Each day you wake up and market your business. As an entrepreneur, this is non-negotiable, but are you properly marketing to your audience? Do you have enough insight into how your audience buys to produce content and marketing campaigns directly relating to how they purchase anything?
Understanding the four buyer types that you will come across, a few more than others, allow your marketing efforts to be full-bodied in how it is delivered and received.
A common hurdle we see with entrepreneurs is that they base many of their decision-making processes on how they prefer things.
They create content they enjoy, they sell how they like to be sold to, and they speak how they prefer to be spoken to.
The problem is, you’re not selling to yourself. Instead, you’re selling to various individuals who may have commonalities but are ultimately unique.
Remember that people are usually more than one type of buyer, and your audience will be a mix of these. You may have predominant buyer types, but it’s essential to take notes in a client relationship management system (CRM) or lead tracker as to your common objections and hesitations or what someone responds best to in your marketing strategy to identify better which types you need to focus on the most.
The Assertive Buyer/The Driver
Assertive buyers know what they want, and they want it in the most efficient way possible. Results drive this buyer type, and they don’t need to build a relationship or rapport if the proof is clear that you know what you’re doing. Instead, their main focus is generating the best outcome possible in hiring you.
These buyers do not need to be nurtured for long. Instead, they are quick to take action as long as it makes sense toward their goals.
Assertive buyers are goal-driven, confident, and want cold, hard facts. They love to be in control and will challenge you on that. They are not impressed by how your product or service will make them feel; instead, they want to know that they will see a return on investment.
This buyer type likes the short version of a sales pitch. Think of less presenting features and more presenting solutions. This buyer is the negotiator and requires matched confidence to close the sale.
If your audience is full of assertive buyers, you will benefit from showcasing client results, client wins, UGC content, explaining your framework, product features, and proof.
Remember, their attention spans are short, and they prefer straightforward, simple content. Less talking, more showing.
The Amiable Buyer
Amiable buyers need a bit of hand-holding in the process. They are not quick to decide and prefer to build a relationship over time. They will likely look to you for advice and consume all of your content but not take the lead in buying.
This gives you an excellent opportunity to nurture them while guiding them through your sales funnel.
They are buyers who like to see themselves in others’ shoes; therefore, relating what they’re dealing with to previous clients or customers goes a long way. In addition, they want to feel assured in their buying decision.
On the positive, once you close an amiable buyer, they will be loyal customers as they prefer not to let others down and avoid conflict.
If your audience is primarily amiable buyers, lead with lead generation and top-notch engagement strategies. Prioritize getting to know them and understanding them. Focus on testimonials (preferably video), storytelling, and sprinkling personal content into your strategy. The more they know you, the more they’ll stick around and eventually buy.
The Expressive Buyer
Expressive buyers are your impulse shoppers that favor experiences and impact over data-driven results. They are driven by their emotions and are creative and expressive in how they feel.
They will enjoy building a relationship with you and feel comforted if it is ongoing. Expressive buyers are long-term clients/consumers until they feel left out and find something that supports their experience more.
Expressive buyers also have very short attention spans. They want the information quickly and precisely so they can jump in. They prefer quicker response rates and ultimately buy based on ideas and concepts. They are motivated by human-leveled sales talk.
Less formal, more authentic.
If you have expressive buyers in your audience, you will benefit from showcasing your brand personality and behind-the-scenes content. While these buyers are impulsive, they love case studies to understand better that the experience they will have with your offers or services will be positive.
The Analytical Buyer
Analytical buyers need all the data to decide confidently, but that decision-making process is slow. These buyers need detailed information and will only buy once they feel they’ve analyzed, researched, and compared what is being offered or sold to them.
Numbers and statistics go a long way for analytical buyers, so presenting these in any format during the buying process helps them better make a decision.
Analytical buyers will also be the buyers that ask the most questions and be the most hesitant. They will likely need a few conversations to prime them as well. Something to always keep in mind is that rushing an analytical buyer will immediately have them denying you and your offer.
Allow them to decide in their own time. They are highly skeptical shoppers, so making big claims and promises will also have them backing away.
Keep to the facts, be helpful, and don’t pressure conversations.
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Knowing these buyer types allows you to approach your marketing from a different narrative and lens. In addition, it will enable you to start paying attention to even more data surrounding your audience, allowing you to adjust your strategies.
As you pay attention to buyer types in your marketing, you begin to see the buyers you attract most.
Because your audience is varied, paying attention to your brands’ specific buying trends is essential. This means looking at the analytics of content, looking at conversations, reviewing sales calls and notes, and seeing where people are activated or where they drop off in the buyer’s journey.
Some key areas to look at are:
- Which posts or campaigns are performing best
- Is it producing visibility and reach or comments and conversations
- Which marketing efforts are drawing in the most interest
- Is it leading to inquiries or followers
- Which platforms have the best results based on your goals
- Is your brand becoming more known or more profitable
These all vary in goals; depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, you want to create more of what is working best.
As you start to study your efforts, you build your own custom marketing strategy that produces results based on understanding how your audience needs to be nurtured and sold to.
If you have an audience of primarily analytical buyers, you’ll remove the emotionally drawn-out narratives and create content surrounding reports, analytics, statistics, and results.
If you have an audience that is primarily expressive buyers, you’ll start to create content that paints pictures and presents ideas in an exciting or polarizing way.
But, like most brands, your audience is varied. So you have to put in the work to find the right blend and ratio of content that piques the interest of all buyer types.
Of course, this goes outside of content marketing too. For example, this relates to sales calls and discovery calls. To be successful, you want to ensure you are going into your calls with an understanding of buyer types and, if possible, some lead information that helps you understand them before the call.
This is where inquiry forms and applications come in handy. Having strategic questions in those two formats can help you dial in who you will be speaking to.
If that isn’t applicable, then the process is the same; you want to ask some questions initially to help you better understand their desires and how they like to be sold to. Then, you want to understand their problems, desires, and objections.
How they respond to these questions will give you the information you need. This is all part of mastering not only your sales strategies but marketing strategies as well.
As you start to pay attention to brands and their efforts, you’ll see which brands take what approach in their campaigns. Of course, the time of year plays a significant role in their marketing efforts.
Most brands bring the expressive buyer approach to their marketing and messaging during the holiday season. However, once the New Year comes, it shifts to the Driver approach, “New Year, New Me.”
Studying how brands, especially brands in your industry, navigate the time of year and their approach gives you insight into what works for your specific industry, but more importantly, how to make it different and unique.
To take this info and implement it immediately, here is your plan of action for the next 30 days:
- Go through your content from the past 90 days and make a spreadsheet of your top-performing content categorized by metric (likes, saves, shares, followers, website clicks, etc.). Do this for each of your platforms.
- From there, identify the hook and messaging type and categorize it as one of the buyer types above.
- Note which type of buyer is most activated and taking the most action, and focus on how that translates into every other area of your sales strategy.
- Create content similar to what is currently activating the most buyers while sprinkling in content more directed towards your least dominant buyer types. This way, you are capitalizing on what works while still nurturing the other types in your audience.
As a rule of thumb, any strategy needs about 90 days of consistent action to get adequate data to decide from. So be patient and keep promoting.
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