Connecting To The Human Being (Customer)

I’m sitting here with a great friend and we’re talking about his latest exciting venture marketing one of my all time favorite writers/artists on the spiritual side of self-help- David Deida.

My friend will be launching a new monthly audio membership site at TheDeidaSource.com

Helping him with his marketing, launch, and social media strategy… first thing you should know is that we’ve got a couple of distinctions made. These are two important distinctions about his prospects and potential customers. They are:

1) Existing Fans- There are a lot of people who are already fans of Deida and love his work. How and what we’ll do to attract and market to these people is radically different than how we’ll handle “Newbies”

2) Newbies- If you’ve never heard of Deida, and more to the point you haven’t really been doing this kind of “work” on yourself, then how and what we want to put in front of these people to attract them and get them to convert (sign up for newsletter, blog, membership) is not at all what the existing fans will receive.

Point being, we are actually going to create 2 seperate channels to connect with and market to both these general audiences.

I’ve literally seen people triple their business with simple insights and distinctions like this, or become 10-20x better at attracting new customers with less effort. That is, once they find the right way to find, identify, and present a relevant message to these people.

Insight: Your products/services won’t sell themselves just because they are great, cool, or other people rave about them. What will sell them is how you connect the dots on how your stuff is valuable to your prospect.

So what if you’re pretending that all your prospects think and act the same way, talk the same language, and respond to the same things for the same reasons.

Big mistake.

That’s why I’m making sure my friend divides the camps in his marketing for his Deida audience and targets his marketing approach.

The point is simple-

When you think about who the actual recipient of your marketing is, and you stop pretending that they are all the same, you begin to dive into THEIR WORLD.

When you finally get past all your BS about what you know, and you start paying attention to them, you’re going to recognize some important stuff. Like how they feel, what they’ve done before, what’s worked for them, what hasn’t, etc. Simply mentioning that you know all this about them can make for good marketing. Great marketing goes a step further.

Recognizing “important stuff” about people in their past, and foretelling their future is arguably the single most valuable activity you can do as a marketer. Why? Because it allows you to paint a window of their world and place it in front of them. And when you do this, people can’t help but be amazed and need and ask for more.

At the end of the day- we all love being understood for our pain, our pleasure, our abilities and our weaknesses a whole lot more than we’d like to admit.

The internet is the ideal place to do all this with your customer, because they don’t mind passively opening up in this way.

How much time do you spend making distinctions about the personal experiences of your prospects, readers, and customers?

I’m always amazed at how business people can listen to and study marketing, and then totally ignore what they’ve been told and jump to stupid conclusions about what their customers would be interested in.

I’ll say it clearly-

If you’re doing marketing of any kind- you are not your customer, and you do not get to choose or dictate who your customer is or how they think, feel, speak, etc.

The market you have chosen to be in, and the channel through which you are connecting with and putting your message in front of people is what dictates.

Action Step:

Put some time into how and when your message will appear in front of a real human being. Sit back and imagine this moment. Then stop to remember that no one wakes up and says, “I want to read some advertising and buy stuff I don’t really need today.”

Now, what will you say to them given the CONTEXT in which they will hear from you?

If you want raving repeat fans and customer, you’ve got to give them a reason that’s already all their own.