I have no idea if it’s just me, but it feels like every other ad I see on social media is someone who wants to help me acquire new customers.
There are people who have ad strategies that have worked on Facebook.
Other people have ad strategies that have worked on YouTube.
Some people want to talk to me about running webinars to get new customers.
I’ve bought lots of these types of services. Some have worked and some have not.
Regardless, there are more important fish to fry if you want to have an offer that really works.
I’m in the middle of creating a new offer right now, so I thought I’d let you ‘look over my shoulder’ while I do it so you can see my process.
Before I even get started, it’s important for me to let you know this isn’t 100% foolproof because there can be some educated guesses involved … but the more clear you get by working through the process, the higher your success rate will be.
I’m going to be sharing the first four steps of the process with you today. There are 11 total steps to really monetize what you create and I’ll share the other 7 in a different post. Don’t want you drinking from a firehose and having 80% of the water just hit the ground.
Let’s get on with it.
Step 1: Figure out who your “right fit” client is and be specific
Before you even think about creating a product or a service, you have to know who you are creating it for. Ideally, this would be the type of person you truly feel like you can help accomplish something significant in their lives … be it their personal life or business life.
If you need a kick start to think about this, consider that you are ideally positioned to help the person you once were. The problems you have overcome in your business or your life put you in the perfect position to help someone else overcome those same obstacles … just a lot faster with a lot less mistakes because you already made those mistakes and can guide someone else around them.
Your right fit client needs to be as defined as possible. When I’ve created products in the past designed to serve the widest variety of people, they never did as well as the products I’ve created to serve a very small niche of people. There are a number of reasons for that, but the most relevant is it’s easier to understand what makes a small group of people tick than it is for a large group.
Understanding what motivates your right fit client, what their hopes and dreams are, what keeps them awake at night and what makes them feel regret is going to help in not only the creation of your product or service, but it’s also going to help you market to that specific type of person.
When I’ve gotten into trouble with this step, it’s because I chose some type of broad audience like “small business owners” or “women in their 30’s.” There are lots of different types of small business owners and thousands of different types of women in their 30’s. Different types mean different problems faced and that makes it tough to create something that really speaks to the person to whom you are marketing.
The more specific you can get with your niche, the better. If you want to serve women in their 30’s and need your right fight client to be more specific, you could go with “women in their 30’s with children over 7 years old who want unlimited earning potential.” That one sentence tells whoever listens to your message that it’s for them or not for them really quickly. If a woman in her 30’s who wants to lose weight hears that message, then she’ll know it’s not for her right away … which is good because you don’t have to waste any more time or money marketing to her.
Step 2: Figure out the ‘perfect’ desire of your right fit client
The creativity of business starts right here. The easiest thing to do is figure out what your right fit clients needs, but that is not the way to think about it.
The right way to think about it is figuring out what your right fit client wants.
I have been a poster child for screwing this one up.
A few years ago, I had an offer in the marketplace that was a coaching program designed to help people increase their level of self discipline. It worked okay, but it wasn’t going to make any McLaren payments because I wasn’t offering what the client wanted.
Discipline by itself sounds punitive … like going to the principal’s office. Very few people want to go there.
Everyone needs discipline, but they want what discipline will get them. That might mean they need to be disciplined so they can lose the 20 pounds they’ve been telling people they’re going to lose for the last 5 years and still haven’t done it. They might need discipline to make the money they know they are capable of making.
Notice in both examples above, I was positioning discipline as the means to get the thing they ultimately wanted.
People are emotional animals driven by desire. When you offer someone something they truly desire, they are going to ask ‘how?’ If you tell them ‘how’ up front, they are either going to be skeptical because it sounds too easy or they are going to doubt they have what it takes to actually pull it off.
Figure out what your right fit client really wants and create a product or service to give them that.
If you want a kickstart on this one, I usually start by thinking about what one of my clients would have to experience to stay as my client forever and encourage all of their friends to become my client’s too. They would have to not only receive their perfect desire once, but would have to continue experiencing it and be enthusiastic about the results they are getting.
Step 3: Understand the obstacles your right fit client has to achieving their perfect desire
In this step, we’re making an assumption that the right fit client does not have their perfect desire right now.
It’s not a really risky assumption though because most people feel like their lives could improve in lots of different ways. Some people want to feel better about themselves and need to lose weight to make that happen. Others feel like their relationships could improve. Almost everyone feels like their bank account could stand to get bigger … no matter how much is in there right now.
If they don’t have what they want, that means they are facing obstacles. To have a really successful offer, you have to know what those obstacles are.
For example, if someone wants to make more money, they need to overcome the obstacle of creating a business idea that can scale. They also need to figure out how to message this new idea and figure out how to acquire customers to name a few.
People will pay you to help them overcome obstacles.
When you read that, it might sound like a service but it’s not limited to done for you or done with you offers. It works in physical products too.
Look no further than Loreal Cosmetics. They are of course in the business of beauty products sold primarily to women. They are in the business of making women feel beautiful. The obstacles they overcome are blemished skin, nothing calling attention to their eyes and pale pink lips. They created products to overcome all of those obstacles and that’s why they’re worth almost $225 BILLION.
Understanding every obstacle that is standing between your right fit client and their perfect desire helps you figure out how you’re going to help them, which leads me to the fourth step.
Step 4: Create a Vehicle To Help Your Right Fit Client Achieve Their Perfect Desire
It’s very likely your right fit client has been trying to achieve their perfect desire for a while. Some could have been chasing it for a decade. Some for a lifetime.
He or she has probably tried a lot of different things to try to achieve their perfect desire, but none of them have worked as well as they thought they would. That’s why their perfect desire is still a desire instead of a possession.
In all likelihood, your right fit client could have already achieved their perfect desire if they would correct some of their own behaviors and stopped looking for someone else to save them, but marketing messages telling people it’s their own fault their life sucks don’t work. I’ve actually tried it, so I know from first hand experience how much people don’t want to hear that (even if it is the truth).
What I’ve found is people buy renewed hope.
Let’s take it back to the beginning of this blog post with the example of the ads I see about getting more new customers for my business.
Let’s say I had tried Facebook ads and those didn’t work the way I’d hoped. I got a little traction, but nothing that would make me feel like I was truly successful. If that had happened to me, what would make me pay attention is someone saying that the real key to getting more customers with a paid ads strategy was to have an amazing video on my website that would make people excited to buy whatever I was selling.
That video is representative of renewed hope. If the Facebook ads didn’t work, maybe this video would.
In both the case of the ads and the video, they are vehicles to help me get what I really want in this example, which is more customers (aka my ‘perfect desire’).
If the vehicle you create looks just like everyone else’s, then it will be tough to convince anyone they are more likely to achieve their perfect desire if they do business with you. You’re essentially relying on how much they know, like and trust you in that scenario, which is difficult to scale.
Create a unique vehicle, even if it’s just adding a few tweaks to something that’s already available to your right fit client, is going to go a long way in getting people to work with you.
Like I said at the beginning, there are more steps to this process, but everything that comes after this will not work if you don’t get these four right.
Start here.
Nail this.
And then we’ll talk about the rest.
