How Your Customers Define Your Business

As small business owners, we work very hard at defining our business, positioning it effectively, and marketing to our niche. Nowhere is this more visible than with our marketing message.

Think about how much time - and possibly money - you’ve spent on your marketing message. You’ve written and rewritten it. You’ve probably either taken a course or at least purchased a product or book. And what about the endless editing just to get it right…how many hours has that taken?

Yet most small business marketing messages miss the target - that is, the target audience. Oh they may get looked at or even read, but often your prospects breeze over them like the stock quotes in Sunday’s newspaper. And like with those stock quotes, those really into what you do will stop, read and perhaps take action. But most people don’t even begin to try to understand what’s written.

Don’t believe me, think about all the websites you’ve visited this week. Of those you’ve found, how much time have you spent reading the content in full? And if the website was a blog, how many of the static pages have your even looked at, let alone read over the entire time you’ve been reading the blog (and the about page doesn’t count).

You see, what your prospects are looking for in your marketing message is what they see, what they think, what they experience - and most importantly - what they need. In other words, people want to be met where they are. They don’t want to learn something or be have to understand the great philosophy of your life. They don’t really care about the history of why you do what you do (at least not yet). And they aren’t interested in figuring out your jargon so they can decide whether your business fits their needs.

What they are interested in is the fastest way to figure out whether you can help them solve their problems.

This means, you need to write for your where your audience is. The best marketing copy helps the reader immediately identify whether they’re in your targeted market (and no, not everyone should be). Next it begins to describe to them their situation, what they face and how it ‘feels.’ Then, and only then, does it talk about how to solve their need.

When you write from this perspective, you allow your audience to define your business. Not entirely, of course. But you begin the process of aligning what you do with what they need. But more importantly you’re presenting it in a way they understand and are looking for.

And that makes all the difference.