"If you stop talking about your customers' problems, they stop paying attention to your brand." Donald Miller, StoryBrand
She blinked.
“What?”
You would have thought I had told her that her best friend died. I didn’t but in her mind it was pretty close.
“I don’t want my marketing message to be around losing weight. I want to help women change how they think about themselves.”
I get it.
I had the same complaint to my coach a week earlier. I just said it differently. “I have made the classic small business mistake,” I groused. “I am giving people what they need, not what they want.”
“How’s that working out for you?” She asked.
“Not so good,” I replied.
It’s just human nature. We see a need, and certainly, because the need is there, our fellow humans want it filled, right?
If that were true, marketing health and wellness coaching services would be a piece of cake.
People are tricky. They don’t always want the real problem to be solved.
They want what they think is the problem to be solved. (Did you get?) And it’s not just limited to coaching services.
· Accounting
· Getting out of debt
· Tutoring
· Weight loss
To name a few.
The truth is you can almost never sell people what they need. You can only sell people what they think they want, and then you give them what they need to change.
A great example of this is the weight loss sector. I remember years ago seeing weight loss clinics springing up everywhere.
Did people, mostly women, lose weight? Yes, they did. Did they keep the weight off? No, they didn’t because the root cause was never addressed.
These clinics taught women how to lose the weight, but the method wasn’t sustainable. That’s why all the weight came back and then some.
So, my frustrated client is on the right track. Change is all about mindset work. The trick is to dangle the right carrot, the one the would-be client will pay handsomely to solve their problem.
That’s why starting with a solution doesn’t work. (Check out an early post of mine, “Should You Talk About the Customer’s Problem?)
Our brains are wired to solve problems. That’s why marketing copy that only talks about a solution will fail.
The brain thinks in problems first followed by solutions.
You can never engage, connect, or trade money with people who don’t want your solution.
How to Get Your Niche to Listen to You
To get your niche sit up and take notice of you, you must focus on ONE problem they want solved.
That’s how you get a cold audience—one that doesn’t know, like, or trust you yet—to pay attention.
Focus on the one problem they want solved and use it in your marketing. From your website to ads to social media marketing, warm up a cold audience by showing them you understand their problem.
Dig deep.
· How long have they had this problem?
· How has it impacted their lives?
· How do they feel about it?
· Have they tried to overcome this problem but have failed repeatedly? Why?
· What do they believe about this problem?
The more you demonstrate you really understand them, the more their defenses will fade away.
That’s how real connections are made. Once you’ve made that connection, the real work can begin.
Need some coaching around creating a marketing message that gets would-be clients saying, “Yes, I want to work with you!”? Let’s talk about it with my free 30-minute consult. I’ll give you at least 3 marketing strategies you can use to create the right message for you and your audience. 100% non-salesy!
Comments