The Secret Ingredients to Master Your Marketing

by RyanRhoten | May 24, 2024 | Newsletter

Ever feel like crafting the perfect business strategy is like mixing a cocktail in the dark? Well, it’s time to turn on the lights and get clear on those ingredients. This week, we’re exploring three steps for turning customer insights into actionable strategies. So, grab your favorite drink, and let’s shake things up!

The Secret Ingredients You’re Missing

Many business owners struggle to understand their customers, which leads to ineffective marketing strategies, unclear messaging, and poor business decisions.

Without a clear grasp of what makes your customers tick, you’re essentially mixing drinks without knowing the recipe. The result? A cocktail that nobody wants to order.

Turning customer insights into actions is like crafting the perfect drink. You need the right ingredients, a solid recipe, and a bit of finesse. Here’s a step-by-step guide to making it happen:

Step 1: Interview Your Ideal Customers

Interviews are your golden ticket to understanding your customers’ objectives, obstacles, objections, and desired outcomes; they are your behind-the-scenes look at what makes your customers tick.

To get to the good stuff, ask these questions.

Objectives: What are they trying to achieve? What goals do they have?

Obstacles: What are the things that get in their way of achieving their objectives? What keeps them up at night? Why does the problem need to be fixed now?

Objections: How do the obstacles make them feel? What are the things they say, think, and sometimes speak about with close friends and colleagues?

Outcomes: What are the measurable results they seek? What are they hoping to get by working with you?

BONUS: Interview your testimonials. Chances are your customers have answered the questions above in a testimonial. Take the time to read and highlight your testimonials for the items noted above.

Step 2: Create a Customer Persona

A customer persona is a fancy way of saying you’ll create a representation of your ideal customer on paper.

Your persona will be based on the information you gather from your interviews and testimonials. A persona is like a cheat sheet for guiding business decisions.

Without a persona, your marketing efforts will be ineffective, which will lead to wasted resources and missed opportunities.

Personas consist of two parts: Demographics and Psychographics.

Demographics: These are the boring yet useful things used to define the exterior of your persona, things such as:

Business size
Job title
Industry
Revenue
etc.

They are the things all ad placement systems like LinkedIn and Facebook need to get started. By themselves, they are pretty boring, which is why you need psychographics to complete the picture.

Psychographics: Now, let’s look at the inside. It’s said that 95% of purchase decisions are based on emotions. Psychographics is where you get into someone’s head. You’re looking for things like:

Personality
Activities
Interests
Values
etc.

It’s this emotional/personal stuff that helps you understand what makes your customers tick. Combining demographics with this is like the perfect pairing of wine with your dinner.

Bonus: Your persona should be as unique as your best cocktail recipe, tailored to your specific persona. The best part is that you’ve uncovered much of this information from your interviews and testimonials.

Step 3: Distill Your Message to Its Essence

You now have all of the ingredients you need to distill your message down to its essence —a message that is clear and resonates with your ideal customer persona.

For this part of the exercise, you need to gather everything you’ve done to this point and put it into this format to tell a story that resonates with your website, copy, marketing materials, and content.

Objectives: What is the one thing your customer really wants to achieve?

Obstacles: What is stopping them from getting that one thing?

Objections: How does not getting that one thing make them feel?

Offer: How do you help them overcome the obstacles in their way?

Outcomes: What do they get if they work with you?

The key to the story is not to include everything.

You need to boil everything down to its essence- the problem they have that you can solve easily.

Now Go Make Business Decisions

This is where the magic happens. It’s how you ensure all the information you’ve gathered doesn’t just sit in a file on Google Drive, but instead, you use it to drive your business decisions.

Review Your Insights: Go through steps 1-3 thoroughly. Did you miss anything? Does it feel right to you?

Develop your Strategy: Now you can develop a strategy that directly addresses your customers’ needs and desires.

Do it: Implement the strategies in your marketing, sales, offer, and sales funnel.

With all of your insights captured and in one place, you can begin making informed business decisions based on actual customer insights.

No more guessing. Instead, you’ll begin to make calculated decisions that align with your customers’ needs and expectations.

Last Call: Customers’ Points

Interview Customers: Dive deep into their challenges, motivations, and experiences.

Create a Customer Persona: Document detailed insights about your ideal customers.

Distill Your Message to its Essence: Understand the steps your customers take from awareness to advocacy.

Make Business Decisions: Use insights to guide your business strategies.

Turn your customer insights into business decisions, and you’ll create a brand strategy as clear and compelling as your favorite cocktail.

Features: The Stuff

We love our features, however, let’s be clear, when we talk about features, we’re referring to what your product or service is or does. The chair, for instance, is this color, has these dimensions, or distributes weight evenly.

Bad messaging leads with features.

But, hey, I get it. You’re proud of your service and what you’ve built because they showcase what you offer—but here’s the catch: your audience will not care as much as you do.

Think of features as the raw ingredients in a cocktail; yes, they are essential, but not enough to make someone order it without knowing what’s in it for them.

For example, if you run a leadership coaching program, a feature might be the 45 videos in the program or the program lasting six months.

While important, these features describe what your program is and NOT how it helps (that’s next).

Action Steps for the stuff:

Create an Ingredients list.
Identify all of the features of your service.
Note the features that distinguish you from the competition.

BTW, I’m not saying you shouldn’t use features in your marketing; you shouldn’t lead with them.

Benefits: The Spoils

So, you’ve got your features identified in an ingredients list. Next, you need to turn them into something meaningful. That’s where benefits come in.

A benefit provides tells your customers what they will be able to do, feel, or have because they hired you. Benefits explain why the feature matters and how the value proposition is achieved. Benefits are the transformation your customer experiences by using your product or service.

Benefits help your customers visualize how their life improves, so connecting the dots between what you offer and how it impacts them is essential.

The chair, for example, has a seat that is so comfy, you can sit there for hours without getting a sore bum.

For your coaching program, a benefit could be 1:1 coaching or website copy revisions (both of which I do as part of The Brand Messaging System™️.

Action Steps to Translate Features into Benefits:

For each feature, ask: “So what? How does this make my customer’s life easier or better?”
Frame benefits in terms of customer outcomes—what do they gain?
Be specific about the improvements they’ll experience.

For messaging, benefits sit in between your features and value proposition, connecting your features to your value proposition.

Value Proposition: The Solution

Your value proposition is the distilled essence of why someone should choose your brand over the competition. Your value proposition must be tied directly to your customer’s goals.

It’s the promise you make to your audience that captures both the features and benefits, typically wrapped into one compelling statement. The chair might enable you to meet the right person or call an Uber to get home.

Your value proposition communicates why your customer should care—and pay.

Think of it like the signature cocktail at the bar: it’s not just the ingredients or how it’s made; it’s the feeling and experience your customer wants when they place their order.

Your program’s value proposition might sound like this: “Our personalized leadership coaching helps solopreneurs scale their businesses with 1:1 coaching and website revisions that resonate with your ideal audience.”

Action Steps to a Strong Value Proposition:

Link your features to the benefits they enable.
Match the benefits to the outcome your customer will achieve.
Write your value proposition by telling prospects how their lives will be better.

The Last Call: Key Takeaways for Sharpening Your Brand Message

Turn your frown upside down and do the same to this list. Start with your Value proposition. Highlight your service’s benefits, then link features to the benefits to show how your value prop is achieved.

Craft a value proposition: Identify the transformation your clients achieve and how it links to their goals.

Identify your benefits: Show your customers the benefits of using your service.

Jot down your features: Note the raw facts about what your product or service is or does.

When you nail this down, your messaging will become the perfect drink that they can’t wait to sit at your bar and order over and over.

Whenever you’re ready, here’s how I can help.

1 Brand Messaging OS: Join over 100 founders and solopreneurs and create your own brand messaging operating system (BMOS) and bring clarity, focus, and alignment to your audience, message, and offer.

Imagine not worrying about what to say when asked, “What do you do?” Or not worrying about needing to get another job because your leads have dried up. If that sounds like something you need, the BMOS may be for you. Schedule a call, and let’s chat.