Today I'm talking about one of the hottest questions I hear in my entrepreneurial community: "How do I attract the right people to my business?"
And I'm going to share with you how we look at it from an agency perspective. Because one of the very first things I learned when I was an advertising major at Ohio State is that we have to get ourselves outside of ourselves so we don't have an egocentric view of our own product and our own service.
Here's the deal: we're not our own customer.
We might really identify with the customer. Our business might be built around a problem that we solved for ourselves, but at the end of the day, we are still selling to somebody else who's not us. And it's really important that it is all about them.
So one of the easiest ways to get out of ourselves is to talk with real live human beings. People who have either been your clients or customers before, or people who represent absolutely the kind of people that you want to work with, because I'll tell you one of my favorite things about marketing.
Check out this video for some majorly strategic pro tips on how to connect with people who represent your most valuable customers so you can attract the right people to your biz.
Rooting for you!
xo, Heather
Hey there. This is Heather Campbell with a little pro marketing advice because you know, when you know what the pros do, you can do what the pros do. And I'm sorry that I'm hopping on my Facebook live a few minutes late...note to self: Don't trim your bangs right before a Facebook Live. It definitely takes more than just a few minutes!
Today I'm going to be talking about something really, really important. It's one of the hottest questions I hear all the time. In my entrepreneurial community, which is how do I attract the right people to my business.
And I'm going to share with you how we look at it from an agency perspective, because one of the very first things I learned when I was an advertising major at The Ohio State University is that we have to get ourselves outside of ourselves so we never want to have an egocentric view of our own product and our own service.
Cause we're oftentimes not our own customer. We might really identify with the customer. Our business might be built around a problem that we solved for ourselves, but at the end of the day, we are still selling to somebody else who's not us. And it's really important that it is all about them.
So one of the easiest ways to get out of ourselves is to talk with real live human beings. People who have either been your clients or customers before, or people who represent absolutely the kind of people that you want to work with, because I'll tell you one of my favorite things about marketing.
It's like one of my all time favorite things is the surprises. That's why I love data so much because we all have our own personal biases that we bring into every situation, including our own marketing. And sometimes we think, "Oh man, there's no way that's going to work!" And sometimes it does. Or we don't, we think someone's going to search in a certain way for something and they search in a completely. Different way that you never even anticipated.
And those are those moments of delight because you all of a sudden feel like you've got this little nugget of something that you didn't know before.
Even if you are serving your clients or your list, or getting feedback from people through a survey mechanism... that's good. That's not going to be as good as talking with somebody because you're still putting this through your own filter.
And I really want you to sit down. I don't really want you to, I'm requiring you to know it's a great idea for you to sit down and zoom, sit down in person with your most valuable customer and ask them questions about their lives and how they purchase things and how they got to where they are.
Zoom makes this so easy. It breaks down so many barriers. So just to hop on a Zoom meeting, spend 30 minutes with somebody and just ask them questions. So you might be thinking, "I don't even know what to ask them!" And if you've ever had, I've done a couple of Facebook lives on this.
Why the question, "what keeps you up at night?" Is my least favorite question. Because. Yeah, I just don't think you get good marketing Intel on the other side. So listen, not to fear. I have 25, 25 of my best questions that I use that I actually use when I'm doing customer research.
And there's a link in the comments. I don't know where they are, if they're this way or this way or down below, but there's a link in the comments so you can get your own copy of them. But I'm just going to put on my glasses and walk you through just some of my favorite questions that I feel give me really good marketing intelligence.
The first one is I like to ask people what's going on in your life right now, just general. And this is going to give me all my good demographic information. What are your favorite parts? What are you looking? Where do they live? What's their lifestyle like, like this is where you can start to get good demographic information, which is a good starting point, it's the next questions are gonna give you a whole lot more to work with.
So then my next question is just let people know, "Hey, I'm working on this project or an idea for a product or service. And just tell me do you have any experience with it?" And if they do, then you can say, "Oh, you have experience in this area of your life that you're looking to improve, what's working for you now, and then what's not working for you?"
And so I'm not going to go through all 25 questions, but some of the questions are: "What would you like to change about how things are right now? What would happen in your life if to motivate you into looking to purchase a product or service like this? Have you ever tried a product or service like this before?"
It's awesome. When someone has a compare and contrast. Because then you can really understand what went, right and then, so you can build on that and then what went wrong.
One of my favorite questions that I ask, I get such good gold out of this is what do you wish other companies or brands or service providers understood about you? that's where you're really gonna get into those deep kernels of someone inside. That's that's not even scratching the surface. That's like taking a little sand shovel and digging, digging... filling a pail on the side of the beach and then building a castle out of it because someone's going to tell you something so deep that a lot of other people won't even know that you're gonna be able to use to your advantage.
And then you can ask them "If you ever researched products like this in the past, how did you do that? Where did you go? Did you go to social media? Did you go to friends? Those kinds of things. So these are amazing questions that are going to help you absolutely. 100% understand what's going well. And I always like to start off with what's going well in someone's life, just because it orients them to the potential of possibility. This is why I don't like "What keeps you up at night?" It orients someone immediately to something negative and then I always feel like they feel like you have to come up with some sort of BS answer, when I just like to come at it in different ways, because on the, at the end of the day, I like to have marketing things come through on the other side.
So one of my friends and coaching clients like Allegra Kay, who's here in Denver. She's an amazing holistic aesthetician. I just absolutely love her, but she was really upleveling her business and doing this whole new kind of facials that were, and we had talked about that, validating her pricing, that she was really undercharging. So she was going to be able to increase her pricing.
And it was a great time for her just to take a look at everything all at once. And she was doing customer research like this and had met with a couple of her most valuable customers and remember most valuable customers are people who want what you have. They need what you have. You're uniquely suited to solve their problems. They buy what you're selling, they pay what you're asking and they refer and buy from you again.
And so there was someone who she met with who had been a good client of hers, but think about her prices were going to be going up about 50 to 60%. And so this one person who had been a client of hers was like, there's no way in the world. I could ever justify spending X number of dollars on a facial. And this woman was just not going to be in that market. And so it was one of those things that when you find out who's not your most valuable customer, it's almost as enlightening as who is because you just know that, "Oh, I don't have to worry about that person anymore."
And it's okay because I'm not marketing to them. Not because I don't like them it's because they simply will not become a buyer of my product. All sorts of really good things come out of this. I get the things that people say off the cuff on the side are just those beautiful little nuggets that you can use in your marketing headlines.
And that's gonna really help people identify in to your business because when you are speaking to the people you want it to serve the people whose problems you can solve and that you can deliver the transformation. I'm telling you that is when you will get a big lift in your business.
The key to attracting the right people is not to cast a net in the ocean and think, okay, loosen my net. And let me take a look. You definitely want to be intentional. You want to put fish in your baby pool and go fishing in the baby pool and work from it from that perspective. So my pro advice for you today is to step out of yourself, adopt a non egocentric view of your services in your business.
Meet with real life people. Download these 25 questions. You guys, the comments are the link is in the comments and meet with a few people. And tell me about your aha moments. I would love to hear them because invariably. There always are there, there invariably, there are always aha moments. I'm telling you when it comes to marketing, it's not what you know, it's definitely who you know, so you want to make sure that you are definitely reaching out to, so people feel like you're speaking to them.... that you're motivating them to purchase and that you're making it easy for them to refer and buy again. And that is how we do it, people in marketing.
Okay. So please know that wherever you are in this beautiful, crazy ever-changing world of ours, that there's someone right here in Denver, Colorado, who is 100,000% rooting for you.
And that's me. So take care of you guys, and I'll see her next Thursday at noon mountain time, I will not be trimming my bangs. I will not be doing that again before my Facebook lives. Take care guys. Bye bye.
