7 Secret Buying Motivators — Part 1

What do you need to know about your customers, so they’re guaranteed to buy from you over and over again?

When it comes to buying anything, from simple needs to expensive machinery, different buying motivators influence the decisions people make.

Understanding what makes your customers tick, simplifies any niche marketing strategy.

Luckily, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Tons of psychological research has already gone into identifying some of the most common buying motivators.

What you’ll discover here are seven secret buying motivators — some of the most powerful and universal ingredients that influence customer’s buying behaviors.

As effective, and savvy marketers, your job is firstly to understand and recognize these incredibly powerful reasons for buying. Then, when you grasp what drives your customers’ decision-making, you can better position your products and services to appeal to their wants and needs!

When it comes to buying anything, it all boils down to the power of buying motivators.

What are Buying Motivators?

“Why did I buy this? I don’t even like it!” Have you ever stood in front of your closet door, pondering the contents and asking yourself that question?

Sometimes the choices we make are puzzling and inexplicable even to ourselves.

Puzzling and inexplicable, that is until you step back and consider your buying motivators.

Perhaps you purchased the offending outfit in question because you thought it would make you look more professional, enhancing your chances for promotion.

That’s the need for power and control, manifested in clothing.

Or perhaps you picked out that outfit with another need in mind: motivated by the need for love and sex, you purchased clothing to make you irresistible!

Buying motivators are the reasons that we, as individuals, make the decisions we make.

There are lots of names for buying motivators: they’re called motivations, or reasons, influences. For this report, we’ll call them buying motivators because we’re concerned about business decisions.

To understand buying motivators, you have to know that what we’re really talking about here is simply an expression of somebody’s needs.

You purchase products or services in a certain way, at a certain time, to fulfill a need — that’s buying motivators in a nutshell.

Let’s quickly delve a little deeper to understand a well-known theory that categorizes the needs that drive people — motivations. I am referring to the classic “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.”

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a fundamental marketing concept that states we all have needs and that these needs are arranged in levels.

First and foremost are the needs tied to survival.

Once those needs are met, we progress up the levels to needs of most interest to most small business owners: the needs for safety, security, esteem, and beauty. These are the needs that drive most purchasing decisions.

From Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, social scientists and researchers have derived almost endless combinations of needs and motivations in an effort to explain why we act the way we do.

From this wealth of motivations, I’ve selected seven. These seven are the most universal powerful motivators. Taken alone or in combination, these motivators underlie almost all purchasing behavior.

In Parts 2 and 3, I’ll share the Seven Secret Buying Motivators that most influence your target audience to press the “buy” button.