Marketers aren't storytellers; we're story sellers. And the most effective way to sell a story is to connect with a person.
How successful you'll be depends on building emotional intimacy.
The secret to intimacy? Appeal to what the person most needs. Show them you really get them.
Need help to make what you do relevant? Move the conversation away from you, the marketer, to the people you serve.
The cheat? Customer Empathy Maps paired with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
Focusing on a need and developing your narrative around that need transforms your writing from an impersonal pitch to a personable conversation.
get in your customers' heads.
Before jumping to a need, how well do you know your ideal customer?
When it comes to Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing, you have at least two customers.
what matters to the business you're selling to?
The first is the type of business you're selling to. For example, bootstrapped, pre-market fit startups will evaluate your product and service differently than a public Fortune 500 company.
Based on where in a growth cycle an organization is (launch, growth, shake out, maturity, decline) and where their product is on the technology adoption cycle (innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, traditionalists), you can generalize business needs and marketplace influences.
But you can't stop there. Even in B2B marketing, you're engaging with humans.
who are the people involved in a sale?
Unlike Business-to-Consumer (B2C) marketing, your ideal customer is not a single person. More likely, you'll have:
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the person who uses your product,
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the manager who authorizes the budget for your product,
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the person who cuts the check to pay for your product,
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and the person in legal who signs off on either the manager or end user speaking publicly about how your product solves challenges their organization faced.
You'll want to step into the shoes of everyone involved in the purchase decision to craft stories that grab your ideal customer. Complete an empathy map for each person.
The priority and order in which you craft your stories will depend on your go-to-market (GTM) strategy.
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If you're product-led, you may start with the end users, for example, developers.
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If you're founder-led, you might want to start with their peer (CEO) or who they are contacting based on their background (front-end or back-end team leads or principal engineers).
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If you're sales-led, you may focus on department heads, for example, the VP of Engineering or CTO, instead of an individual developer.
choose the right need.
At any moment, your potential customer is either trying to avoid pain or achieve a gain.
However, your potential customers aren't all the same.
Depending on someone's role, they have different needs. What troubles a CFO versus what keeps someone in DevOps up at night differs.
This means you can position what you offer in multiple ways.
For the team that keeps their business's infrastructure available, which is more powerful?
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equivalent of health, a biological and physiological need for a business, stable and available infrastructure.
Our platform-as-a-service (PaaS) has a 99.99% availability guarantee.
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love and belonging need for the business's team: worry-free time to spend with family.
Never again worry about being off-grid with your family with a 99.99% available PaaS.
So, how do you choose the need to pull on for connecting with your customers? Take a look at the Empathy Map you or a colleague created.
Your ideal customer may have multiple needs that your product or service meets at any one time. Often, one need must be met first.
What should you do if there's no clear need? Test. Try a couple of messages based on various needs and compare the results. Choose the strongest and focus on it. Including every need in your story muddies your message.
DEFICIENCY NEEDS (D-NEEDS).
Deficiency needs arise from scarcity. Your ideal customer seeks to fill these needs. For example, when we’re struggling to put food on the table, our physiological need might precede an aesthetic need.
Physiological needs, Safety needs, Love and Belongingness needs, and Esteem needs are all deficiency needs.
Your customer doesn’t need to have met all lower-level needs before focusing on their higher-level needs. An AI program that transforms still images into video satisfies a customer's Self-Actualization need to create. But, if the program is constantly offline, the Esteem need for control may take priority.
In actuality, we cycle up and down through the levels depending on the realities of our lives. For some, the higher-level needs always take precedence over other needs, think the starving artist troupe or activists who repeatedly put themselves in harm’s way or go on hunger strikes.
BEING NEEDS (B-NEEDS).
In Maslow’s original hierarchy, Self-Actualization needs were at the top of the pyramid and the only growth needs.
Maslow later expanded this hierarchy to include four levels of growth needs: Cognitive needs, Aesthetic needs, Self-Actualization, and Transcendence needs.
Many online resources (and business books) use the original pyramid despite Maslow's additions/adjustments in the 1960s-1970s.
This means a quick search on the Internet yields few in-depth discussions or explanations of Cognitive or Aesthetic needs.
refer to a needs inventory.
When drafting your messaging, having a list of needs is convenient for jumpstarting your team's brainstorming.
To help you find the right need(s) to meet for your customers, we've put together an inventory of 86 needs, broken out by whether they're deficiency or growth needs–including Cognitive and Aesthetic needs.
This reference is not meant to be exhaustive. It’s just a jumping-off point for creativity to get you thinking about your ideal customer.
PHYSIOLOGICAL NEEDS.
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to breathe air to stimulate appetite
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to meet one’s body’s water requirements
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to signal threat to keep healthy and energetic
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to maintain a sense of well-being that allows for self-care
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to preserve human life to protect one’s self from the elements
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to attract the attention of potential sexual partners
SAFETY NEEDS.
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to feel safe and secure; to remain secure or safe from any harm
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to ensure the safety of others close to us
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to “feel comfortable and safe, confident [one] will come to no harm physically, psychologically, or financially, by interacting with products.”
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to ensure safe evacuation from interior spaces in case of emergency
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to assure one will be protected from danger; to protect one’s self from potential harm
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to have a safe environment to grow up in “to make decisions about your life based on ways to improve it and society rather than based on survival ...
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to speak up about your needs should that need arise ...
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to let go of toxic people who bring one down ...
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to identify and manage how one feels“
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to reduce the uncertainty of the future and one’s life “
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to be financially independent so that one can pay necessary utility bills and other unavoidable financial burdens ...
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to boost financial safety and encourage savings for future financial security”
LOVE AND BELONGING (SOCIAL) NEEDS.
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to learn to enjoy, love, and care for one’s self
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to bond with another person; to build attachments with others and feel comforted by others' presence
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to feel one belongs to a social group; to feel less lonely
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to share sorrows and happiness with another
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to avoid or diminish a mental illness such as depression or anxiety
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to develop a good friendship; to achieve a feeling of elevated kinship; to find a partner for marriage
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to search for purpose among one’s friends, family, and significant others
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to want to be part of something bigger than one’s self
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to work cooperatively with others on a project; to bond by working together to accomplish goals
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to build brand communities that allow customers to feel like they belong to something
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to influence someone; to give and receive attention to and from others
ESTEEM NEEDS.
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to develop character and inner confidence
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to instill a feeling of self-respect and pride; to believe in one’s skills and abilities
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to achieve validation and acceptance from others; to know one is doing a good job and that a teacher/manager is happy with them
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to desire acceptance in society and social status; to gain recognition and fame in one’s social circle
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to gain the respect and appreciation of others
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to be competent; to be recognized by one’s manager or receive a good appraisal/ performance review
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“to help open up opportunities to advance in one’s career”
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“to participate in decision making on operational matters in one’s workplace ...
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to acquire symbols of accomplishment such as job title, corner office, and so on”
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to have a significant and long-lasting effect; to believe one contributes to society in some way
COGNITIVE NEEDS.
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to learn more about a subject of interest; to seek knowledge and increase our intelligence
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to learn about news and stay updated with current issues
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to hunger for exploration and knowledge; “to discover something new, or invent a new technology, solve a complex problem.”
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“to organize one’s experience meaningfully; to structure relevant situations in meaningful, integrated ways ...
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to understand and make reasonable the experiential world;” to gain “a better understanding of the world ...
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to learn, explore, and welcome experiences in life”
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“to know and to understand one’s self; to get a better understanding of one’s self, of the world around them, and their place in it”
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to know our past, comprehend puzzles of current existence, and predict the future
AESTHETIC NEEDS.
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“to enjoy and promote the beauty of human environment”
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to create rhythm and harmony
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to have an appreciation for the arts
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to look for the underlying meaning in art
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to encourage mental stimulation through visual design to allow creativity to flow and spark imagination; to promote creative thinking and problem-solving
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to try out emotional expression; to experiment with pretend and dramatic play
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“to discover new ways of looking at, listening to, moving in, and speaking of one’s everyday experiences ...
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to combine mind and emotion, cognition and sensory experience, analysis and intuition toward understanding something as a whole;” to engage the senses
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to appreciate and search for beauty, balance, and form; to have a desire for beauty and order
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“to explore the beauty of nature”
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“to refresh one’s self in the presence and beauty of nature while carefully absorbing and observing one’s surroundings to extract the beauty that the world has to offer”
SELF-ACTUALIZATION NEEDS.
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to realize one’s full potential and achieve the “ideal self;” to become everything one is capable of being
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to increase one’s psychological wellness
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to feel secure and unashamed in who one is to tolerate uncertainty with better preparedness
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to be able to solve problems
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to have a strong sense of aim or goal and self-awareness; to have a sense of purpose and regularly work towards a purpose
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to lack prejudice
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to accurately perceive reality both as it pertains to one’s self and others
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to demonstrate empathy and compassion for others to experience childlike wonder or an ongoing appreciation of the goodness of life
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to find humor in a given situation
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to accept oneself and others to make and sustain deep relationships
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to promote a work environment where employees can get desired opportunities
TRANSCENDENCE NEEDS.
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to go beyond oneself or the selfish Self; to put your own needs aside to serve something greater than yourself
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to create a society without any racism
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to be able to be unpopular when it is the right thing to be
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to stand up for freedom at the risk of one’s own life
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to embrace and accept one’s own past into one’s present self
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to become one’s own mother and father to one’s self
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to reach for heaven, nirvana, the stars
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to feel connected to others, to God and the universe
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to rise to the realm of the possible as well as of the actual
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