What Is Your Why? 5 Things To Consider With Your Business Marketing

Does it ever feel like you’re attracting the wrong kind of clients to your business?

You’re following all the marketing advice you come across, and even though it’s working in that you’re getting enquiries; you’re just not able to convert them into paying clients. And the ones that do? Well, they turn out to be something of a nightmare at times!

Sound familiar?

The problem for many business owners is that they’re presenting a persona and business image that they think their ideal customers want to see while hiding away their authentic selves. But if you want to attract your dream client’s they need to be attracted to you; the real you.

In this blog, I want to talk through some ways you can tweak your marketing to reflect you and what your business is about, making it easier for your ideal clients to feel drawn to you and become paying customers.

1 – Brand you before you brand your business

There’s a lot of marketing advice out there about branding your business and giving it a persona, and it is good advice. But there’s no reason why your business persona has to be a completely separate entity from your own character.

So many business owners I’ve worked with feel like they have to be someone else when marketing their business, whether it’s at networking events or just posting on social media.

But here’s the catch. Your audience can pick up on that, and if your business brand values don’t completely align with your personal values, it can be difficult to develop a good working relationship when the marketing is complete and you’re into the client management phase.

I’ve certainly found that since I’ve been my authentic self when networking and marketing, I’ve found attracting my dream clients easier than before and I’ve found a tribe of supportive businesswomen who recommend me to their contacts because they’ve gotten to know the real me.

So, find your inner confidence and put yourself out there rather than an alternate version of yourself that you’ve spent a few hours creating – you’ll wish you’d done it sooner!

2 – Find the sweet spot between your ideal customers and your personal brand

Once you’re out there and being authentic, you’ll find that people with similar values and goals to yourself will naturally be drawn to you. This is what we call “attraction marketing”, but we need to be sure that you’re attracting the right people for what you do, your dream clients.

It’s not so much a case of who you’re attracting now, if they’re aligned with you and your vision then those nightmare clients should crop up far less frequently. But just because you have some like-minded individuals wanting to work with you, doesn’t mean you can (or should help) them.

Let’s say you’re a Virtual Assistant and you specialise in diary management for therapists and counsellors. You do a few extra tasks here and there like travel arrangements, recording expenses, and basic admin, but on the whole, it’s diary management and online booking systems that is the bread and butter of your VA services.

An amazing prospective client comes along but they want help with email management and marketing. It’s not something you offer, and you’re tempted to say yes because it’s a new client. But you’d have to spend time (and probably money) learning the skills they require and if that doesn’t come at a cost to your current clients, it might come at a personal cost to you.

You might not even enjoy these new services and start to dread working on them for your client. Nightmare time again!

Finding the sweet spot is about ensuring that the audience you attract knows exactly what you have to offer and how you can help them. That’s what you should be working on to perfect in your marketing materials rather than how you come across and what they might think about you.

3 – Create content that builds rapport

So, how do you create content and marketing material that builds rapport with the clients you want to attract while ensuring that you filter out those you can’t help.

Make sure that what you’re putting out there, is what your dream clients are looking for.

Sounds simple enough and I know that it isn’t, but it is the key here.

If you specialise in diary management and the processes around that, you shouldn’t be putting out blog posts about MailChimp and how to write a newsletter. Share other articles around those topics as part of your social media marketing strategy as it’s certainly helpful to your audience, but don’t confuse them by crafting content around services that you don’t deliver.

Remember your “why” here. Why is it that you do what you do?

For most of us, it’s because we want to help people. So, make sure that your marketing actually helps them. That’s how you build a rapport and start building the trust required for them to become your paying customers.

4 – Uncover their hidden pain points

The best way to help your prospective clients is by directly offering solutions to their pain points – the problems they currently have that are making things difficult for them.

By “hidden pain point”, I mean helping them discover the real problems they’re experiencing and not what they think the problem is. Confused? Allow me to explain.

A business owner is frustrated that their website isn’t working. It’s attracting attention but no one is completing the contact form asking for more information and emails are far and few between. He’s asking for recommendations for a website designer to create a new website as it’s obviously missing the mark with his target audience.

But here’s the thing. The website itself is fine. The contact form isn’t working because it hasn’t been set up properly. Rather than spending a lot of money on an unnecessary new website, the contact form could be fixed in less than an hour.

How would you find this hidden pain point if you offer website maintenance services?

By looking at what he was asking for help with, looking at the contact form and the code to see if you can spot the issue, by having content on your own website about common mistakes with websites and how to set up a contact form correctly, etc.

It’s about listening and having the right information to put in front of them.

Rather than saying “I can help with that”, you’ll win a lot more trust when you can say here’s the issue, this article/guide should help you understand it, reach out to me if you need assistance with that.

5 – Be reliable, be consistent

The final step in the marketing process and the one that ties everything together is to keep showing up.

Being consistent and reliably there with your marketing is what will help you stick in the minds of the people you want to attract as clients. Because the day you don’t show up is the day someone else fills the gap and tempts your prospective client to their side instead.

It takes on average 15 touchpoints – that’s times seeing and interacting with you before a lead becomes a customer. That means you need to show up 15 times making the right impression, and as you don’t know when they’re going to be looking – you need to be marketing consistently.

So, schedule your social media in advance. Batch write blog posts so you’re always one step ahead. Outsource to other professionals to take care of the marketing for you. Do whatever you need to do to ensure that you’re always being seen as out there, showing up.

Because that, is ultimately how you attract the right clients to your business.