Show Them You Understand Them
Understanding your client’s customers and crafting the perfect offers makes no difference if you don’t communicate it to the market effectively. The whole point in understanding customers is to be able to communicate in a way that resonates with them.
This is still pretty broad advice, though, so here are a few guidelines for your long-form copy that can also come in handy for short-form or even Google Ads headlines.
1. Let them know it’s for them
There is more information out there than anyone can reasonably consume in several lifetimes. Your brain automatically filters out most of this information to keep you sane. It’s capable of taking in all of the information, but you would break down from the effort of trying to make sense of it all.
Thus, your subconscious mind registers everything you see and determines whether it is relevant or important to you. Things that pass the test trigger the reticular activating system of the brain and cause you to consciously focus on the things that are relevant or important.
It’s often said that the goal of the headline is to get them to read the first sentence and the goal of the first sentence is to get them to read the second, and so on. A solid way to make sure the right people are reading your ads, watching your videos, or consuming your organic content, is to start by calling them out.
You can call out a person by their work role (e.g. “Marketing Agency Owners”), by their problem (e.g. “Struggling to retain your clients for a year or more?”), by the services they offer (e.g. “Do you manage Google Ads for your clients?”), or even by their actions or habits (e.g. “Stop outsourcing your Google Ads! Do this instead…”)
If a person is consuming content and comes across a line that registers as specifically addressing them, some small part of them feels significant, recognized, and valued. Someone is paying attention to them!
This will at least earn you a chance to hold the attention you just caught. Another, probably bigger part of them, will likely put up defenses to protect against being sold.
That’s where the next part comes in.
2. Make them feel understood (build credibility and trust)
Have you ever had a friend that just got you? They knew what you were going through and they knew how to help. That’s a wonderful feeling and it helps us feel better when there are people that understand our pain. It helps us feel like we’re not alone.
Helping someone feel understood has a similar effect.
They feel like they’re not alone, but they are also more likely to trust you and view you as credible sources of a solution to their problem. If you’ve caught their attention by addressing them and/or their situation, you stand a solid chance of getting them to pay attention to what you have to say. I
f you want to hold their attention, you have a better chance of doing so by describing their problem, pain, frustration, fear, etc.
Start by highlighting the problem using their own language. You’ll need to do research to learn exactly how they’re talking about it, how it affects their life, etc. If you’re following along with this series, you’ll have already done that or at least learned some ways to better understand your customers.
After bringing attention to the problem to further resonate with your ideal customer, start describing how it affects their life, the pain it causes, and paint a picture of what life will be like if they never solve the problem.
They know how bad it is, show them how much worse it can get.
Don’t lie, but don’t pull any punches. If someone doesn’t fix their back pain, it could lead to all sorts of problems that affect their ability to do what they love with people they love. If someone doesn’t fix their roof, they could pay tens of thousands in repairs due to water damage. If someone doesn’t replace their brake pads, they may have to pay hundreds more to replace their rotors as well.
Make it clear that you know what they’re going through and that you know what happens if this problem is left unresolved. You don’t want them going through their current pain, much less the pain of the problem’s logical conclusion, so you want to help.
Telling stories can be an easy way of delivering this understanding while proving you understand. Extra points if you’ve been through the problem and can tell your own story.
The more you prove that you understand their problem, the more they’ll trust you when you tell them you can solve it. After all, if you understand their problem so deeply, you probably understand them and their pain and you’re probably familiar with it all because you’ve been through it or helped others with it.
Whether you give social proof or not, proving that you understand their problem and pain will help them trust you enough to pay you for help.
3. Explain your solution and how it’s different/better from other solutions
There are a lot of solutions out there and as I pointed out when talking about market sophistication, everyone in the market is constantly getting bombarded with marketing messages about all of them. If you don’t communicate with the market how this solution is different, you’ll just be part of the noise.
Proving that you understand is certainly a good start in proving that you’re different. Most companies only talk about their products or services, so caring enough to show you get them and their pain is a good differentiation tactic.
You may also need to stand out in other ways.
This is where niching down can come in handy. It can help you speak to a smaller subset of the market with more precision to resonate more strongly with a more targeted message.
Which sounds better, saying that you help busy moms get organized, or saying you help busy working moms with 3 or more kids plan out their weeks to maximize family time without sacrificing their livelihood?
The first option mentions a person and their problem. The second option adds in some of the context, the pain, the fears, and the desired outcome. That’s going to resonate as the perfect solution for moms in that position.
You can also differentiate on price, on speed, on features, or anything else the market wants.
Tell them how your solution works and tell them why it’s perfect for them. Why should they choose it over all of the other offers out there?
4. Prove that your solution works (social proof, reviews, case studies, testimonials)
One of the final hurdles in showing that you understand and earning their trust is social proof. This usually takes the form of reviews, testimonials, and case studies.
You can also show numbers of clients or customers helped, products sold, etc, but people connect with people over numbers. Showing names and faces with testimonials saying how happy past customers are goes much farther than saying “over a million copies sold”.
This is something widely accepted by marketers, so I won’t beat a dead horse. What I will say, though, is that you should lay out your sales pages with all of these points for maximum effectiveness.
Prove that you understand the customer and their pain.
Prove that your understanding helped you create the perfect solution.
Prove that your perfect solution has helped others solve the same problem.
Profit.
If you’re curious about how I work with agencies or if you’re frustrated with your agency’s profitability or retention of clients or employees, feel free to reach out to me and I’ll see how I can help. I never charge for the first consultation and if I can solve it in 30-minutes, there’s no reason to pay for my services and you walk away happy.
If you know of someone who may benefit from this newsletter, please don’t hesitate to send them to https://kinglyconsulting.com/newsletter so they can start receiving them.
Also, you can now catch up on past issues you may have missed by visiting https://kinglyconsulting.com/archive/