match your content to your customers

When it comes to purchasing decisions, people have many variables to consider, and they tend prioritize them differently in different circumstances.

If you were having a one-on-one conversation with a customer and you could determine what kind of buying preferences they have, you would probably adapt the way you speak to them to appeal to those preferences.

The same applies to your media, although in a bit more of a general sense.

Here is a summary of four different buyer preference profiles as categorized by pricing and selling expert Blair Enns (who, in turn, adapted this model from others):

price buyers

Just as it sounds, these buyers are shopping for a specific price. Usually the lowest, but sometimes people will always choose the middle option or even default to the highest.

value buyers

These buyers care about ROI. They will pay more if you can prove they are getting more value in return.

convenience buyers

These buyers are not in a position to shop around. They need a solution that can be delivered with as little friction as possible, so the first viable option will probably be the one they go with.

relationship buyers

These are the loyal ones. Once they decide they like you, your organization, your brand, etc, they will buy everything they can from you, and probably return more than once.

~ ~ ~

While not an exhaustive list, I think this is a solid starting framework.

Most likely your customer base is a mix of these, but depending on your offering, market, or business structure, you may find that you have a predominance of one or another type of buyer. When that’s the case, it can be very useful for deciding how to speak to them.

In the next few days we’ll break down each of these buyer types a little further and think about how they might shape the form of the media you choose to create.

content for price buyers

Price buyers generally know three things:

1. what they want
2. what they don’t want
3. what they’re willing to pay
   • (even if it’s a vague as “as little as possible” or “the most expensive option must be the best”)

That means, if you’re going to communicate to price buyers through your media, you need to convey the corresponding information:

1. what you offer
2. what you don’t offer
   • (or what you are willing to remove from the offering—with a corresponding price adjustment)
3. what it’s going to cost
   • (even if it’s just “a little” or “a lot”¹)

Conveying timely price information through live content streams like social media can be a great way to drive engagement, and you can have fun with it. Hitting the right price is a game, so you can make cheesy posts about discounts and promos; or, on the flip side, cheeky posts about how expensive and exclusive your luxury offering is. They’ll eat it up.

Just don’t get attached.

Price buyers aren’t here for you and they will jump ship as soon as someone else beats you at their price game. And someone probably will eventually.

1. Remember: leaving something out is still part of communicating. “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it” is a tried and true pricing tactic after all. ↩︎

content for value buyers

Value buyers don’t care so much about price as they do about what they get for the price.

They need to feel that they’re getting the most bang-for-their-buck, regardless of how many bucks they actually end up spending.

So when you start to create media for value buyers, you’re going to want to showcase as much of your offering as you can in as much detail as you can. They’re going to binge all this content and mentally tally up the intangible value that they expect to receive for their investment.

Value buyers practically live in the guided discovery phase, so you want to make it a good experience with lots to explore. This is also a good opportunity to create a media environment with as little noise as possible so they can focus on just your offering without comparing it to the value they might get from anything else.

Just remember when you’re describing your offering to go beyond the nuts and bolts and tie everything back to the big picture of how your offering can make the customer’s life better.

That’s the real value they’re looking for, and they’re willing to pay accordingly.

content for convenience buyers

Convenience buyers need a solution quickly, and they don’t want to have to jump through a lot of hoops to get it.

When it comes to your content for these buyers, there should be a pretty direct line between consuming the content and making a purchase.

Bonus points if your content is able to even half-way solve their problem through its intrinsic value, leaving only the really technical or on-going support solution for you to accomplish with your offering.

Ultimately, if you know you’re creating content for convenience buyers, you should express:

1. an understanding of the situation that the buyer is in
2. how you can help them
3. and how they can take advantage of that help

And if you know exactly what the situation is that will have them looking for your solution in the first place, you’ll also be able to tailor the context of your content to target exactly the right people.

For a real-world example, just consider that this is basically the entire strategy of personal injury lawyers. If your audience is convenience buyers, you can probably take a few notes and adapt a few of those tactics to your situation, but maybe adjust the tone to match how you want to be perceived.

content for relationship buyers

Relationship buyers are your fans. They love you, they love what you do, they want to support you, and they want other people to know about you.

This type of customer is pretty common among small businesses because the face of the owner is usually pretty closely tied to the name of the business, which means the owner’s friends become a natural network of relationship buyers.

Another example would be local haunts like bars, coffeeshops, bookshops, etc., which are the type of experience offerings that people become regulars of, i.e. they make it their “spot.”

These type of buyers—with at least one caveat¹—are probably going to be your followers online. People who want to keep up with what you’re doing and show off their support via your branding or merch, or even organic UGC.

The easiest way to engage with these buyers through your media is to use your business’ social media content the same way you would use your personal social media. And frankly, it seems like this is what most small businesses default to because it feels the most natural.

But if we really took the time to sit down and think about what kind of content would actually benefit these loyal customers, I think we could be a lot more creative in the way we approach this natural followership than just posting about how adorable the office dog is or which account manager recently had a birthday.

Relationship buyers want to spend their attention on you.

Let’s respect their investment.

1. There is a subset of relationship buyers that I would call “status-quo buyers.” These are people like dental patients. The patient is committed to their dentist and returns because they are satisfied with the relationship they have, but, for the most part, they’re not super interested in what’s happening at the dental office in the six months between their regular appointments.
   If you really want to engage these buyers on a regular basis, you’re going to need to create content that has an outsized amount of intrinsic value for the audience. ↩︎

final thoughts on buyer types

Matching your content to your customers is about two things:

1. quickly and clearly communicating the specific critical information that each customer is looking for to make their purchase decision (price, value, action, personality)
2. making the customer feel seen in their specific state of mind during the buying process

But since people are never one buyer type exclusively, and your customers will be a mix of buyers to begin with, it’s important to have a mix of content that speaks to more than one of the buyer types.

If you rely too heavily on tactics for one buyer type, you risk alienating others. People who just want to see your smiling face will be turned off if all you’re posting about is promos and deals.

The key to communicating to various buyer types is to tailor your content to the customers who will be seeing it in any given context. So, for example, maybe the content which details your offering on your website is developed with value buyers in mind, while your social media content is developed with a view toward relationship buyers.

Finally, don’t forget to balance the scales.

If we were to plot the buyer types on a scale from emotional decision makers to intellectual decision makers, relationship and convenience buyers would be toward the emotional end of the spectrum, while price and value buyers would be at the intellect end. So be sure to add a little emotional weight into your content for the latter and some intellectual weight to the former.