Aligning mindmaps with your customer’s

What do I mean by mindmap? In the context of marketing we mean a persons perspective on something based on their own personal experiences and belief systems. So why should we care as marketeers? Well, understanding your target audience’s mindmap is critical to understanding their needs/wants/desires/motivations. Understanding this will able you to make smart marketing decisions. You can decided that a particular customer group may simply not have a mindmap that is aligned with your offering and further more it’s so out of alignment that they just aren’t your target group of customers at all. Nothing wrong with that. However, on the other hand, understanding a customers mindmap that is only slightly out of alignment with your offering may mean you simply have to make some adjustments to your offering, or better still, adjust your marketing messages.

Take, for example, website design. Now there’s lots of people and company’s doing that. Ourselves included. We offer our services to medium sized companies, particularly those in the technology sectors. Now take a company that has not embraced the internet, has no interest in the internet and never will (yes they do exist). Their mind map is so out of alignment with our offering, they just aer not our target group.

Make sure you at least try to profile your customers mindmap (not always easy but insightful market research can help hugely). This will help you be in better alignment with your target group and consequently your marketing spend will be working harder.