Understanding Motivations and Needs: The Key to Any Successful Online Marketing Program

A person who is online is looking to satisfy a need.

Whether it is a product, information, entertainment or just wasting time, people online have motivations for their actions.

Let's look at the quintessential analysis of a person's needs, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs:

Although online users aren't regularly on the internet to fulfill the basic human needs above (though you could make an argument for that) they do have specific things that they are looking to satisfy, some of which curtail with Maslow's model:

Your marketing likely centers around the bottom level of the pyramid shown above, but the motivations for many users don't sit within that single layer.

Unless someone is specifically looking for your product or service, it does no good to offer it to them. Their motivation simply isn't there.

One might argue that you can convince someone to buy, even if their motivation hasn't manifested itself. However, if you think about what really motivates these sales/actions, it likely falls in a different category. For example, you may be able to capture sales by offering a promotion or special offer, but were you really answering a need for the product or were you actually appealing to someone's desire to feel good about saving money and getting a deal? If you think about it that way, you're actually appealing to their highest form of need, self actualization (saving money makes the user feel good, and saving money helps their ultimate goals).

Too often online marketers get caught up in making something that sounds catchy, looks good, or simply shouts their own message without taking into account the users' needs and motivations.

If you're an online marketer, your audience falls somewhere within this pyramid. The question is, does your product, service or message fulfill any of these needs beyond just selling? Even more important, do you understand your audience motivations, and are you responding to them?

Questions you need to ask yourself when planning online marketing:

What are my targets audiences' possible motivations? 
Why are they online and why would they be interested in what I'm saying? 
Why would they click on my ad? 
What can I give them or say that satisfies their needs throughout the hierarchy?
How can I translate their motivations to build results?

Understanding and responding to your audience's needs and motivations online will reveal new opportunities for success from your online marketing and web channels.