You’ve decided to start your own business, hoorah and congratulations. Welcome to the steepest personal development journey you never asked for, but seriously well done. I’ve been self-employed for 4 years and my only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner. Now I get to choose where I work, when I work and who I work with. But it wasn’t always like that. When you first start out, like everything you do when you’re new to it, you’ll make a lot of mistakes. That’s a good thing, it means you’re learning. But if I can I’ll try and help you save time, develop faster and avoid making some of the same mistakes I did.
As a new business your biggest and most burning question will be “How do I actually get customers?” That’s what most of my clients want to know. But most of them get bogged down in systems, automations, platforms, autoresponders and funnels etc . If you don’t know what any of that means, don’t worry. All those things are awesome and you’ll definitely need them as your business grows, but not in the beginning. How do I actually get to the customer? In this blog I’m going to break down the first three things you need to do to find your customers;
1. Who is your ideal client?
The answer to this question will dictate everything else you do in your business. Before you make an offer, send an email or even post on social media you need to know who this person is. What keeps them awake at night? What are they worried about? What is going wrong in their life right now? What do they wish wasn’t happening? If you waved a magic wand and they woke up in their perfect life what would that look, feel and sound like? People don’t buy for logical reasons, they buy to satisfy an emotional need. Your job is to find out what that need is.
If you’re new to business and you haven’t worked with anyone yet, think about the qualities of the person you would like to work with; are they studious, spiritual, into woo in a big way? Are they laid back and chill or are they fired up and ambitious? Do they have a sense of humour or are they quiet and serious? The more people you work with, the more you’ll understand who you enjoy working with and who you tend to get the best results for. Your ideal client is something that you need to be regularly revisiting and reviewing.
2. What problem do you solve?
Unfortunately not many people wake up in the morning wondering what service providers they could possibly work with that day. Lots of people however do wake up with dread as they remember all the shit they’ve got to deal with. Imagine your client is holding their problem in their hand, it’s red hot and spiky and they are looking to get rid of it – you the service provider come and take that problem away. What’s the problem? What was life like before they worked with you and what will life be like afterwards? That’s what you need to talk about in your marketing content. Not your fabulous services, what you do, how you coach or what your personal mission is – what is the difference you make to the life of your clients? Understanding the difference between the services you provide and the result that your potential clients want to buy is the key to converting readers into buyers.
3. Social Media Marketing
Now you know who you want to work with and you have a clear message for them about how you’re going to transform their lives. Next you need to communicate that message consistently and in the right places. You do not need to be on every single social media platform. You do not need to create a different set of content for each platform if you decided to be on more than one. Just Copy and paste. Those who follow you on Instagram aren’t always on LinkedIn and the people you’re connected with on LinkedIn won’t be your mates on Facebook. Marketing is “The right message for the right person at the right time in the right place”. You can promote your business free of charge on social media but it has a cost attached in terms of time, distraction and mental fatigue. If you’ve decided to promote your business on social media, find a scheduler like Buffer, Hootsuite or SmarterQue so you don’t get sucked into a doom scroll every time you log on to post for your business.
And finally……….
Don’t rely on social media marketing to promote your business. Yes, you can and will find clients on social media but if you lost all access to all your social media accounts tomorrow how would you find new clients? You’d be screwed. No responsible business owner hands that much power over to something or someone they can’t control. Build yourself a website and grow your email list. Market to your potential customers directly through Google or straight into their inboxes.
My name is Clair Stevenson and I teach business owners how to write their own marketing content. I help coaches, consultants and freelancers write content that attracts the right people and turns readers into buyers. If you’d like to know how we can work together to improve your marketing email me at clair@upwriteonline.co.uk