Getting the most from your marketing

Effective marketing works when it is guided by insight and intention. By understanding your customers, highlighting the benefits of what you offer, and tracking meaningful results, your marketing can connect with the right people and help your business to grow.

Knowing your customers

Marketing works best when you truly know the people you are trying to reach. It is not enough to rely solely on numbers and demographics. Research from Harvard Business School shows that businesses that align their products and messaging with real customer insights achieve significantly better growth and brand loyalty.

This means understanding your customers on a personal level and seeing the world through their lens: what problems keep them up at night, what outcomes they value most, and how your product or service can genuinely improve their lives. Simple actions like surveys, customer interviews, and observing behaviour on social media can reveal insights that numbers alone cannot. Tailoring your marketing to these personal insights ensures your messaging resonates and builds stronger connections with your audience.

Benfits over features

Once you understand your customers, the next step is making sure your marketing is talking to them, not at them. This means showing why your product or service matters to them personally rather than simply listing what it does. Features describe what something is or what it can do, for example, “Our software tracks inventory in real time.” Benefits explain what that feature actually does for the customer, such as “Spend less time managing stock and more time focusing on growing your business.”

By focusing on benefits, your audience can see the real value of your offering. It makes your messaging more engaging and relatable because customers can immediately understand how it will solve their problems or improve their lives. This approach strengthens the connection with your audience and makes your marketing more persuasive.

Measure what matters

Once you understand your customers and are communicating the benefits of your product or service, it is important to see whether your marketing is achieving its goals. Key performance indicators, or KPIs, help you track progress. Some metrics, such as likes, shares, or page views, are useful for building a community and engaging your audience. However, these can also become vanity metrics if the KPIs that truly matter, like enquiries, leads, or sales conversions, are not moving.

Focusing on meaningful KPIs allows you to see what is really working, identify areas for improvement, and make informed decisions about where to invest your marketing efforts. This ensures your campaigns are not just generating numbers but actually driving growth and results for your business.

Want your marketing to really hit the mark? Let’s have a chat about understanding your customers and turning those insights into growth.