be learned about your best customers (and prospects) include:

  • Interested in the fine arts
  • Enjoy showing off my home to guests
  • Willing to pay more for premium electronics
  • TV ads are manipulative
  • I exercise on a regular basis

With this type of information, no matter what types of products or services you sell, you will be able to tie these emotional buy buttons to specific messages, ad channels, and tactics. In other words: a more fine-tuned, better-converting marketing strategy.

customer research, emotional buy buttons