Why it's not about what you know, but what your customers are asking.
This is a problem that I hear about time and time again, with clients saying to me,
"But Jo, I'm telling my audience all the time about what I know, and I'm just not getting any traction."
Here's the thing:
Customers don't know what they need.
They just know that they have a problem.
If you can solve that problem with your thing - be it a product, service, whatever - then you have a conversation and the opportunity to invite them to work with you.
Telling them how awesome you are and using industry-specific language and jargon might make you look smart to your peers, but it's not going to help solve their problem.
Speaking directly to their issue is going to help. both them and you.
They get the answers to the problems they have, and you build an audience of fans who turn into clients.
Let's take a peek at how that might look:
For example, imagine you are selling a holistic yoga service that helps to deal with stress, unblocks creativity, and gets people to a different life state.
Your clients don't know that they need yoga, so they probably wouldn't be looking for you.
All they know is that they're feeling stressed, tired, and burnt out or their creativity is blocked.
So if you can speak directly to those issues and show them an answer?
Boom, now that's a gamechanger.
It's so simple when you think about it, but we so easily get bogged down with platforms, content for content's sake, wheel spinning, and getting no-where.
(hands up if you can relate).
Search around for questions that are already being asked around the problems your clients have.
For example, you can look on AnswerthePublic.com to search for questions around the issues your target peeps have, and you can answer them in your way.
(watch a video on how to do that right here)
That's how you start to build your audience - knowing who you are, what makes you brilliant, and how that actually relates to the problems your clients have.
Be aware, too, of just talking about what you think your peeps need to know.
Really go deep and speak to people who are your ideal clients; have conversations with them on live streams as realtime focus groups, or in messages, emails - heck, even the real world - and find out what's really bugging them.
Look at their language.
Look at the things that they talk about.
They don't know that they need your service, necessarily, but something is keeping them up at night.
If you have the answer to that thing and you can help them out with a burning desire to make it better, then you can show them the solution to that problem.
That's all marketing is.
It's having a solution to a problem and showing people that you have that solution.
We can over-complicate things so easy by worrying about the content, and platforms and know, like, trust factors and all of those things.
Go back to basics, guys.
Think "What do my customers need? How can I tell them how to solve that problem in a way that sounds like me?" .
That's pretty much it.
For example, my clients might not know that they need a personal brand, that they need to ignite their brilliance or to brand their brilliance, but they would know, for example, that:
- They need more confidence
- They need ways to get seen more easily
- They might need to have a bigger authority on and offline
- They know they want to stand a better chance of getting a promotion at work
- They want to be a standout individual in their field.
Those things they know.
That's what's keeping them up at night.
Then I can show them the answers around branding their brilliance, really seeing their brilliance and then articulating that to the workplace, on and offline, and also in their own lives.
I have the tools to help them stand in their own brilliance.
I just need to show them the toolkit.
What about YOU?
What are your clients actually asking?
What problems do you really solve?
Let's go back to basics - good old marketing basics - and then we can build the content back up from there.