When a potential customer recognizes they have a need, or a problem that needs to be solved, they go through a series of steps as a part of their decision process. Simple decisions go through this decision process at a rapid pace, while others require spending a longer amount of time at each stage.

So what are the steps of the decision process?

1. 1. Need Recognition
   2. Information Search
   3. Alternative Evaluation
   4. Purchase and Consumption
   5. Post-Purchase

In this blog post we’re talking about perceived risk, so we’ll focus on two stages: Information Search, and Post-Purchase, since this is where risk is addressed.

INFORMATION SEARCH

There are 5 types of perceived risk you need to be aware of, and think about how you can lower the risk for your potential customer to help them make a decision.

The 5 types of risk:

Performance Risk

Is the product going to work how you said it would? Does it have the level of functionality that was promised? Can you show data or comparisons of how your product works as compared to the competition?

Financial Risk

How much does your product or service cost? How much is it compared to alternatives? If your prices are higher than the competition, what is the value you bring to the product to make it worth it? The higher the cost, the more perceived risk there will be, so you have to be sure to point out why your product is top tier and worth the money.

Social Risk

This is the fear that other people will not have a positive view of the purchase you made as a buyer. Having a solid reputation online with people talking about your product or service can help to alleviate this risk.

Physiological Risk (Safety Risk)

Does your product or service have any risk of physical harm? A good example of this is cars. People seek out vehicles with a high safety rating because it has a high physiological risk and they want to be safe and secure.

Psychological Risk

How your buyer will feel if the product or service doesn’t convey the image they hoped it would. Make sure you position your product so that the perception of how the buyer should feel about it aligns with their expectations. A great example of this is how Betty Crocker turned around it’s failing sales of Instant cake mix, which was caused by the feeling of guilt. A Creativity Lesson From Betty Crocker.

Buyers don’t look at every risk when going through the purchase of a product or service. There is no checklist that they’re checking off, but as a rule of thumb the above list is risks that could be associated with your product or service. Being aware of what they are is important so you can address them early on in the decision making process.

The larger the value of the purchase, the more perceived risk a buyer has. This means they will do a lot more research, ask for recommendations of friends and family,  and seek out social proof online to make sure other people also have a good perception of your business.

POST PURCHASE BEHAVIOR

The last stage of the decision making process is post-purchase behavior. One of the worries of a buyer is that after they make a purchase, they’ll feel like they made a bad choice. This is called buyers remorse, or post purchase cognitive dissonance. It’s real and it’s a big reason consumers hold off on making a buying decision in the first place.

How can you reduce the risk that your customers will have buyers remorse?

Don’t over promise and oversell or your product or service or you’ll run into a lot of buyers remorse from your customers. They’ll be expecting one thing and get another, and that’s just not a good experience. Make it clear how to use the product or service. If it’s a complex software offer a support guarantee. If it’s a new-to-market product create videos so it’s clear how it should be used and what it’s intended purpose is.

To get out ahead of potential buyers remorse, make sure you provide your customers with plenty of options to lower their chance of being unhappy with their purchase and the risk of being ‘stuck’ with it.

• • Offer a money back guarantee to make them feel more confident in making the decision to buy, knowing that they have a way to avoid risk if it wasn’t the right ‘fit’.

• • Provide customer service to help them get on-boarded and set up to learn how to use your product or service.

• • If you sell a physical product, offer free returns and exchanges.
  • Use community groups to support customers. Closed Facebook groups have become very popular for this. It allows a place for users of your product to go to collaborate with one another, learn about product features, and help you learn about new features your customers are looking for. It’s useful for your customers because they feel like they have a place to get support, and it’s valuable to your business because it’s like a captive research panel for you to build and expand your product line.

By understanding the risks that your potential customers have about buying from your business you can address them through your marketing. The buyer is in control and they can seek out information to lower their risk in making a decision long before they ever speak directly with your business. Make sure you come up when they’re seeking out information, and build your reputation so social proof of others will speak for you.

If you need help with your positioning and marketing strategy, reach out to Purple Fish Marketing for a free 30 minute consultation. ← See what I did there? I just lowered your perceived risk by offering you a FREE consultation.

As always, Happy Marketing!

If your brand is trademarked, it’s important to apply for Amazon Brand Registry. Doing this allows you to have more control of your Amazon product listings and who sells on your listings.

Once your product is registered with Amazon brand registry, you have access to create a product listing using enhanced brand content.

Your product description can be more robust with images, use of more HTML formatting, and generally a more professional look than a standard product listing. You can also import videos to showcase the product and features.

Pay Per Click Advertising

In order for your product to get found in the millions and millions of products available on Amazon, you have to do a combination of Pay Per Click (PPC) and organic search optimization.

Amazon PPC allows you to be listed in the sponsored product sections of the Amazon website, which is usually at the top three slots at the top of the page, and interspersed through the organic listings. Make sure you are bidding high enough so your listing is showing up in the top three spots.

If you’ve ever done Google Pay Per Click advertising, you know that most people don’t search beyond the first page of results, and that’s the same with Amazon. If your organic or paid listings are not showing up on the first page you’re probably wasting money on ad spend.

When starting to run advertising on Amazon, you should use a combination of Manual and Auto campaigns. Manual campaigns allows you to run ads for keywords you know you want to show up for, and auto campaigns uses Amazon’s best judgement of keywords that are relevant to your product based on your product listing. You can use results from your auto campaign to add to your manual campaign terms. More about keywords is next…

Keyword Research

When you’re creating your product listing for the first time, it’s important to know the best keywords for your product and what you want to show up for in a search.

Using tools like Scope, or Viral Launch Keyword Research are great places to go to find relevant keywords. You can also use your best guess, or ask a friend what they would search for and see what the campaign results show.

Keywords are important because they will help you rank organically, meaning it will help you get found faster. It’s also important to use in your paid ads to help your product show up right away for the relevant keywords.

I won’t get into specifics in this post on reading your ad campaigns, but you should be looking for impressions on your keywords to understand how many times people are actually searching for a specific keyword.

Make sure your main keyword is in the title of your product description. This is the most important section of your entire product listing.

FBA vs. FBM

You may or may not be familiar with what these acronyms mean, so let me clarify. FBA is fulfilled by Amazon, and FBM is fulfilled by merchant.

It is always best to list your products FBA. By letting Amazon do the fulfillment of the product, the customer can take advantage of 2 day free prime shipping. Sales are typically higher when a product is listed as fulfilled by Amazon because the customer can get it faster (even if you can ship it fast, FBA is still perceived as the better option.) With this option, you send your products into an Amazon warehouse and they take care of all of the logistics, shipping, and customer service.

If you have excessively large products, or something with a short shelf life, then you might have to do fulfilled by merchant. In this case, you create your product listing the same way you would for any listing, but you are responsible for shipping the product when it sells.

External Traffic

Amazon likes external traffic that leads to a sale of your product on Amazon. They see it as highly relevant and will move your product up the organic ranks faster.

If you have an email list, don’t be afraid to direct traffic to your Amazon listing, even if you have a shopify or other ecommerce store. It will help in boosting your organic ranking, which will help in getting you found faster from people just searching within Amazon.

Also consider Facebook advertising as a great way to drive traffic directly to your product listing. Facebook has an incredible ad platform that allows you to target very specific types of people. Create a compelling offer or coupon for this audience to help get traffic to your listing and ultimately sales.

I hope this helped you get a glimpse of some of the things you need to know when navigating the Amazon platform. It’s an incredibly valuable platform to be on because of the sheer number of customers ready to buy and take advantage of PRIME shipping.

If you have questions or would like to know more, drop me a note at jason@purplefishmarketing.com or call 617-501-2706.

If you’re in the Boston area, I’d love to sit down for coffee and chat about how your products are doing online.

How do you build out these attributes? Research, talk to existing customers, or just use your best judgement of who you think they are. As you get more information you can add to the cards or change them to align with what you learn. It’s an evolution, not a once and done exercise.

• Character:
  • Give them a name, define what they do for work, are they a senior executive or a sales clerk, are they still in college, middle aged, retired senior citizen. As many descriptors and you can come up with to clearly define the “person type”. Be general but specific. For screenwriting it helped to be very descriptive because it helped define the personality better, so if the character was in a situation you had a better idea of how they’d react. Remember, you’re trying to create the ideal, not the generic audience.
    • For example: Jessica is a 25 year old waitress who is a creature of habit that wears red lipstick, has her hair tied back in a ponytail, and put on the same pair of brown flats every day. She’s optimistic, but introverted so she tends to keep to herself outside of work. She lives alone in a studio apartment in the city. Jessica takes leftover vegetables from the restaurant each night that she feeds to her pet iguana….
      • You can continue building out the persona with more details, habits, education, etc… You might not think every attribute is important, but it might help you develop a new piece of content.
• Location:
  • Where are they located? Are you focusing on the north east, the United States? Are they in an office building, homeowner, renter…? Is it hot weather or cold? Do they work at a small company or a large multinational?
• Object/Situation:
  • Do they use a mobile phone for most of their research, read the newspaper, look for expert opinion? Do they listen to a friend for recommendations or are they on the cutting edge and a leader in their field? Are they on Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest? Do they consume most of their news on LinkedIn or a niche forum? Do they work remote with a chromebook?
• Action:
  • What makes them take action? Are they just looking for a commodity item where the best price wins? Do they need to improve sales results and you have a product that answers that need? Is it a long term commitment or a simple purchase decision? What type of person is likely to take the action, are you reaching or targeting the decision maker?
• Theme:
  • Fill in the persons identity further. What do they like to do in their spare time, what drives them, do they have a family or are they single? Anything you can use to fill in the theme of this persons buying behaviors.

Take a look at each one of those areas and see if you can apply it to the type of person your business is trying to reach. In the “marketing world”, these descriptions are called personas and they can help to guide the content, blog posts, and stories that you write. Having a good description of the “ideal customer” you’re trying to reach will make your marketing efforts, branding strategy, and ultimately sales that much easier to achieve.

This process helps you in all aspects of marketing because it helps you understand what you should be writing about, the type of visuals a customer likes and more.

Have you created a marketing persona before? Have you had success with them? Have you created something similar to find and understand your target audience? Did it help with creating a relationship and engaging on Facebook or other social media?

Treat Me Like a Person

It sort of got me thinking about how to do marketing and still be human. We’re all human and we all have needs (Maslow’s hierarchy of needs anyone?), and we all want to be treated like people, not like consumers, or customers, or a new lead or prospect. We all know that happens, and we all know that eventually we are consumers, but wouldn’t you rather be treated like a person with your own personality, needs and wants, than a person that just needs to be sold to at all costs?

If I’m solving a problem for you, or offering a solution to your needs, I don’t want the solution to be forced onto you. It shouldn’t have to be a fight and you shouldn’t feel like you’re just a number. You should feel like, ‘hey this company has the solution I’m looking for and I feel comfortable working with them.’

A Blog with Personality

With that human element in mind I decided to talk about a blog that I read, Young House Love. I’m amazed every time I read it. Not because the content is exceptional, although I do think it’s great and interesting to me; but because they just write about life and the DIY projects they work on. They aren’t trying to sell anything directly, but they are selling themselves through the great stories they tell. The blog is their full time job, but it seems like they’re having fun and not pushing their readers or forcing them into a sale of some kind.

They organically grew their readership because they write naturally and talked about something they were interested in and passionate about. Having that passion and interest makes writing content that much easier and it helps to grow your audience because it doesn’t feel forced.

Marketing your business or yourself doesn’t have to be an in your face marketing approach. This is a case in point of a blog that started small and grew into a full time job and income for a family simply by being who they are; people passionate about DIY projects that were looking for a way to share with others.

So when you are trying to sell or market your product or service, try not to think about how you can make that sale, but think about how you can connect with people and show you’re passionate about what you do and what you sell.

Me Me Me!

If you do nothing but talk about me, me, me, then it’s a one sided conversation that will turn off those people that might have turned into potential buyers.

Help people discover their problems and needs, wow them with your passionate content, and communicate as a human and you will eventually see the rewards pay off.