Have you ever heard the phrase about assuming, and what it makes out of you and me?
Marketers can sometimes be the biggest offenders of making assumptions about who their target audience is and what they want. As one of our marketing musts for 2015, we challenge fresh produce marketers to focus on being present and not presumptuous. You may think you know what a buyer wants to know from you or how they would behave, but you can’t truly know until you ask.
You may be a presumptuous marketer if you’ve said something similar to “I would never use a coupon app on my cell phone,” or “our buyers wouldn’t want to download sell sheets and other information from our website.” Buyer audiences are expanding and with that are going to have different ways of interacting with a website, using a social network or making a purchase than we do personally. In order to truly know your audience, marketers must ask to understand.
DMA Solutions nearly made this mistake last year. We were working with a client to determine where to focus our content efforts for the upcoming year. Assuming that since the client already had so many great recipes on their website, we recommended redistributing a portion of our marketing budget away from creating new recipes that year. Before finalizing the budget, we decided to poll our database to ask their preference on what they would like to see more of on the clients’ website. Guess what 87% of them told us they want? MORE RECIPES. We came very close to making a significant marketing mistake in terms of budget allocation and content creation for the entire year, but by asking our target audience exactly what they wanted, we were able to re-configure the budget and delight them with new recipes and cooking tips all year long.
The moral of the story? Be present, not presumptuous in 2015. This especially applies to assuming you understand how buyers behave, particularly now as millennials have become a prominent portion of the workforce. The traditional ways of the buyers you think you know are changing as buying audiences rapidly expand and their habits involve more focus on seeking information online. Fresh produce marketers, make sure you are actively listening to their problems and asking them how you can help. As a result, you will not only create a more authentic voice, but you will start to assume less and yield more for your marketing.
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