As a savvy and successful business owner, you know that marketing is essential to growing your business. In fact, it is the single most important thing you can do. Understanding who your ideal client is and how you help them is vital so that you can ensure you meet the needs of your current customers too!
The purpose of marketing is to understand your clients so that you can authentically add value and solve their problems.
3 Most Common Mistakes in Marketing
These are the three most common areas that you can go wrong in marketing are your message, medium or market. This is because they are the three areas of marketing.
Message – When you don’t know specifically how you help them, you can’t speak clearly to those you can best help. Your marketing Message should be magnetic, attracting your ideal clients because you understand and can speak exactly to their needs.
Medium – If you have the most compelling Message, yet put it where your ideal clients are not, how will you attract them? The Medium is where you place your marketing message; it affects who sees your Message.
Market – If you don’t know who you actually best serve, you are missing your Market. Your Market is your ideal client, the person whom you are talking to. By understanding who it is you best serve, you can write a message that is targeted to attract them and put it in a place (medium) where they will see it.
Knowing your market helps you better ask for referrals in networking: “I help anyone who is looking to buy a house” vs “My ideal client is a recent widow who is overwhelmed by her loss, is in a house that is too big for her and wants to downsize.”
In this scenario, ‘anyone’ probably does not make you think of a qualified referral, whereas the second one will help you visualize a referral immediately if you know someone in that situation. The goal is not to serve everyone, that means more work because you are funneling a larger selection of less qualified leads for a lower closing rate. Instead, the ideal goal is to have a smaller pool of highly qualified leads for a higher closing rate – all for less work!
How To Find the Right Message, Medium & Market
Your Ideal Client Persona, or Avatar, is the single most important foundation you can create for your marketing. Why is that? Because when you understand who your ideal client is, and how you serve them, you can create the messaging to appeal to them and use it in the right place.
When you address your client’s pain points and offer a solution to them, in the form of a story (because stories are memorable and people make decisions on emotion), then you will work with those that you can best help. The purpose of marketing is not to manipulate people, but instead to understand them so that you can authentically add value and solve their problems.
