Stop creating content no one reads or listens to.
If you consistently put out content but feel like it falls on deaf ears - well, it probably is.
You can’t get consistent leads and revenue when you talk to no one, so start attracting your ideal customer now!
How do you do that?
By speaking their lingo - not your own technical jargon.
In today’s podcast, learn how you can go from 0 downloads to a list of raving fans that keep coming back for more content.
Mentioned Resources:
Stop creating content no one reads or listens to.
If you consistently put out content but feel like it falls on deaf ears - well, it probably is.
You can’t get consistent leads and revenue when you talk to no one, so start attracting your ideal customer now!
How do you do that?
By speaking their lingo - not your own technical jargon.
In today’s podcast, learn how you can go from 0 downloads to a list of raving fans that keep coming back for more content.
Mentioned Resources:
Do you create and published content, but feel like it's falling on deaf ears. Now you might have great content, the most entertaining podcast, or super fun to read blog posts. But if you're not thinking about who your ideal customer is and how you can help them, then no one is going to be paying attention. When you try to appeal to everyone, or you just have a vague idea of who you're talking to, you're not gonna appeal to anyone at all. Now, if you're ready to attract a real ideal customer for you and your business, it's time to learn how to speak their language. You're listening to the captain coder podcast each week. I take you through actionable strategies that can help you grow your online business. I'm your host, Marisa VanSkiver, AKA captain coder. Now, if you want to talk to an attract your ideal customer, you have to understand your ideal customer. First look, you have to understand them to speak to them. Cuz marketing is really all about psychology and empathy. You need to ask yourself, what are your customers struggling with? What do they want to do better? What results do they wanna get for themselves and their business? A lot of this is research based and we have to delve deep into thinking about what our customers are struggling with. And I'm not talking just about what they're struggling with in their business, but what they're struggling with in their personal lives for many of us, if especially if you are a B2B done for you, service provider, you're going in there and you're helping an entrepreneur make their business better. You're taking something off of their plate. You're making their lives easier by doing something for them. You are literally doing work for them. So they are able to trust you and take that completely off their own, play off their own worry list, right? But if you don't know why they wanna hire you and I'm not talking so that you can do their bookkeeping for them, I'm not talking about the fact that, you know, you can do their scheduling for them. They're hiring you because they're overwhelmed. They want greater profit. They wanna be able to work on things in their business. There's a lot of different avenues and a different reasons that somebody makes a hire and it's often not based on the surface level need. So you have to go deeper and understand why your customers are hiring you to begin with. If you already have a customer base, this is so easy to go in and ask them, what exactly was it? Why did you hire me? What were you struggling with? And why did you choose me as that person to help you? You need to know why your customer is making the decisions they're making, why they are hiring someone to help them, why they are searching for a solution to their problem. And you have to get down to the bedrock need, not just the surface level need, because you have to appeal to what they're actually concerned about before they're ever going to consider even hiring you. There's another level to this though. You have to be able to attract your customer by talking about the things that they actually understand that they're actually going to connect to. You cannot attract someone by using your technical jargon, because they only have a basic understanding of, Hey, but they don't know exactly if that's what they need. Say for instance, that you do honey book set up or you use dub Sodo to help streamline someone's business. If your entire content is about making your honey book easier, making your dubs Sodo and setting it up and five tips to make dubs Sodo easier. What if I don't know that I need dubs Sodo. You have to get down into the bedrock of what someone needs and talk to them in the way that they think they are not buried in your business every day. Like you are, you have to get yourself out of your own head basically. And think like your customer thinks you can't talk to somebody when you're talking on a completely different RA wavelength than they are. If you're doing that, if you're on a whole different wavelength and you're talking about things that are so technical, that they don't understand, that's where you're getting content. That's falling on deaf ears. And look, I have been just as guilty about this. Honestly, being a web designer and web developer, you can bet your butt that I have fallen into this same trap. Over the years, I have talked about how I build WordPress websites. No one really cares that I build WordPress websites. They just care that I bring them leads through their websites. I have talked about how I do SEO. Some of my clients kind of, sort of know that SEO is important for their business, but they don't really understand SEO. I have talked about how I create blog copy and how I write blogs and ghost write for clients. And again, not a lot of people understand why they need that. That's not a need. That's not even a want on most of my clients radars. So they don't really understand what they want and what they need until we start talking. And then we get a connection. All they know is what benefits them and their own business. They don't know what you do, and they really don't care what you do. As long as what you do is solving a problem for them. Now that doesn't mean you don't need to know the value you provide. You have to get a hundred percent clear on the outcomes that you're providing your customers. I want you to think about your best sales call that you ever had, where you were talking to someone. And they were really understanding, and they were getting really excited about how you're gonna help them. And they signed before you even got off the phone. How were you telling them that you were going to help them? What benefits were you telling them that you were providing? What value are you providing now? I do want you to step back and think about the technical terminology that you're using now. That's important, partially, somewhat for SEO, because you need to somewhat know, okay, what might people be searching if they have any kind of awareness of my technical jargon, but more, I want you to think about that technical terminology, because I want you to identify where you're using that technical jargon now. And I want you to completely strip it out of what you're saying. Now we're gonna, we're gonna talk about how to do that here in a little bit, but I just want you to get that in your head. What technical jargon are you using on a daily basis? What kinds of things are you already saying? And are you focused on the benefits or are you focused on the features? And those features tend to be the technical terminology instead of the benefits. And then I want you to think about what's the value that you are helping people get from working with you. What is the outcome? Why are you different? Why are you unique? You need to be intentional about how you serve your clients and really get into your head. Okay? Why are they coming to me? Why am I the best person to work with them? And why am I going to get them results? And what results am I going to get them? What is their outcome? What do they want? And how am I gonna get them there? Now this is a lot to think through. I know that, but I just want you to start brainstorming now because when you have some ideas, either get out your notes app and just sketch some ideas. Or if you wanna be that weird person who's out walking their dog, talking into your voice memos, like, um, I do on a daily basis. Now get out your voice memo. I know you're out doing something while you're listening to this. So take a second and explain what's the value you're providing and what technical terminology are you using now? And just off the top of your head, dump it out. Okay. Now that you're back to me, let's talk about how you actually talk to your ideal customer and how you use their language. Now, the number one key to doing this is doing some keyword research. Now let's take a step back. I know that if I say the word SEO, key word research, you are probably gonna go, oh, I have no idea what that means. I don't wanna do that. That sounds really difficult and a really confusing you're right? But unfortunately it is the best way to discover how your customer is talking about their problems, their needs that leads them to find you and your services. Now, there are a lot of different keyword tools that make this a lot more user user friendly. I personally, I like using Google AdWords, re keyword research tool. It is free. You do have to set up a Google ads account. If you don't have one already, you may have to plug a card in and start a free campaign. And they've got made it a lot more complex to use. So I understand if you don't wanna start there, unless you already have an ad word account and you can just pop in there. Now you can also check out Maz keyword, Explorer, HFS, solution, SEM Rush's solution. It'll link all of these in today's show notes, all of these offer free trials. Now here's the other thing that you can do. You can literally just start Googling things and see what comes up. Now. I don't want you to start Googling your technical jargon because here's the thing. The only people Googling your technical jargon are other service providers doing exactly what you're doing. They think they know. And so you're going to get a lot of articles. A lot of blog posts, a lot of things around what you do, and the only other people reading them are gonna be people in your industry. Not the people you're trying to reach. It's crazy. Right? But you have to think about it in a totally different way. So we're gonna translate and use your customer's language. Instead. Now, when I'm teaching digital marketing at Wichita state, we go through this exercise ourselves, at least in part, when we're creating buyer personas like the first week. And then we go through it again. When we talk about Google ads in like their fourth or fifth week of class, and this is the number one thing that really trips a lot of people up because they think about only themselves and their business and not their customer at all. I don't know how many times I have told students, Hey, just because you don't like clicking on an ad or just because you don't think that's beneficial, doesn't mean that your target customer won't. So we've gotten a little bit better over the semesters. I've gotten a little bit better about teaching them how to think like their customer, because I've noticed that's a huge disconnect and one of the best ways to do that, which is always surprising. When I tell people, dig into Facebook groups, I am not a huge fan of Facebook right now. I'm not gonna get into it. The only reason that I am still on Facebook are because groups are a gold mine to understand your buyer persona. So think about the types of groups. Your ideal customer is hanging out in and go join them. And even better if they offer some public posts, you can even search and look at those conversations without having to join the group. But I recommend you join the group and join the conversation so you can provide value and potentially get clients. But the first thing you're gonna do is just look and see, okay, how are they talking about their problems? And look at other online communities. You may have, your ideal client may be in an online community on discord. It's not all about Facebook. They may be in a LinkedIn group. I'm pretty sure those are still a thing. They just may be hanging out in comments on certain influencers pages. So just think about where your ideal audience is hanging out and do some research, do some guessing, but also just go through and see, okay, this is my ideal community or no, this is not my ideal community. Here's the thing. I just joined a crap done of Facebook groups in the last like six weeks, just to kind of get an ideal. I'm changing up my own ICA. And I very quickly discovered that what I thought my ICA was, was not because I did not wanna work with the people that I was finding in these Facebook groups. So I have fine tune my own ICA based off of this. Now this is not a go into a group, find some information and be done in a couple hours. You could be, but I highly recommend that you're paying attention to these online communities for a few weeks and refining this process. You can use a search function in a Facebook group and in other online communities and you can dig and find a lot. But joining in those live conversations are probably your best way to really understand your ideal customer. But don't forget about your own current customers. Now, I, I get it. Not all of our current customer base maybe is our ideal customer, especially if you're like me and maybe you're changing up your ideal customer just a little bit, but go back to your own customers and ask these questions, ask what brought them into working with you. Look at the, at your reviews that they're leaving and how they talk about the things that you do to help them go back and interview a customer and just ask them, okay. If I were to talk to you about X, Y, Z, about this service, about dub Sodo, what does that help you with? And then they would tell, well, I'm more interested in the productivity. I'm more interested in improving my processes, you know, find out why they came from you. And then honestly do some basic Googling. If you've talked to enough people, you might have an idea in your head of what their language might be. So do some basic Googling and see what kind of results you're getting. And if that matches up, now, when you're doing this, you need to make sure that you're thinking about the intent of that search. Why is someone looking for the content through that keyword? What would they expect to find on the other side, in other words, so you go through and do Google research, just do a simple Google search on some ideas that you have and look at what is ranking for those keywords. Now as that mostly a learning kind of stuff, or they mostly buy pages and make sure that you're looking at the ads, not just the organic stuff, cuz if somebody is promoting a product or a service based on your keyword, one, that means there's probably value in that keyword. But two, that means that there's buyers value in that keyword. So you wanna look and see what those ads are running and what people are promoting in those ads. And then think about how you can turn any of your keywords into questions. Naturally, we tend to search questions, I think almost more than anything else. How do I grow my business? How can I get more productive? I need help.<laugh> okay. Maybe not quite that much, cuz that gets us, you know, heaven knows what I need help would get us in Google, but we know, think about how you're searching for things and try to put it in those phrases. You also need to think about where somebody is at when they're searching for that specific phrase. So again, look at the content that's coming up on Google. Is it a lot of DIY related content? Is it more by this program to solve this problem kind of content? Is it more sales funnels and high level stuff? Look at what's coming up now and think about why somebody might be searching this. They have a pain point, they have a problem. They have some kind of worry. What is that worry? And then speak to that. But remember though, depending on the keyword and key phrase that you're thinking about using, they may be only in a DIY stage, they may not be in the ready to buy stage. Maybe they're in the ready to learn stage. So look at those keywords and think about the intent. Think about where the customer's at, but again, think about how they use their own language and make sure you're talking like they do because here's the number one thing that I tell my students every single semester, when it comes to SEO, when it comes to social media, when it comes to anything online marketing, nobody is going to Google or search or look for something that they don't understand. They are only going to do that through their own language and their own window of understanding. So if you get super technical, they are not going to, uh, get it. They're not going to connect with it. But if you speak like your customer speaks, if you write like your customer writes, then you're going to come up for those search results because that's what they're actually searching for. They're not searching for WordPress websites. They may be searching for small business websites, but they're probably looking how to grow their business. They're probably thinking about how can I increase my leads? How can I get more discovery calls? Those are my ICAS bedrock needs. They need leads. They need to book out their calendar. They need to grow their business. So you have to think about the intent where they're at and what kind of language that they're using. Now, one thing you don't wanna forget you, they need to know your customer needs to know what done looks like when they work with you, the outcomes that they're gonna get and the goal they're going to hit. There's a lot of times when those keywords that people are actually looking for the outcomes like growing their business, increasing their recurring revenue, getting time back in their day, getting freedom, flexibility. Those are the things. Those are the outcomes that they want. That's what's going to appeal to them. How do I build a flexible business? Mean think about it. We all got into entrepreneurship or you know, a lot of us because we thought, oh, this is gonna be great. It's going to be so much more flexible. And then we all know that it actually can consume you very easily. So think about your own pain points as a business owner. If that's who you're trying to attract, think about the things that you want, but think about the outcomes. Think about the transformation they're looking for. Now. If you wanna make this all much easier, I actually have a freebie for you today. I put together a very quick jargon disor, so you can dump out those ideas for your technical jargon and put the translation of how your customer speaks. Now, this will give you a good idea, a good starting point to your keyword research, but also is a really quick, easy guide. So when you're creating social media posts, you know how to talk about it. When you're creating blog posts, you know how to actually talk about it and it gets you out of your own head and into the head of your customer and start thinking like they do. Now, if you wanna be a really empathetic business owner who understands their customer and attracts your ideal audience, then you need to talk like they talk and the free jargon, the, so is your first step to doing just that. Now you can grab that today at the link in the show notes, or by going to Capt, coder.com/zero five. Keyword research is not about trying to trick Google and trying to game in the system in any way. It is literally just trying to discover how your customer is already talking. So get out of the frame of reference that this is a really terrifying thing and just think, okay, how does my customer think? How do they talk? What's important to them? How do I help when you approach it in that way, this becomes a whole lot easier. Thank you all for tuning in to our show this week to catch more captain coder, you can subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now, if you have any questions or you wanna learn more about digital marketing and how it can help grow your online business, follow us on instagram@captaincoderorvisitusonlineatcapcoder.com. Can't wait to talk to you all again next week.