Step #4 to kick-starting your inbound marketing: Develop A Consistent Marketing Message Your Ideal Client Can Understand
Often, we ask business owners what they do and who they help. We also ask key members of the organization these same questions.
The sad fact of the matter is a huge portion of businesses can’t explain, simply and clearly, who they help and the problems they solve. Worse yet, many people within the same organization will give different and conflicting answers to these question.
If you can’t explain who you are and what you do, how is a customer supposed to figure out if you can help them?
What’s the problem with this lack of clarity? Everything. You often have a very limited window of time to explain who your business helps and how you help them. When you give long, confusing and conflicting answers, prospective customers and clients get turned off.
So what should you do? According to business expert Ian Altman, you need to focus NOT on jargon, services, company structure, etc. Simply focus your core message on the PROBLEMS YOU SOLVE for your ideal client.
For example, we could say 3Rhino Media is a company that offers digital, social media and inbound marketing services. But what the does that mean? Many people end up asking “What is digital marketing?” and “What is inbound marketing?”. If you aren’t a marketer, these terms are a bit confusing, right?
So instead of talking about ourselves, we used Ian’s method to focus our answers to the questions on our clients. Here is an example of what we might say:
“Clients come to us when they are sick and tired of feeling overwhelmed, confused and really, really stuck with their marketing. They don’t know what works today. Is it the Yellow Pages? Magazine Ads? Social Media? eMail? etc.?
Our clients have great products. They have great services. They have great ethics and are motivated. But they have struggled trying to figure out how to let the right people (prospective buyers) know what they do and how they can help them. They feel like the world of marketing is smoke and mirrors and they are tired of being sold on ideas they don’t understand. They want to focus on running their business and having an agency they can completely trust.
We help these people solve these problems. How?
We help clients get crystal clear on who they absolutely need to connect with, why they must connect with them and how to effectively and efficiently reach them when they need their product or service.”
Do you see the difference? When we speak from the perspective of our customers, we connect with them more deeply. And when we connect with them more deeply, every marketing is more powerful, more focused and more meaningful.
Take the time to answer from your ideal customers’ perspective. Do this, and your marketing will become easier to produce and much more effective.
ACTION STEP
So answer this …
What do you do … Why do your ideal clients seek you out? It it because they are tired of having companies speak at them rather than listen to them? Are they sick of having companies use jargon and language they don’t understand and makes them feel dumb? Are they confused by all the options available for your product or service?
In our next video we’ll talk about identifying your ideal customer.
Here’s to your success!
