Marketing Truths: You Are Not Your Prospect

by Andrew Schulkind

Your website and other digital marketing is only as effective as your message. And your message is only effective if it speaks to your target audience. If your message is geared toward your needs – rather than your prospects’ – converting traffic to sales is going to be very difficult. If the mismatch is bad enough, attracting traffic at all will be tough.

Your Needs Come Second
With that in mind, it’s vitally important to remember that your needs are not the same as your prospects’ needs. Your marketing must serve their needs first – you provide tools and information that are of value to them and relate to the business problem they are trying to solve. (And for which your product or service is a possible solution.)

Your needs literally do come second. You only win their business after you capture their interest and gain their trust, and demonstrate that you can help them meet their needs.

Your Guess is as Good as Mine
And I don’t know anything about your business!

Seriously, you can take all the educated guesses about what your potential clients are really interested in, or you can ask them. And then you can test.

Don’t fall into the trap of sitting around a table with your fellow sales and marketing team leaders deciding what your marketing should look like. Work with those people who are closer to your clients and who interact with them every day.

Internally, this will be inside and outside sales people, customer service representatives and anyone else who spends significant customer-facing time.

Externally, you’ll want to think about the questions and concerns you hear most frequently from your prospects and clients.

Test To Validate Your Data
Even as you build your message based on real-world information rather than gut instinct, you’ll still want to test it in as many ways as you can. Analytics and metrics are your friend here. Among the tests you can run are:

A/B tests of your landing pages
A/B tests of your email newsletters – subject lines, delivery timing, etc.
Popularity of various content types (video, case studies, infographics, etc.)
Popularity of various topics
Alignment between content and service lines

The goal throughout is to remove yourself – your unconscious biases and personal preferences – from the process as completely as you can. That’s not to say that your gut instinct has no role in your job as a marketer. But having data and other supporting evidence to rely on will not only increase your likelihood of success in the short term, it will help eliminate the crises of confidence that can occur when you go with your gut and things don’t go as planned.

Because in marketing, as in so many things, you need to be confident in your decision making to perform your best.

Cookie	Duration	Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-non-necessary	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Non Necessary".
viewed_cookie_policy	11 months	The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.

Cookie	Type	Duration	Description
_ga	0	2 years	This cookie is installed by Google Analytics. The cookie is used to calculate visitor, session, camapign data and keep track of site usage for the site's analytics report. The cookies store information anonymously and assigns a randoly generated number to identify unique visitors.
_gid	0	1 day	This cookie is installed by Google Analytics. The cookie is used to store information of how visitors use a website and helps in creating an analytics report of how the wbsite is doing. The data collected including the number visitors, the source where they have come from, and the pages viisted in an anonymous form.
.ASPXANONYMOUS	1	2 months	This cookie is used by sites using the .NET technology platform from Microsoft. It enables the site to maintain an anonymous user-id to track unique users within a session without them logging in or otherwise identifying themselves.
GPS	0	30 minutes	This cookie is set by Youtube and registers a unique ID for tracking users based on their geographical location
uvc	0	1 year	The cookie is set by addthis.com to determine the usage of Addthis.com service.

Cookie	Type	Duration	Description
di2	0	1 year	This cookie is set by addthis.com on sites that allows sharing on social media. The cookie is used to track user behavior anonymously to generate usage trends to improve relevance to their services and advertising.
IDE	1	2 years	Used by Google DoubleClick and stores information about how the user uses the website and any other advertisement before visiting the website. This is used to present users with ads that are relevant to them according to the user profile.
loc	0	1 year	This cookie is set by Addthis. This is a geolocation cookie to understand where the users sharing the information are located.
NID	1	6 months	This cookie is used to a profile based on user's interest and display personalized ads to the users.
uid	0	1 year	This cookie is used to measure the number and behavior of the visitors to the website anonymously. The data includes the number of visits, average duration of the visit on the website, pages visited, etc. for the purpose of better understanding user preferences for targeted advertisments.
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE	1	5 months	This cookie is set by Youtube. Used to track the information of the embedded YouTube videos on a website.

Cookie	Type	Duration	Description
__utma	0	2 years	This cookie is set by Google Analytics and is used to distinguish users and sessions. The cookie is created when the JavaScript library executes and there are no existing __utma cookies. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics.
__utmb	0	30 minutes	The cookie is set by Google Analytics. The cookie is used to determine new sessions/visits. The cookie is created when the JavaScript library executes and there are no existing __utma cookies. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics.
__utmc	0		The cookie is set by Google Analytics and is deleted when the user closes the browser. The cookie is not used by ga.js. The cookie is used to enable interoperability with urchin.js which is an older version of Google analytics and used in conjunction with the __utmb cookie to determine new sessions/visits.
__utmt	0	10 minutes	The cookie is set by Google Analytics and is used to throttle the request rate.
__utmz	0	6 months	This cookie is set by Google analytics and is used to store the traffic source or campaign through which the visitor reached your site.
YSC	1		This cookies is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos.

Cookie	Duration	Description
__atuvc	1 year	This cookie is set by Addthis to make sure you see the updated count if you share a page and return to it before our share count cache is updated.
__atuvs	30 minutes	This cookie is set by Addthis to make sure you see the updated count if you share a page and return to it before our share count cache is updated.
na_id	1 year	This cookie is set by Addthis.com to enable sharing of links on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter
ouid	1 year	The cookie is set by Addthis which enables the content of the website to be shared across different networking and social sharing websites.
um	1 year	Set by addthis.com.(Purpose not known)
vc	1 year	This cookie is set by addthis.com on sites that allow sharing on social media.

Marketing Truths: You Are Not Your Prospect

Why Your Website Matters, and How to Make it Matter More

Ways to Create Compelling Content for Content Marketing

Three Secrets to Memorable Content