When you ask someone who their customer is, they give you a demographic.
Here’s why you don’t want to avoid this. At least not at first.
In a crowded market (which is most markets you will deal with today) you cannot put the product on the stage. Doing so will lower your results.
Instead, you want to put your customer on the stage.
When the market is crowded, customers aren’t asking “What product is best?”
They’re asking, “Do they see me?”
And they will follow the one who understands them the most.
This is my modification and expansion of Eugene Schwartz’s stages of market sophistication.
Watch, enjoy and apply.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
You will want to have read [The Feature & The Benefit] first to fully utilize this post.
This post is the foundation of how I consistently attain great results.
When I am asked to review copy, or asked to review marketing that’s not working well, the same factors show up all the time. But all these things rest one poorly structured foundation – the targeting is unfocused.
No Such Thing
I want to make this clear – THERE IS NO SUCH THING as a successful marketing campaign or a high converting sales letter which is NOT focused.
In other words, the one quality you will always find in good marketing, is FOCUS. How focused? Hyper-focused.
You give me a high-effective marketing campaign and I will show you a focused marketing campaign.
How To Focus
I use this technique to build a marketing campaign and to make copy as focused as it needs to be.
I reduce everything to one thing. I have a checklist of items which make marketing campaigns and sales letters powerful, and I try to ensure each checklist item is focused on one thing.
Most coaches and experts cannot do this.
They then to be too immersed in their craft to see it from the view of the customer.
They forgot what it’s like to NOT know all they know. I am no exception.
I struggle with this all the time. I’m sharing with you what I do to break out of this.
The Checklist
I’m not going to go through the entire checklist, but I will start with the most important items.
You can look at these items like the soil.
You can have the best seeds, but if you don’t have good soil, it won’t matter.
The soil is the thing most people will overlook. Most people go goo-goo-gaga over the seeds. Ok here goes:
- WHO is the ONE prospect?
- WHAT is the ONE pain he/she is experiencing which you solve?
- What is the ONE promise you can make to this prospect?
Now, please remember I have a few hundred more I can list. But their power, their effectiveness COMES from getting the best answers to the above questions.
I DO NOT SPEND ANY TIME, ENERGY or EFFORT on ANYTHING ELSE UNTIL THESE THREE QUESTIONS ARE FLUSHED OUT.
Let me repeat…
I DO NOT SPEND ANY TIME, ENERGY or EFFORT on ANYTHING ELSE UNTIL THESE THREE QUESTIONS ARE FLUSHED OUT.
I DO NOT SPEND ANY TIME, ENERGY or EFFORT on ANYTHING ELSE UNTIL THESE THREE QUESTIONS ARE FLUSHED OUT.
I DO NOT SPEND ANY TIME, ENERGY or EFFORT on ANYTHING ELSE UNTIL THESE THREE QUESTIONS ARE FLUSHED OUT.
If I do not have a specific answer to each one of those questions, and I cannot see it will provide the greatest sales power for you, I will not move forward.
I can’t know the answer to any other question until I find the answers to these questions.
Every single marketing element – the hook, the tagline, the headline, the story, the bullets, the call to action, the traffic strategy, etc. etc.
They all depend on knowing the answers to the above questions.
Power Of One
The key to your marketing power is to reduce the answers to those questions to ONE thing.
ONE prospect, ONE pain, ONE promise.
Once your answers start to include more than one you start to lose.
Once your answers start to sound like Blah, blah, blah, you lose horsepower.
Most marketing and most copy I review does the opposite of reducing things to ONE.
Most marketing tries to be everything to everyone.
Reduce the answers down to ONE item and make it SPECIFIC.
You don’t help people “lose weight,” you help people lose 10 pounds. Specific.
And it’s ONE thing.
The ONE Thing
You build powerful, sustainable, and profitable marketing, your marketing must focus on ONE thing.
NOT women 30 – 50. That’s not ONE person.
The Unique Identifier
It is and always will be a HUMAN making the purchasing decision.
If you can make a person feel unique, you will increase your chances of closing them.
Therefore you want your marketing to focus on ONE person.
You want your prospect to be the one who reads or sees your marketing and feels it is EXACTLY him or her you are speaking to.
When you attain this, it is an almost hypnotic trance you put the prospect into.
But getting this reduction to one, is challenging for most people. It felt like a root canal for me.
After doing it so many times, I got better and better at it. Eventually I started seeing so many patterns, I could identify the prospect from a distance, and just tell my client who it should be.
But when you are learning this, these tools help you reduce your prospect base down to ONE person.
I call it, the unique identifier.
A unique identifier is something which makes the prospect feel unique.
It’s something your prospect will immediately connect with and say, “Yeah, I’m not like everyone else, this makes me unique.”
If you can find any ONE or more of these identifiers you are doing good!
- Age
- Gender
- Position
- Pain
- Circumstance
- Event
- Passion
- Community
- Location (For local marketing)
Age
When I say age, I am not talking about demographics.
Forget about demographics. DO NOT USE DEMOGRAPHICS.
Demographics are IMPERSONAL.
When I say age, I am talking about a phase in a person’s life.
This lends itself well in certain situations and less in others.
If I talk about natural health services and I say the prospect is a 30-year-old female, the reality of a 30-year-old female is a universe apart from the reality of a 50-year-old female.
The 30-year-old possesses a different set of values and daily experiences connected to her age compared to the 50-year-old.
The term 30-year-old” or “30-something” connotes a LOT of things in this market.
So does the term, “50-something”
The same is true in the dating market.
Dating for a 20-year-old dude is different from dating for a 50-year-old dude.
A 20-year-old will not consider himself the same in any way to a 50-year-old when it comes to dating.
The reverse is true. So, this is how age can be used to reduce your prospect base.
Circumstance
A circumstance is defined as, “a fact or condition that affects a situation.”
So, what is an example of this?
What about divorce?
Let’s take the dating market again.
“Dating advice for a recently divorced man” is an example of how a circumstance creates a unique identifier for your prospect.
“Dating advice for a recently divorced man” will have a powerful effect on a recently divorced man and will have little effect on a 20-year-old single guy trying to end up with more dates.
Here’s another example: Let’s take infertility.
It’s a fact or condition. And it will affect a woman who wants to have children right (a situation)?
If you are a health coach who knows how to fix this, and you call yourself a “health coach” you won’t succeed in a scalable way.
But if you say “you help women with fertility problems get pregnant” you will have a far greater response from these women.
Circumstance is a way to reduce your prospect base down to one.
Position
In certain cases, a powerful unique identifier is the position or title your prospect holds.
In this case, your solution addresses people in this position – regardless of age or circumstance.
For example: A CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
This can be a man or a woman, 30 or 50 years old, divorced, single or happily married, but if the pain he or she is feeling is tightly intertwined with his/her position, then it becomes a unique identifier.
Sometimes the title or position of the person affects their lifestyle so much that by focusing on a position, the prospect believes you understand the nuances he/she is going through.
So, your prospects position is a way to reduce your audience down to ONE.
Pain
In some cases, the type of pain your prospect is experiencing is identification enough to make them feel unique.
For example, erectile dysfunction – it doesn’t matter what position, age, etc. It’s enough to eclipse anything else in terms of making your prospect feel you are speaking only to them.
So, this is another way to reduce your prospect base in your marketing.
You can reduce it by crystalizing the pain. Only prospects experiencing this specific pain will raise their hands.
A Major Event
Let’s use relationships as an example again.
A breakup, a divorce, your spouse initiating a lawsuit for custody of children, a death of your child, spouse, your child, are examples of major events.
These are major events.
If the core of your marketing message hits at this major event, the prospect will feel deep rapport.
Passion
Your prospect may be someone who is highly passionate about something.
This can also be a powerful identifier.
For example, I have some friends who love golf.
Now, keep in mind, they are not good at it and freely admit it.
But it doesn’t matter. They love it. They are passionate about it.
They have opinions, beliefs, arguments, points of contention, you name it.
That’s what happens when you talk to someone who is passionate about something.
They see the subject they are passionate about as part of their identity.
So, this is a unique identifier as well.
Community
If your prospect’s identity is tied to a community, then the community will be a powerful unique identifier.
I’ve talked to individuals who are from a certain tribe of Native American Indians.
They always talk about this with pride.
The community is part of their identity in a deep way.
I’ve talked to fraternity brothers, and they talk the same way about their brotherhood and their fraternity. Part of their identity is tied to this community.
Recovering alcoholics are another clear example.
Especially if they are in AA. If they are in AA, they even speak a lingo only known to this community.
In the US, the fans of a football team are another good example of this.
It is also a combination of having a passion.
But some of these fans see themselves as part of a community of fans.
In the UK, the same is true for soccer.
In a bar during a game, you can witness bromances developing between complete strangers right in front of your eyes.
This is an identifier a prospect will consider himself or herself unique or different than the rest in some way.
Location
This last one is best used if you serve a local geographic area.
I see a lot of local coaches or business owners NOT using this in their marketing.
They should.
There is something about being in a geographic locality which unites the residents and gives them a certain identity.
In one way or another, they feel they have a unique culture, or identity, and it provides a sense of identity or uniqueness. So, using a local geographic location to reduce your audience down to one is another means.
Now, I specifically used the word LOCAL.
There is a point where a geographic area becomes too big and it doesn’t feel local. The word “local” in this context refers to a feeling of being local.
Combining Them
When you start to look at your audience and all the different people you coached, you can start to narrow it down.
Use the above unique identifiers to help you.
You one or two or more and create a combination.
Dating advice for divorced dads in their 50’s.
Can you see how it combines a few of these unique identifiers together? Can you see how powerful it is?
It is specific.
If you are one of those divorced dads, you will subconsciously raise your hand. It will be hard to resist.
This is what irresistible marketing is all about.
The One Pain
If you have your audience reduced to ONE, you can now reduce the pain they are feeling to ONE.
Let’s find the ONE pain they wish they could wave a magic wand and make disappear.
Once you reduce your audience down to one, you’ll discover that ONE prospect can have many pains and frustrations.
You want to find the ONE pain which hurts the most which your coaching solves.
To determine this, I ask my clients to ask their prospect this: If you had ONE thing you wanted to solve or resolve, what would it be?
And when you ask enough prospects this question – you will see the same answer come up over and over.
That’s it.
That’s the ONE pain.
In a later exercise, we want to develop the various ways the customer expresses the ONE pain, but for now, we only want to know what it is.
The Promise
This is another foundational marketing element often butchered to pieces.
In most cases, there is no clear promise.
If the prospect cannot see it, feel it, or get it in less than 1 second, it is NON-EXISTENT.
Here are good examples:
5 Hour Energy – Here the name of the product itself is the promise.
Your pizza will be delivered within 30 minutes or it’s FREE – this is the Domino’s promise.
Almost everyone in the US still remembers this.
Dominos stopped using this for a long time, but the fact that almost all Americans remember it, and identify it with the Domino’s brand, is a testament to the power of a good clear promise.
Overnight delivery – This is a promise owned by FedEx.
It’s promise, like the Dominos promise, created a whole industry.
We have the largest supply of books online – this is Amazon’s claim to fame. You want to read it; we will have it.
Ready to use out of the box – this was Apple’s promise with their desktops and notebooks.
Whether they know it or not, your prospect has ONE thing they want to hear.
I simply ask my prospects what they want.
And this is how I ask it: “If I could wave a magic wand and give you ONE wish, what would you want?”
Of course, you are saying this in the context of their pain point.
If someone is losing all their hair, and they have told you their pain point with their hair, now you ask, “If I could wave a magic wand and you had ONE wish granted to you for your hair loss, what would you wish for?”
The prospect would say something like, “I want to get my hair looking like it did in my teens. I want a thick head of hair.”
Redefining The Promise
Sometimes the wish you keep hearing cannot be delivered.
Maybe the technology is not invented yet.
So, you can ask for another lesser wish.
You can say, “Ok what if this wish could not be granted, what would you wish for then?”
You would hear something like, “OK, well, I’d settle for stopping my hair loss” Do you see how that works?
And I also hope you recognize how important this step is.