How companies plan their business strategies for marketing and promotion methods!

The content of the article describes in detail the decision-making process of customers in choosing a product, which is very useful for improving your user thinking ability. If you are engaged in traffic promotion, copywriting, branding, business negotiations, or even HR, which are fields that revolve around dealing with people, this article can give you a good underlying logic.

The foundation of the entire marketing system is customer behavior and customer psychology, and all marketing promotion methods are based on these two points. Whether it is Baidu promotion, information flow advertising, new media operation, event marketing, brand positioning, or public relations marketing, these two points are indispensable. By understanding customer behavior trajectories, we can know how to carry out macro-business operations such as marketing layout. After the overall marketing layout is completed, what kind of copywriting content should we use to attract customers? After the customers come, what kind of words should we say to impress them?

However, many people have no idea what to write or what to say, and lack a theoretical system to do these tasks systematically.

Okay, now let’s start our main text.

Suppose you just started working at a civil service exam training institution called "Company A". Your position is sales, and your leader has sent an experienced salesperson named Zhang to guide you. Lao Zhang has won the sales championship many times and has strong business capabilities. At this time a student came over, Lao Zhang went to greet him, and you quickly stood aside and followed him to learn.

The student asked: "Why is your course so much more expensive than B's?"

Old Zhang, who had seen the scene before, smiled and said:

I believe that when you go to Taobao to buy something, you will definitely not sort the prices from low to high and choose the one with the lowest price. First, when you choose an institution, the first thing you consider is the success rate and whether it can get things done, and the second thing is saving money. Our admission rate in previous years is at least 50% higher than the industry average.

Back to the price, there are several reasons why our products are more expensive than those of Company A:

(1) Our teachers are former civil service recruitment officers. One of our teachers has even participated in setting questions before. Therefore, the quality of our courses is much higher than that of our peers, so the cost of this will definitely be higher.

(2) Our service system is very comprehensive, from one-on-one online Q&A to weekly theme sharing sessions and fixed offline teaching venues. Every link is done very thoroughly. However, many training institutions, after collecting your money, don’t care about anything else and just throw a bunch of videos at you.

(3) Our course development team consists of more than 50 people, so our course quality is completely unmatched by our peers. The quality of the course is directly related to students’ absorption rate.

We have invested enormous energy and cost to complete these tasks to the extreme, hoping that you will not have to delay for another year and ensure that you pass it in one go. Just think about how much more you can do with just one year's time!

At this moment, I felt like I had suddenly been enlightened, and felt that I had received the true teachings from Lao Zhang. At this time, another student comes to consult, and you repeat the same set of words you just said. After talking for a long time, the student looks confused.

Seeing that you were about to give up, Lao Zhang analyzed with that classmate the pros and cons of taking the civil service exam versus working for a foreign company, an Internet company, or a small company. That classmate immediately became interested in the course.

At this point you may be wondering why the two groups of people use different sales pitches. How do I classify these customers and what kind of sales pitches should I use for different customers? Lao Zhang spread his hands and said a lot of things that you thought made sense, but you just couldn't remember. Because he only has experience, but has not formed a systematic methodology .

What I want to talk about today is the methodology of this system.

In the case we talked about earlier, why did the two groups of people emphasize different points? At this time, we need to introduce a term, which is "customer decision-making trajectory."

01What is the “Customer Decision Trajectory”? What is the method of production?

It means the key decision-making stages that customers must go through before they finally choose your product. What key decisions did the client make before choosing Company A as an educational institution? That is, he has to decide whether to sign up for the class, and screening will be carried out when he decides to sign up for the class. The entire decision-making trajectory is like this, constantly digging deeper and deeper into the key decision-making stages.

There are a few key questions:

Question 1: How to select the key decision-making stages in the entire decision-making process?

When a client chooses Company A, why is "deciding to enroll in a class" the key decision-making stage, while "deciding to study hard" is not? The core of the entire decision-making trajectory is that people make choices at each key decision node. Since we are making a choice, there must be at least two options.

Therefore, the key to determining the critical decision-making stage is that he must have other similar options. For example, similar options to "choose to take a class" include "choose to study on your own" and "choose to buy pirated copies."

In addition, the purpose of sorting out the key decision stage is not to be used as a decoration, but to pave the way for subsequent marketing links. It must have meaning and value.

Question 2: What is the end of the decision-making trajectory?

First of all, we have to understand that the customer’s decision-making trajectory ends with our own products. If we trace back, where is the final origin? In fact, it is the customer's demand . The entire decision-making trajectory is the key decision-making stages that your product goes through, starting from customer needs.

So according to this logic, let us take a closer look at the decision-making trajectory of civil service examination training and education institutions.

As shown in the figure above, we can see that the complete decision-making trajectory of Company A’s target customers is: solving graduation problems - choosing employment - choosing civil servants - choosing to enroll in classes - choosing Company A. Some people may have doubts. Company A obviously provides civil service examination training services, and the needs it meets should be the civil service examination! Why does the starting point of the decision-making trajectory be to solve the graduation problem?

Okay, let's explain this problem.

The civil service examination is analogous to "employment", and choosing to take the civil service examination is not the only option at this decision-making stage. Since it is not the only option, we must dig up one more key decision-making stage.

The key decision-making stage at the previous level is "choosing employment". Similarly, "choosing employment" is not the only option. Students can also choose to take postgraduate entrance examinations or go abroad. So in the end, we set the starting point of the decision-making trajectory at the abstract customer demand point of "solving the graduation problem."

The above is a method to sort out the key decision-making stages of the entire decision-making trajectory. The most important thing is to understand the purpose of doing so. Why don’t we just set the starting point of the decision-making trajectory to “taking the civil service exam”? Why do we have to keep digging deeper?

Because the deeper you dig into your decision-making trajectory, the larger your market space will be. If you simply define the starting point of the decision-making trajectory as "taking the civil service exam", then at this time, your target customers are the target customers who have already decided to take the civil service exam.

However, we know that only a small number of students in school decide to take the civil service exam. Once you have cleaned up this group of people, the market will immediately dry up. What should you do if you want to expand the market at this time? You need to get those people who originally wanted to work for foreign companies or Internet companies to change their minds and choose to take the civil service exam.

Using the same method, you have to convince those students who originally wanted to take the postgraduate entrance examination or study abroad to change their minds and first convince them that they should start working early and choose to take the civil service examination.

From the above figure, we can see that the closer to the focus of the decision-making stage, the smaller the order of magnitude. But correspondingly, the traffic of target customers will be more accurate.

02 How to use the “Customer Decision Trajectory”

Next we will discuss the most exciting part, which is the commercial application of “customer decision trajectory”. The first thing we need to do is add a module to the “Customer Decision Trajectory”: “Customer Decision Motivation” .

What's the meaning? What is the reason why the user makes this choice? Among so many options, why does your option stand out?

Going back to the case of Company A, we will sort out the decision-making motivations at each decision-making stage.

We can see that at each decision-making stage, their reasons are completely different. When users are struggling between options such as employment, postgraduate entrance exams, and studying abroad. He finally chose to work, and there are several possible motivations:

Start working early and earn more money for a few years;

1. The purpose of taking the postgraduate entrance examination is to find a good job. If you have a good job, there is no need to take the postgraduate entrance examination.
2. Three years of work experience is worth far more than a master's degree.

It is not until users decide to sign up for a class that their decision-making motivation focuses on the product. Before that, what they care about has nothing to do with the product. After introducing "Customer Decision-Making Motivations", we will introduce the second module: "Customer Decision-Making Concerns".

What's the meaning? When the customer makes the final decision, what are his concerns? For example, when I decided to start a business, my concerns were losing money, my lack of ability, not being able to recruit people, etc.

Back to the case of Company A, the customer’s decision-making concerns are shown in the figure. We can see that when a customer chooses to work, his decision-making concerns may be:

1. Not having a good diploma will affect future promotions;
2. The competitiveness of finding a job is relatively weak;
3. I feel that my abilities are not good enough and I want to continue my studies.

We can also directly understand "customer decision motivation" as the advantages of making this choice compared to other options, and "customer decision concerns" as the disadvantages of making this choice compared to other options.

"Customer decision-making concerns" are easily overlooked by most people. For example, many people asked me to recommend a reliable employee to their company. My concern is: I don’t know your company well enough. What if your project is very immature, and I recommend someone who turns out to be unable to do anything? Then others will definitely blame me and think I am unreliable. Or maybe you are very dissatisfied with the person I recommended. In short, it is very likely that I will be in a difficult position.

So how to dispel my decision-making concerns is the key. At least let me understand the company's situation first, know that it is a good company and the leader is a good leader, so that I can recommend it with confidence.

Now I understand why in the first case, we talked to the first customer about the advantages of our products, and with the second customer, we talked to him about why he chose to take the civil service exam. Because users are at different decision-making stages, they focus on different things. So our words will definitely be different.

Next, I will share the commercial application of “user decision trajectory” in combination with word-of-mouth marketing.

Combined with the content of our previous article, users often check the online reviews of the product before finally placing an order. If the reviews are good, the probability of the customer finally placing an order will be greatly increased.

Word-of-mouth marketing is a typical search scenario. The principle of word-of-mouth marketing layout is to start from the end point of the decision-making track to the starting point. As the traffic gets closer to the end point, the more accurate it is, the higher the input-output ratio will be.

Back to the case, when a user sees your ad and has a purchase intention, because the amount is large, he may search on Baidu:

1. How effective is company training?
2. Which one is better, Company A or Company B?
3. Is the company’s fee expensive?

The questions that users may search for are the titles of your word-of-mouth marketing, and the specific content should be written around the selling points of Company A’s products.

When users are in the decision-making stage from "choosing to take the civil service exam" to "choosing to enroll in a class", they may search for:

• I want to take the civil service exam. Should I sign up for a class?
• Is it reliable if I study for the civil service exam by myself?

At this time, the content of word-of-mouth marketing is to describe the decision-making motivations and concerns at this stage, and then guide them to your own products. Based on this principle, a topic system for word-of-mouth marketing emerged around the customer's decision-making trajectory.

In fact, we can cite many more examples, the most typical ones are sales, Baidu promotion, new media operations, recruitment, negotiation, etc. How to absorb things faster is to be able to apply them to your work immediately after seeing them.

Source: Feng Jian (fengjianroom)