How much do you know (and care) about your target audience?
Do you know their pain points so you know how your product or service alleviates or eliminates them?
Do you know what keeps them up at night?
Who are they angry at?
What books do they read?
Do you know who else they’re “seeing” right now (your chief competitor at the moment) and why?
Your goal here is to tap into your prospects’ emotional baseline, not to mine for “logical” reasons why they should be coming to see you instead of who it is they’re already seeing.
People don’t care how much you know or what you offer until they know how much you care.
If you’ll copy and paste my Content Questionnaire into a Word document and go through it, answering as many of its questions as you can with regard to your target audience, you’ll have the skeletal structure you need to start putting meat on the bones of your campaign to get them to start coming to see you. (You’ll find the link to my CQ on the Contact page.)
But it isn’t just about knowing about them. Hang where they hang. Get to know as many of them as you can in person. If you’re a business-to-business provider, start networking and joining local business groups. If you’re a business-to-consumer provider, engage with your community wherever they gather.
If you’re hesitant to do the above because you’re an introvert or painfully shy, join Toastmasters and press on until you get over it. I promise you will overcome the handicap. I did, and I thought I was irredeemable. Now I LOVE networking and speaking (within a minute or two of starting, as soon as I see interested eyeballs and faces to engage). In fact, now I miss it when I get too busy writing for clients to participate in the local groups I’ve joined! (Never thought I’d ever see myself write that, or even think it!)
If your target audience is virtual/global, befriend them wherever they’re found in groups on Facebook and engage as a source of information and good times. (Not sales–information and good times.) Example: sports teams have Facebook pages. Star Trek and Star Wars fan groups have scads of Facebook pages. If you have sports paraphernalia or sci-fi costumes to sell, I’ve just given you a huge hint about where to go to start making FRIENDS. (Not SALES yet!–FRIENDS!) Do not use social media to sell or you’ll shoot yourself in the foot. Read Likeable Social Media by Dave Kerpen (if you haven’t already) for more on this topic.
When you fully understand and engage your target audience’s nature (prospect nature) and learn to engage them “where they live”, you’ll gain entry into their pocketbooks–but not before.
All things being equal, people do business with people they know, like and trust.
Givers gain. If you run around with a catcher’s mitt on both hands, you won’t get very far…
