Of course you know this. You know it’s about your audience and what they need to know about your business. How you can help them, how you can tell them about your business and its benefits to them.
Except that is still about you. You’re still looking at it from your perspective. The focus is on your business and how it can help your audience. Not the other way around. And that’s where the misconnection may be happening.
Perception is everything.
How your audience interprets what you’re saying and, when and how they receive that information is the most important part of the process. You can have the best product, the best message, the best looking assets but if they’re received wrongly, all that effort is redundant.
This is the biggest mistake we come across when helping businesses. Everyone says to us "We’re telling people about ourselves already but it isn’t working." And what we usually find is that focus is wrong. They’ve just been talking about themselves without realising it.
Sure, you think that having an SLA on response time at 3 days is a huge advantage and better than your competitors but is it to your audience? Do they care about that?
Sure, your software facilitates their sales process by putting all the funnel stages in one place, but is that a problem for them or indeed, a main problem?
You might be interested in Just A Bunch of Headline Readers
What are their motivations for buying? What are their actual challenges and how are you answering those? Not in a way that helps you but in a way that helps them.
If you were going to buy me an outfit and I said I like a dress and you bought a trouser suit because you think that looks smarter, the focus is on you, not me. But, if you bought me a trouser suit and said, look, this wedding is in the middle of winter and tights don’t go with the dresses you like … well then now we’re starting to focus more on me.
It’s how you present it. It's how you get into the mind of your audience and speak to their psyche that counts.
Faster Horses
You don’t have to offer exactly what they want. Ford’s famous quote “if I’d asked people what they wanted, they would’ve said faster horses” springs to mind. But you can present your offering as a convenience to their lives, i.e. you don’t have to feed or stable a car, it can go faster for longer and you can fit the whole family in it so you need one car to 5 horses - well now these benefits start answering my challenges.
Position your offering in a way that your audience can understand, at their convenience, in a manner they prefer and you’ll win them over.
What are your customers' challenges and how have you positioned your business to be the solution to their problems? Maybe it's your great service? Let us know in the comments, we love to hear from you.
