Transcripts
1. Let's go: The more you understand
your dream customer, the more your
business will grow. Whether you just started
posting to Instagram, you've got a thriving Etsy shop or if you have customers
paying you for regular work, it's never too early or too late to hone your target
audience so you can create content
products and services that are perfectly
aligned with their needs. My name is Jodie
Cook and I have been a business owner for 10 years. I started as a freelance social
media manager and I grew a very successful
social media agency before selling it in 2021. We worked with
hundreds of customers, including some household names. We built a brand and we
attracted inbound leads from customers who could
not wait to work with us. Whilst running my agency, I traveled the world, I competed internationally
in power lifting, I wrote 20 books, and I became a contributor for Forbes on the topic
of entrepreneurs. I also secured a spot on the
Forbes 30 Under 30 list of 2017 and was interviewed for global publications
on social media. One of the key reasons
that my agency was so successful was that we knew
who our perfect customer was. We sought out ways to
make more of them. We knew where they hung out. We created content they
love to consume and this attracted them in
to make inquiries. Entrepreneurs who don't succeed spread themselves too thinly. They go after too many
types of customers with too many products
and services. You might feel confused
about where to focus, you might feel like you're
going off in all directions. You might not know
how to prioritize your outreach or you might
not know who to say yes to. The most successful
business owners are obsessed with
their customers. You're going to understand
the defining characteristics of your dream customer. You're going to
become familiar with their frustrations and pains. You're going to get
to know their deepest desires and you're going to create headlines and content
that resonates perfectly. The skills you learn
in this class can be applied to creating
all types of content, whether it's YouTube
videos, blogs, articles, social media content or even website calls to
action and website copy. Entrepreneurs who succeed do so because they become
ultra relevant and ultra in-demand to a very
specific group of people, their perfect target audience. They understand them, they
speak in their language. They get to know
them so well that these people cannot
wait to buy from them. This is why I cannot wait to
take you through this class. We're going to do a lot of
thinking and we're going to have a lot of fun,
so let's dive in.
2. Get in the zone: [MUSIC] This lesson is to introduce
the project and get you set up for success
with today's class. The project is where
we take all the theory from this class and we
put it into practice. The practice is where
the magic happens. The project is for you to get so familiar with
your dream customer. That's their defining
characteristics, that's their pains
and frustrations, and that is also their
deepest desires. You're going to get so familiar with them that you will be able to introduce them
to someone else. You also got to know
when you find them. This is going to lead
to amazing content that speaks directly to them that
they cannot wait to consume. Content including
podcast, episodes, including social media post, including blog articles, including absolutely everything
that you can think of. This is going to be
so relevant for them. For the purpose of this lesson, I want you to allow yourself
to indulge in your business. Please do turn off
any distractions. Notifications off on your
smartphone, on your laptop. Don't let him visit you,
don't let anyone him you. Put everything on airplane mode. Just give yourself permission to totally focus on your business, on your dream customer, and on your success. What we know about the
brain as it does best when it is solely
focused on one thing, not when it's multitasking because we're not going
to do any multitasking. We're going to put
all our energy into one thing which is defining your dream customer and creating content that they
love to consume. For this class, you're going
to need a pen and paper. You're going to
need somewhere to take notes and jot stuff down. You're also going to
need the workbook that accompanies this class. I'll tell you when
there are parts in the workbook to complete
and then you'll have a chance to upload
your findings later on. Remove anything from your peripheral vision
and just remember that there are very
few emergencies for the time that you
are taking this class. Just be okay to ignore everything else
because it's absolutely fine. Nothing is going to
happen is more important that you give it your
undivided focus. Give yourself permission
to indulge in your work, indulge in your business, indulge in your audience for the entire duration
of this class. This is about you,
your business, your goals, your
career, your audience. Just put everything
else to one side.
3. Why you need to understand your customer: In this lesson, you
will learn why it's so important that you can
define your dream customer. I want to start
with this phrase, "If you see John Smith
through John Smith's eyes, you'll sell John Smith
what John Smith buys." In this example, John
Smith is your customer. We want to completely understand John
Smith so that we can sell John Smith
what John Smith buy which is exactly what
we're trying to do. The best businesses they're just obsessed with their customers. The best businesses
aren't trying to sell their customers what they
want to sell their customers, they're trying to sell
their customers what their customers want to buy, and this is such
a key difference. Remember that this
isn't about you, this is about them. Understanding your
dream customer will lead to them
saying phrases like, "They just get me, or
they just understand me or I just feel that this
brand just knows me." Well that brand, is your brand. When you get it right,
you're effectively making deposits into this
metaphorical piggy bank, which means that
you build up trust, you build that familiarity, and then when you're selling
to your audience in future, they are primed and
they're ready to buy because they feel
like you get them. Getting this right also
makes your marketing FLS. It means that you can just
hit the right spot every single time with everything
that you put out there. It makes it so obvious
when you can say, "Hey you guy, this is for you." It also makes it really
obvious when you can say, "Sorry, this isn't for you, " and you'll know exactly
who your brand and your business and your
services are just not for. It also channels your energy
all in one direction, and as we know from
the previous lesson, that is super important and will lead to all this energy, all this focus going into this one dream customer that leads to making
your business grow. So getting this
right means setting super strong foundations
from which to build. It's so important to
get this right right the start rather than
retrospectively. There are so many
businesses that have been running for a
very long time and they still don't really know exactly who their
dream customer is. They couldn't really,
really define it and that just means that they
end up being confused. So they end up going all this time selling too many products
and too many services to too many people and never really properly defining it
and getting amazing, and just doing one thing
to one audience really, really well, and
that's the purpose of this entire class. I'd like to invite
you to do two things. One is to think of the
brands that you buy from and engage with
in your day to day. Think of those companies
that you always buy from, the shops that you can't
pass it out going into and the ones that are bookmarked on your web browser because
you shop there so often. Think about how well you feel
like they understand you. Dig into what that is. Is it because the people in the shop engage with
you in a certain way? Is it because you buy
into the brand itself and its colors and its theme? Is it because you engage with their content in social media? Is it because you
feel like you have something in common with the other people
that they serve? There'll be little hints in every single brand
that you engage with, and these are the things that we want to draw out when we're talking about your
dream customer. The other thing I'd
like you to do is, just assess where
you are right now. Take a moment just to think, how well do you know
your dream customer? How much do you feel like
you could define them right here, right now? Just be honest, how much do you know you
would dream customers? How much do you know
why they buy from you? How much do you know
what they really want or are you just guessing? Work that out before
we go any further. Next, we are going to dig a little bit deeper
into that phrase, "It's not for you." [MUSIC]
4. It's not for you : In this lesson, you will learn
the power of the phrase, "It's Not For You." The phrase, "It's Not For
You," can make people feel a little bit uncomfortable. They can see it as
dismissive, or rude, or even discriminatory,
but actually, anyone other than your
dream customer is not the right right for your business and
that's why the phrase, "It's Not For You" is
just so important. There are five main
reasons why going narrow is a really, really good thing. The first is the network effect. The narrower you are on
your target audience, the narrower you are on
your dream customer, the more your customers have
in common with each other. The more that your customers
together form a club, they have things in common, they have shared
interests and everything revolves around your company and your brand, it is powerful. This puts you at the
center of a really, really strong network not
to be underestimated. The second reason going narrow
is a really good thing, is that it reduces headaches. If you are serving not
the right customers, you will have headaches because your product or service
is not designed for them. Similarly, they will have
headaches working with you. You're not going
to be the perfect solution to their problems. It's a lot better off
sometimes to just say, "It's Not For You" and
avoid those headaches. When you go really narrow
with your dream customer, you might find that
your dream customers start to wear your
brand like a badge. You might be able to
think of someone with a Harley Davidson tattoo
or an Ironman tattoo. Something that says, "This
brand matters to me. I am a card carrying member of this company's target audience." That's what you
want your customers to be able to say about you. You want them to
feel like you just get them and that you can
speak in their language, you can understand their needs, and they are card carrying
members of your audience. They are proud to be in it. It also shows confidence. When you're creating
your products, when you're creating
your services, when you are thinking about
new marketing campaigns, you are so drilled
down who your audience is that you are very confident in the message
that you're sending out. You're confident that it doesn't matter if it's not
resonating with everyone because you have
confidently excluded some people and that is okay. Finally, it makes space for
the right people to find you. There are eight billion
people in the world. It's okay not to serve absolutely everyone,
and actually, clearing the space of their
own people means there's more space for the
right people and that can only be a good thing. In the early days of
running my agency, we went on some sales training and the sales training
was really, really good. One of the things
that the person running the training said was, "You need to focus on your dream customer to the
detriment of everyone else. You need to focus
on those customers that are your perfect customers, but not only that, the ones
that are going to convert. You need to not spend your
time and energy focused on the wrong people
because all that will do is lead you off in
the wrong direction." I think it's really easy to just follow what everyone
who wants to buy from you. It's really easy to think that the same opportunity
isn't going to come along again, but it will. For the purpose of this
class, who I mean, when I say your
dream customer is one person or one
group of people. Even if you business could serve multiple
different people, even if you could have a few
different target audiences, I want you to focus on one. If someone had a gun
[LAUGHTER] to your head and said one customer, this is who it would be. You could also think
of it in terms of, if your business could only
serve these customers, who are the ones that
would make it grow to the business that you
were really happy to run? This is your target audience. This is your dream customer. This is the person who
we're going to define in every other lesson
in this class. To get you really
familiar with what it's going to feel like when
you get this right, I would like you to join me
in closing your eyes and just picturing your perfect customer approaching you
to work with you. Say maybe they're
approaching you physically, maybe they're coming in to your website in the
form of inquiries, maybe they're popping up on social media and
saying hi to you, maybe they're sliding
into your DMs. Visualize, looking at each of these inquiries as it comes
in and visualize just how amazing it feels to
be flooded with inquiries from the people you just
cannot wait to work with. Visualize it. You can see them coming in and like, "Oh
wow, there's another. Oh my God, there's
another. Oh wow, another." [LAUGHTER] Open your eyes. This is where doing this
work is going to lead. I'd also like you to practice saying, "It's Not For You." Imagine you've got an inquiry, you know that you can't
help this person. A former version of you
might have tried to twist stuff around and be
flexible to match their needs, but this version of you watching this class knows that this
is not going to happen. Practice saying it. Practice
saying, "I'm really sorry. We're not going to have to
help him. I'm really sorry. There's going to be a better
company to serve your needs. I'm really sorry, but we are not a match for what you want." Practice it because it
can sound uncomfortable. It can sound really
strange turning work down, but it clears the way
for the right work. Secondly, I want you
to practice having this sense of pride that you know that what you're doing is so focused on this one customer. It's going to absolutely
change their life. It's going to make
them so happy. It's going to make them wonder what they ever
did without you. Next, we're going to take this one dream customer and
we are going to define them. [MUSIC]
5. Defining your dream customer: [MUSIC] In this lesson is
where we drill down in incredible detail who
your dream customer is and we get really, really familiar with them. I want you to spend
your energy on those people who will
become customers. I want you to spend your energy on those people you want to become customers and
not those who don't. Sounds obvious?
Remember the phrase, the best business
owners are obsessed with their customers
and that is you today. This lesson is not only
to get crystal clear on who your audience
is but to be able to introduce them to someone else and to be able to recognize them when they walk through your door or enter
through your website. I'd like to start with
a visualization so please close your eyes. I'd like you to pick
your one dream customer. Maybe you know who
they are already. Maybe you don't know
already but this is the person who is perfect
for your services. Picture them.
Picture their face. Picture what they look like.
Picture their demeanor. You know what your
business does will make a hugely positive
change for them. As you're visualizing them, get familiar with
everything about them. Get to understand who
they are as a person and what they want out of life. Keep your eyes closed because in the next few
sections we're going to be defining this person based on defining
characteristics, frustrations and pains, and their deepest desires. We're also going to
be understanding how they spend their time. All the questions and the
concepts that we discuss, jot them down in your workbook with this dream
customer in mind. The one that you've got
in your head right now. Open your eyes. As we go through this lesson, not all the things that
I talk about will be relevant to you and to your
business, and to your work. But just write down those that are relevant to your
dream customer. Open your workbook and get
the following jotted down. Age range. What is the age range
of your dream customer? One company that springs to
mind that has absolutely nailed the age range of their dream customer is
called Tikiboo fitness. Tikiboo fitness do
leggings and they are aimed at women aged over 30. The reason this works
so well is because for them can be aimed
at women aged 30. They know what these
people have in common. They can use certain
references and popular culture that just
speaks to those people. It means that they can further refine their products
and services. Next, we've got location. Another company
that brings to mind is the Secret Spa App. This is an app that
helps people in certain areas book different
spot treatments and say, you can only work with Secret Spa if you're in
one of a few cities. Location, for Secret
Spa, is really, really important to
have noted down, perhaps you will the same, maybe your dream customer
has to be based in a few different locations or maybe even just one location. Another example is Realtors. Realtors have catchment areas. Maybe there's something
that your business provides that means that it resonates the most with certain people and certain
trends in certain cities. This is where to get down, all that location information. Next, we've got the job
title or the industry. If you are operating
a B2B business, so if you sell to people who
are certain professionals, then you will need
to write down here that job title or the
industry that they work in. You'll probably find that
the people who become your dream customer have one
of just a few job titles, and it might be that they're in specific functions
in their company. It might be that they're all
saved marketing managers of certain size companies within
a certain geographic area. As we go down the list, we're going to add
more demographics that effectively stack
on top of each other. We're going to get even more clear on who your
dream customer is. Now we've got age
range, location, job title, or industry
if you are B2B. The next one analysis income. This is if you are
a B2C company, so if you are a
business to consumer, if you a targeting people, you might find that the
people who will make your perfect audience members have a certain income range. Maybe you are a luxury product for people who want
a certain amount. Maybe you're a
budget product for people who are another
certain amount, so get that down here
in your workbook. Next, it's specific. This is things that your dream customers
specifically must have. The first example
I want to give you is my social media agency. Specifically, our dream customer
had to have a business. We didn't work with people
when they were pre-setup. Some agencies might have done, but we had a specific that
they must have a business. Maybe another specific for a antenatal class provider is that you must be pregnant
or you must have a baby. [LAUGHTER] Maybe companies said that you must have a
certain net worth. You must have a website, you must have a brand already. You must have a company. What other things that your
dream customer must have? To go back to the Tikiboo
fitness example as well. Not only would that dream
customer's age over 30, but they were also into running. A specific was that
they were interested in running and they may be
must have run a 10K, or they must take
running seriously or they must train at
least three times a week, there's something in that
for Tikiboo fitness, just as they will be
something in there for you. Then the flip side of this
is the absence of specifics. This is something like they
must not rent that home. Maybe if you're selling only to people who
are homeowners, it must be that they
didn't rent that home. Maybe if you're a restaurant, they must not be vegetarian. Well, they must not eat meat
or they missed something else that fits in with the things that
people must not have. Maybe if a company is helping individuals get immigration
in a certain country, they must not have
a British passport or they must not have
an American passport. That's their specific absence, their specific not have. Then the final category of
this section is interest. Here I want to introduce
you to the phrase, people like us do
things like this. Picture your dream customer saying to that bunch of friends, all of whom were also
that your dream customer. People like us do
things like this. What are those
things that they do? What we know is
that people choose their social circles based
on what they have in common. This might be where they live. These might be the
hobbies they have. These might be the TV
shows that they watch. There are certain
things that will come out and that is what
ties them together. For the purpose of
your company think of what those things are
and get them jotted down. One good example here is a British coffee shop chain
called Boston Tea Party. When Boston Tea Party
are choosing where they're going to put
a new restaurant what they look at is the presence of a
certain supermarket. They know that dream customer
shops at the supermarket so they will put their locations next to those supermarkets. It makes their expansion
plans super easy because they're pulling up a list of
where the supermarket is, and then later using plots
as close as possible. Next, is frustrations and pains, and we're going to go into
this in a lot more detail in the next section. But here I want you to
write down what are the frustrations
and pains that you would dream customer has? It might be really
surface level. It might be that they need a good designer for
a certain product, or it might be that they need a good set of paintbrushes, or it might be that they need a certain type of artwork
to give as a present. They might have
minor frustrations and minor pains but the
more you understand that, the more that you can
understand your dream customer and sell them what
they wanted to buy. We're going to go
into this in much more detail in the next section. It's important to know that
you don't have to solve all of your customers'
frustrations and pain. You're not that to wave a magic wand and fix
every problem for them, but being aware of them
means that you can create content that speaks to them
perfectly in their language. Then the next section
on your workbook is your dream customer's
deepest desires. To use the example of my
social media agency again, we would mainly be dealing with marketing managers
and companies of a certain size and their deepest desires what
to do a good job at work. They wanted their
boss to like them. They wanted their colleagues
to give them respect. They wanted to make
good decisions in the agency that they chose. That was the frustration and the pain that we were
solving for them. Maybe the deepest desires for your target audience is that
they want to one day run a triathlon or they want to buy amazing presents for
their nieces and nephews. In essence, you
are going to find these people from their
defining characteristics. You're going to understand
their pains and frustrations. You're going to speak
to them in a way that relates to their
deepest desires. Have a look at what
you've just written down. What you should have is a step-by-step picture
of your dream customer. You should by now be
building up this picture of them where you'll start
to recognize them, you'll start to have
people in your head that these different
characteristics relate to. You feel like you
understand them. Maybe you feel like your
friends at them already. Maybe you feel like you
just know them really well. I want to close this lesson with a quote that I love by Oprah, and it's this "Service plus
significance equals success". What we've just gone through
is the significance path. This is you being super significant to your
dream customer. That means exercise
is going to follow. [MUSIC]
6. Rabbits, deer & elephant: In this lesson, you will
learn about rabbits, deer, and elephant. This is a bit of a fun hunting analogy and it goes like this. Deer, the customers that
we have just described. Deer are your dream customers and how they are
characterized is as follows. They are fairly
straightforward to catch. They can feed a family
for a few days. They've got a lot
of meat on them and they're not so common like rabbits that
they're just everywhere, but they're not so rare like elephants that they're
really hard to find. Once you have your deer
hunting skills honed, you can find deer and
you can catch them and you can be very good
at catching deer. Rabbits are different. Rabbits are really easy to catch because they're
just everywhere. There's not much meat on them. They can't feed
you for very long. They can't sustain
you for very long. But once you catch one
and two and three, they will multiply,
so you just end up with a lot of
different rabbits. Elephants at the other
end of the spectrum, so elephant are much rarer, they're harder to find, they might take more
people to catch them, but once you've caught one, they could sustain
you for months, say. Rabbits, deer and elephant, basically relate
to your customers. Everything we've
talked about is deer. What we want to do is become
amazing deer hunters, so this dream customer,
they are your deers. For my agency, our deer were
marketing managers of companies who had between say, 10 and 1,000 members of staff, they were certain
type of product, they fulfilled a certain
need and they were looking for an agency to do a
certain number of things. They were just our deer clients. We knew when we saw one, we knew when one
was in front of us, and everything in our
marketing where they'll get up to speak to the
specific clients. Rabbits are different. Rabbits are different levels of client with maybe
a different budget. Maybe they've got
different needs. Maybe it's say, not necessarily
your main customers, but it's the ones who sign up to email list and
get your freebies, but don't ever buy anything. Or maybe it's the ones that
buy you entry-level product, but they don't buy
your main product and they don't buy your
premium offering. That could be rabbits. The idea here is that
rabbits were around, but we don't want to
spend all our time working out rabbits and
fulfilling their needs. Elephants are
slightly different. Elephants are those
huge customers that are just like the dream. For my agency, we started
working with a car brand ones and they were a huge car
brand, really recognizable. The contract was
about 20 percent of our entire turnover, but the car brand was
an elephant client. What I mean by that is that if they stomped
around like an elephant, if they click their fingers, we would drop everything
in order to save them. It was a very elephant high
maintenance relationship. For loads of different agencies, that is totally fine. If they're set up to
handle elephants, that might be exactly
what they want to do. But for us, because we were
set up to handle deer and because we've perfectly
defined that customer, the elephants basically took away from everything
else we were doing. Everything that we're
talking about is in terms of your dream customer, which is a deer,
but do be aware, there will be periphery rabbits
and periphery elephants, and it's really important
to know what to do with them and how to
speak to them too. Another really good reason for understanding what
does a rabbit look like for your business
and what doesn't elephant look like
for your business? Is that you don't waste energy and you don't
become frazzled trying to catch rabbits or
trying to catch elephants, because actually, you might not want to
catch the rabbits, they might be the
ones that you say, it's not for you. Equally with the elephants, it might be that you offered
this huge contract or since this is a massive piece of work that you could
put yourself forward for. But actually, you want
to focus on the deer client's because
you want to focus on your dream customer, and that's also fine. Knowing both ends of
the spectrum will make you even more focused
on those in the middle. I want to give you three
examples of rabbits, deer, and elephants in practice. Let's say you are the
owner of an Etsy store. Your deer, your dream
customer might be those customers who go on
and spend about $100, say. Your rabbits might be
the people who go on and just download a
free PDF, one free PDF. For they might be the
people who send you a message about buying,
but never actually buy. Your elephants might
be those people who want to buy a big bulk order
or a big cooper order, or they want to get a big
personalized order for wedding or a handle,
or some event. That's rabbits, deer, and
elephant for an Etsy store. Another example is
a YouTube channel. If you've got a YouTube
channel, for example, your deer might be those
people who watch your videos, they subscribe to your channel, and then they go
through and sign up and complete your program, your paid program, say. They're your deer. They're
the people who you focus all your efforts on. Your rabbits might be the people who watch your YouTube videos. Maybe they subscribe
to your channel, but they don't engage
any further than that, so they don't sign
it to your list, they just watch your
videos and that's it. Your elephants might
be your sponsors. They might be your
YouTube channel sponsors. They get in touch, they say, "Hey, I like your videos, I want to sponsor your
channel," but they're not the main people that you focus on because
that is your deer. Another example is if you're
a marketing freelancer, so your deer, your dream customer might be people who spend between say, $500 and $1,000 a
month with you. They take a set of
services from you, you know what work
you do for them. They are perfect dream
customers and that your specialism
matches what they need and they are your deer. Your rabbits, on the other hand, might be people who want, say, one of your services
or they only have a budget of up
to $500 a month, or they only want to take one, say, training session from you. Your elephants might be
those really big projects. The ones who have much
bigger budgets or the ones who want you to
basically be full-time for them, or the ones who have lots of different things that
they want you to work on at any given time. Say for the purposes of this exercise of the
dream customer exercise, but I only focus on deer. We don't want to
get our marketing up to rabbits and elephants, they will probably just happen. We want to get all our
marketing up towards deer. Those dream customers,
the ones in the middle, the ones that
absolutely everything should be focused towards. Next step is an exercise to test how well you
have honed in on your one dream
customer and how you will know when there's one
right in front of you. [MUSIC]
7. Introducing your dream customer: In this lesson, we will
get to the next level of familiarity in terms
of your dream customer. The first thing I want
to do is tell you about two companies in particular who do this and what they
do because it's genius. [LAUGHTER] Apple, who I'm
sure you'll be aware of. Apple leaves an empty chair in meetings that
represents the customer. In a meeting, they'll be all the people
there and they will have one chair empty and that is so that they can
always be considering their customers needs
in their meetings. There's another
makeup company where they have given their
dream customer a name. The avatar is so
familiar to all of them that this customer is
called Jessica, for example. In meetings with
buyers where they've got potential suppliers
coming to see them, the buyers will be,
would Jessica like this, or I'm not sure Jessica
would like this, or, yeah, Jessica
would love this, this is what Jessica would
say about this product, and because they've
defined Jessica so well, they can all talk on
behalf of Jessica. This is what it looks like
when companies get it right. The goal of this
lesson is to get you to that level of familiarity. I want you to imagine that
you have in front of you, your dream customer, and I want you to imagine
that you are now going to introduce them
to someone else. You're going to describe them, you're going to talk about them, and you're going to
be very accurate in terms of their
defining characteristics, their pains and frustrations, and their deepest desires. What I'd like you to do is to set a timer for three minutes. I'm going to give you
some examples first, but then we're going
to set a timer for three minutes and
you're going to do exactly the same thing and get down all the
different things that spring to mind about
this customer. We're going to
start this exercise with the phrase, oh hey, you'll never guess who I
just met. I'll go first. This is me explaining
my dream customer, which is an entrepreneur who
buys my books to a friend. I'm going to say, oh, hey, you'll never guess
who I just met. I've met this early-stage
entrepreneur. They've just set up the
business and they feel like their business is
running them rather than they are running
their business. Maybe they've had
a bit of success. They've had a few
clients sign up. They've got some customers. Maybe they're
thinking about hiring the first team member, but at the same time,
they're frazzled. They're doing every single
job in that business. They're running around like crazy like a headless chicken. They want to do a really
good job for their clients. They want to be
the best employer when they do start
employing people. They want to be just
amazing at what they do and they wanted to build up a brand of themselves, but they are just too busy and they don't
know what to do, and they do not see a way out. This person loves learning, so they love reading books. They love listening to podcasts. They love meeting
other entrepreneurs. They're really hungry for
knowledge and they're really hungry to apply all
to their situation. But it still comes back
to this time issue. They just feel like they
haven't got the time to do anything that
they want to do. Hopefully, from
that description, you can see elements of the
defining characteristics, associations and pains, and the deepest desires
of my dream customer. I'm going to give you one
more example and then we're going to go into your try. I want to talk to you
about my friend Cat. Cat is also a
Skillshare teacher. She creates digital
watercolor artwork and she licenses her designs
to different stores. This is Cat explaining to me
who her dream customer is. It starts by her saying, oh, hey, you'll never
guess who I just met. I just met the product buyer for a very recognizable brand. They are set in their role, they're looking for
new ideas for designs. They do loads of arty
stuff outside work, so they're really
interested in the field. They got to art
shows. They spend their weekends in
museums and galleries. They love meeting designers. They love seeing their ideas. They want to do a really
good job at work. They want to get promoted.
They want to get a pay rise. They want to have respect
from their colleagues, and they want to also get
praise from their boss. More importantly, this person doesn't want to make
any bad decisions. Hopefully from me
telling you about my dream customer and Cat telling you about
her dream customer, you can see exactly
what's required of you in this exercise. Now,
we're going to do it. We're going to set a
timer for three minutes. We're going to stop
everything and write down this introduction
in your workbook. I want you to explain
your dream customer in as much detail as
I just did it with mine and Cat did with hers. Open your workbook, let's go. Three minutes is up, so hopefully, you have
loads of scribbles, loads of notes all about
your dream customer, and you can introduce them to someone else in insane detail. What we're going to do next
is drill down even further this time into their
frustrations and pains. [MUSIC]
8. Pains & frustrations: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we are
going to get super familiar with your dream customer's
pains and frustrations. This was mentioned
briefly earlier, but now we're going to go
into even more detail. Why are we focusing on
pains and frustrations? My goal is that
your dream customer looks at your company,
your products, your services, and they're like, "Oh, my goodness, this suits made so perfectly." They are banging your door down for you to solve
their problems. Getting to know them in this
way makes the sale simple. It's far less about
you persuading them, and it's more about
you letting them in. It also makes your
content really simple, which we'll come onto
after this lesson. In this lesson, we're going
to do a visualization. I would like you to
close your eyes right now and picture your
dream customer. Your dream customer is crying. You're going to say to
them, "Are you okay?" They're going to to, "No,"
and they're going to have a box of tissues next to them. They're going
to be using them. They're going to be crying
into the tissues and you are just going to sit
there and listen. You are going to write
down what they say. Some of what they say
is super trivial, but some of it is very deep
rooted. Open your eyes. [LAUGHTER] The exercise
that you're going to do is open the page
in your workbook that relates to your dream
customer's pains and frustrations and write down
everything that they say. By now, you're really
familiar with this person. You can get perfectly
inside their head. Now they're angry, they're
sad, they're frustrated. There's lots of things that they wish they could change and you're going to write down
what those things are. In a moment, we're going to set a timer for three minutes and you're going to do this
exercise in your workbook. But first, I just want
to give you an example. The example product is a
social media reporting tool and the example dream customer
is a social media manager. They're sitting on the
sofa, they are crying, and I'm writing down their
pains and frustrations. It starts off with
them saying, "Oh, no, I haven't got time, I can't do my reports, I can't possibly report back to my client and also do
all my client work. I can't update all these
different social media platforms and tell my client
what I've been doing. I'm really worried that
I'm going to lose my job. I'm really worried that I'm
not going to be very good at my job and my colleagues
are going to laugh at me. I'm really worried that
I'm never going to find another job once
I lose this one. I'm really worried that
this isn't a role for me, that I've been wasting all my time in this
role when actually, I'm not great at it. I think that my clients are
going to think I'm stupid. I think my clients
are going to leave. I'm not going to find
another company and then my boss is going to be
angry at me for losing our clients and I'm going
to lose my job again." You'll notice from this social media manager
example that some of these pains and frustrations
are very surface level. But some of them
are deep rooted, some of them are real
pains and frustrations. In the exercise, I want you
to write down as many pains and frustrations as you can
of your dream customer. What you'll find is that
the first few are easy. You write them down. Because
you know them so well, it will be really
obvious what they are. Then as you go down the list, it will get harder and
harder to think of them. When you get stuck, persevere, keep going with it. It would be so easy to
just get distracted and pull out a phone or a web browser,
something like that, but stick with it because this is where the magic
happens when you start thinking of the next and the next and the
next after that. Dig really deep to try
and find these answers. We are going to start the
clock for three minutes. Please, open your
workbook and begin. Three minutes is up. Hopefully, you've got
a really long list of all your dream customer's pains and frustrations right
in front of you. Next, what I want you
to do is have a look at them and see if you can
group any of them together. You might find that
some of the pains and frustrations actually
will fit into the same category and it's
all about loss of money. You might find that
they all fit into the same category and
it's all loss of respect. Whatever that is, link
them altogether so that you know the big
categories that they fall into. After that, I'd like
you to prioritize them. Knowing what you know
about your dream customer, what's their number
one biggest pain? What's the second and
what's the third? These are the top
three that we're going to focus on the most. From this class so far, you
are super familiar with your dream customer and all of their defining
characteristics. You know their deepest desires. You know how they
spend their time. You know have to spot
one when you meet them. You know how to introduce them. You are ultra familiar with this person
and you might start to think that they're
like a friend or a colleague to you. Now you know your dream
customer's pains. You know what keeps
them up at night. You know why they're worried. You know what they're
sad about. You know what they're angry about. Next, we're going to tie
all of this together into planning content that these
people love to consume. Remember the goal,
the goal is that your dream customers wear
your brand like a badge. They feel that you've
just get them. They can't explain exactly how. They just know. [MUSIC]
9. Headlines: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we are going to turn
those deepest desires and pains and frustrations
into headlines. Where we are right now is we are sorted with our definitions. Our definitions are crystal clear and they will not change. I want to stick a pin in all the definitions
that we've done of your dream customer
and we want to move forward with
content planning. I want to tell you
a story of a man in a hardware shop and he is
going to buy some nails. If I said to you, what
does this man want? You would say, well,
that's obvious. You just told me, [LAUGHTER]
he wants some nails. But actually, there's another
level to it than that. He doesn't just want
to buy some nails, he wants to put up a shelf. What this man is
looking for is storage. What this man is looking for
is clear space in his house. There you go, that's
what he wants; clear space in his house, but it actually goes
deeper than that. What this man actually wants is the recognition from his family
that he put up the shelf. This man wants to be loved. You can see how a
really simple story of a man in a hardware
shop looking for some nails can
lead [LAUGHTER] to a man who actually
wants to be loved, who wants love and
respect from his family. Everything is like this, every single dream customer
story is like this. They don't just want those things that are on the surface, they want those deeper things. If you remember Cat who I
talked to you about earlier. Cat is the Skillshare teacher whose target audience is a
product buyer at a big brand. Those product buyers don't just want to buy great products, they want to be respected and admired by their colleagues. They want to not
lose their jobs. It's so much deeper than
just buying products. It's the same with
sports products. People aren't buying sports
products just to play sport, they're buying them because they want to win championships. They want to prove points
or they want to be admired. People mainly want love, status, time, or money. They are actually buying
one of those four things. Most problems come down to these four things and
most solutions do too. It's creating the link
between your dream customer, their defining characteristics,
their deepest desires, their pains and frustrations, and what your product or service does that comes
down to headlines, and so this lesson is all
focused on headlines. A social media freelancer is selling to
marketing managers. The marketing managers
don't just want tweets and blog posts, the marketing managers
want recognition, the marketing
managers want to make good decisions at work,
they want promotions. It comes down to
money and status. There is always more to it. What I'm going to do now, is talk you through some
formats for headlines. These headlines can be
email subject lines, they could be the headlines
for articles that you write, they could be things that
you saw on your website, they could be
social media posts, they could be article
titles and they could be YouTube video titles. In your workbook
in front of you, you've got your list of
defining characteristics, deepest desires, and
pains, and frustrations, and we're going to use all of
these to create headlines. What we're going to do
is combine them with hooks which I'll talk
you through it in a sec. We're going to add
a relevance marker, and we're going to make content that you audience
can't wait to consume. The first one is
their secret to. Everyone wants to know the
secret to doing something. The purpose of the
secret to hook is so that you will target
audience can find out how to achieve one of their
deepest desires and how to avoid one of their
pains and frustrations. Remember, human nature
is that people move away from pain and they
move towards pleasure. You're directing them in one of these two directions with the headlines that
you're putting together. Another one is common mistakes, so three common mistakes
that X make when buying Y, or when doing Y where X
is your target audience. Remember, you've got their
defining characteristics, you know who they are. Remember, they're
runners from earlier, the TTP fitness female
over 30 runners. That's who we would
put in the X space, and doing Y is something
that you know they do. You know their milestones,
you know their interests, you know what they
spend their time doing, and that is what goes
here for that headline. Next, we've got the
simple ways to. Everyone wants simple
ways of doing something, and this is why
you're going to tell your dream customer
the simple way that they can avoid their
pains and frustrations and move towards their
deepest desires. Five simple ways to, 10 simple ways to,
whatever it might be. This is where you take
information that you already know about your target audience
and you fill things in. Three things to remember when running your
first half marathon. You know the milestones or you know other things
that are coming up, so what do they need to remember when these things come to pass? We've got the steps too. How are you going to talk
someone through doing something that takes them away from pain and towards pleasure. We've got the top 10. Top 10 lists are
always really good. It's human nature to want to do what everyone else is doing, it's human nature to want
to find out what is top, what is popular, what should
I not be missing out? Then we've got things to nerve, so things to never do. The example I've got
in front of me is three things to never take
to a bachelorette party. Imagine that your
target audience is people who go to
bachelorette parties. You want to move them away
from fear or from shame. You want to move them away from embarrassment and so you're
going to help them move away from embarrassment
with this headline or with a social media post that
answers this question. Next, we've got why X isn't happening or why X is happening? Specifically from the pains
and frustrations list, you know what things are happening in your
target audiences lives, and so you're going to tell them why this thing is happening. You're going to basically
solve their query with your headline and with
the article you're going to write or the video that you're going
to put together. That's why X isn't happening
or why X is happening, then we've got the reasons. We've got the reasons X
should do Y where again X is your dream customer and
Y is that thing that you know that they should do
that action they could take. Remember, you know them so well, you know how they can get towards pleasure
and away from pain. We've also got the
biggest mistake. No one wants to make mistakes. If you can help people
avoid mistakes, they will seek out your content. The one we mentioned earlier
was a social media manager. The example I've
got is the biggest mistakes social media managers make when creating social
media reports for example, and this might be relevant for the social media reporting tool. We've put all these
together using a combination of a hook and the information
glean that's already laid out there in your workbook. Next, what we need to do
is add a relevant marker. The relevance marker
here might be a time. It might be this year, or this summer, or before you graduate, or before your first half
marathon, something like that. Something that signals to
your audience why they are reading or why they are
consuming this content now. It compels them to
do it more than if you didn't have that
relevance marker there. Another relevance marker
could be a place, so in New York, in the supermarket,
in the cinema, somewhere that you know they go. Remember you do know this
because we put it all down in the defining
characteristics. You know how they
spend their time, you know what they
do on the weekends, you know where they shop, you know the other
brands they like. You've got this picture
of them that you can build these headlines from. There are two examples that
I want to take you through, and the first is
Thought Catalog. Thought Catalog is a website whose target audience
is millennials. What Thought Catalog did; so imagine they took this
class and they broke down all the information
that you've written down in your workbook
and their workbook. They have now come up with
all these article titles that perfectly match their
target audiences interests. If you look through this
list of trending now, you've got all these
topics coming out. You've got relationships,
anxiety, friendships. You've got picked me up, you've got pillow
talk questions, you've got personality traits, there's zodiac signs, Harry Potter, all this stuff that people are interested in. All this stuff that
they target audience the Thought Catalog
are interested in. A few more things I
wanted to pull out here. We've got the 10 things,
we've got the reasons why. This is helping someone
to categorize themselves, helping them to put
themselves in a box, and therefore make
decisions on how they've come off on that personality test or
whatever it might be. This is based on
the zodiac sign and this is based on your
[inaudible] or patronus. One thing to notice
about these headlines is that they all hide some things. If every single one of these, I need to click to find
out that key information. I've got the top one
in the meantime; do this, but what
do I need to do? The second one, 10
things you should know. I don't know these
straightaway, I have to click. You've got the ugly truth, you've got the reasons why. They're all saying click me, I'm going to tell
you this answer. The more compelling you
can make the question, the more someone will want
to find out the answer. Another one I wanted to show
you is from Women's Health. Women's Health also did this
exercise and they identified sleep as a huge pain and frustration for
their dream customer. What Women's Health have done is they've gone a step further. They have put an
entire section on their website
dedicated to sleep. You can see from here, you've got stuff about
the best pillows, you've got the best
mattress toppers, you've got the best
cooling pillows, you've got stuff
about narcolepsy. Even on the big huge headline
you've got relieving back, neck, and shoulder pain. Imagine when they
did this pains and frustrations exercise
that you've just done, their dream customer said I've got back, neck,
and shoulder pain, and that's the
article that they are writing to answer that. Another one I want
to point out here is the healthy sleep awards. Awards straightaway
is credibility. People want to know what's won awards because
they wanted to buy things that have won awards, so that's a really good
one to pull out here. What I would recommend
doing is finding the publications that your
target audience reads, and looking through the headlines
that they put together. They will have content teams going into creating
this type of content, and researching stuff, and they will have so
many analytics that they're running to work out which ones are doing the best. You can get a lot of information just from
looking through the sites. Because you know
your dream customer, because you know their
deepest desires, and their pains, and frustrations, you can write content that perfectly
speak to them. Hopefully, you will see a
formula appearing here. What I'd like you to do
once a month is carry out a headline bank exercise. This is where you carve out some time to come
up with a load of different headlines
that perfectly speak to your dream customer. If you think not
only have you got all the information
in your workbook, but you've also got the one biggest
challenge question that you're constantly asking. You've got the wave the magic wand question that you are constantly
asking as well. You've got all the feedback that you're collecting from LinkedIn, polls from Twitter, posts from Instagram polls, and all of this is
going to turn into headlines that you can
use every single month to plan your whole
social media content and website content in advance. Similarly to the pains and
frustrations exercise, you will probably find that
the first few headlines every time you do this exercise are simple. You can
just write them down. It's almost like you can
do it in your sleep, but the ones after that
will be more tricky. This is where to stick with it, this is where to
just keep going. In the future, you
will just become a headline creation machine. It's almost like
training a muscle. This information then becomes all your content and
all your web copy, and you know that it perfectly speaks to your dream customer. My goal is that you
never waste time on vague content ever again, you speak directly to
your target audience. I want you to absolutely know this process and be
confident in creating the headlines and copy from all the information that
we've covered so far. When you've got headlines
that you are happy with, add them to your
workbook because this forms part of
your class project. You get thinking about
how you could use them as the hooks for your
social media posts, or your email titles, [MUSIC] or as headlines for
your articles or videos. This is what your dream
customer wants to know.
10. Feedback: [MUSIC] In this lesson, you are going to learn how
to collect feedback from your dream customers that can be turned into compelling content. So I want to start
this lesson by telling you about Pete and Gary. When I was starting out as
a social media freelancer, Pete told me that it
would never work. [LAUGHTER] He told me that I was charging far too much
for what I was doing. He told me that there
wasn't a need for what I was doing and
he told me that it was really easy for my customers to do what I was doing for
them on their own, and therefore, I should
charge them far less. Gary, however, had
the opposite advice. Gary told me I should
charge far more. Gary thought that
what I was doing was so valuable to my customers that I should command a bigger proportion of
their marketing budget. He thought that with
my current prices, clients were never going
to into take me seriously. Gary thought that rather than go after who I was going after, I should be focusing on big
companies in London and in big cities and I should try and do their social
media work for them. At the time, neither Pete nor Gary were my dream customer. Actually Pete
represented a rabbit, if you remember the rabbits, deer and elephants
analogy we visited earlier and Gary
represented an elephant. And why this is
important is because collecting feedback
is really key. But you only should be collecting feedback from
those people who are actually your dream
customer because only what they say will be
relevant to your business. So the purpose of this video is to go through ways of collecting feedback that can then be turned into really compelling content. And there are about five
different ways of doing so. There are two questions
that I want you to ask your dream customers. The first question is, what's your one biggest
challenge with x? Where x is your industry or the product that you have or is the problem
that you solve. What's your one biggest
challenge with social media? What's your one biggest
challenge with graphic design? What's your one
biggest challenge with commissioning videographers? What's your one biggest challenge
with finding designers? Work out what that
question is that relates to your
business and then ask as many of you who
dream customers as possible and make a note
of all the results. What you will find is that they will come
up with a whole load of problems [LAUGHTER] and they will come up with a
whole lot of challenges, some of which you hadn't even written down in the pains and frustrations exercise that
we did in a previous lesson. What you can do is use their responses to
come up with content. Imagine social media company
ask their customers, what's your one biggest
challenge with social media? The response is received with things like scheduling
content, knowing what to post, knowing what resonates, making the most of Instagram Reels or
whatever it might be, there'll be a whole
list of them. You then create content which answers that problem
with a how-to. So how to and then the
problem that they've said, how to and the challenge
that they've said, how to create perfect
content for Instagram, how to make use of
Instagram Reels, how to do this, how to do that. You basically match them
up so you are answering the exact challenges
that your customer has. A very similar one is the
wave a magic wand question. This is why you ask
your dream customers if you could wave a magic wand, what problem would you
solve with regards to x? Where again, x is the
problem you solve or it's your industry or it's the
field of your expertise. Waving a magic wand is going to make them dream
bigger and it's going to make them rack their
brains to how they would find a magical solution to this problem
that they've got. And that too should lead to different content ideas
that you can write about. Actually, the ones
I've mentioned in the challenges literally
could be YouTube videos. You could create YouTube
videos that answer the questions and
the challenges that your dream customer has. Those are the two
biggest questions and now it's where we're
going to ask them. One of the places that
is magic for asking these questions is
on a thank-you page. So in your business, you might have some free webinar or free download or something
that people can get, maybe an exchange for
an email address. What you want to
do is create it so that when someone puts
in an email address, they get a free download. The thank-you page
that they see is a questionnaire and it
only needs to be tiny, but you want to
collect that answer to the one bay challenge
question or you want to collect the answer to the
wave a magic wand question. We did exactly this in
my social media agency. We created a free webinar. We've got people
signed up for it. And then as soon
as they signed up, they saw a type form. And in the type for they had to write the size of their company. They write down their job title and then they wrote their
one biggest challenge. And that was genius because not only didn't
mean that we've got the one biggest
challenge answers. But we could also say
match up the size of the company and their title
to whether they were rabbits, deer, or elephants
and we could further refine all of our content
to approach deer. There are two amazing examples from friends of mine that I want to show you on screen now. The first is someone
called Rob Garrity. Rob is a presenting coach and he is talking to people about their pains and frustrations to do with presenting virtually. So here is a really
good example of him asking his audience
what they do. And he said so today
I'm after your views on what to wear when
you're working virtually. Has your company put in
place a virtual dress code? Doesn't even matter? Have the dress code rules
change in the last two years? So this is another question
that he's asked his audience. So you've got here's a
hypothetical question today. You've been granted
a free day of working time with the
world leading expo. You just need to
choose which one you think could most help your
big upcoming presentation. Which one would you choose? Comments as ever
are always welcome. So he's then split this
into storytelling expert, voice coach, slides guru, and audience engagement expert. So what you can see
from this quiz which has had 151 responses, is that he now knows what his audience wanted
to hear about. There's almost no point him
talking to the audience about the presentation slides. But talking to them
about storytelling, talking to them about how
to engage an audience, lots of people that
he's engaged with, lots of his dream customers want to know about this stuff. And then I'm going to show
you two more examples from Rob because
he's really got this sorted and this is a
really amazing way of collecting feedback
from your target audience. So we've got a question
about questions. This is asking people when they ask questions during
a presentation at the start, during,
or at the end. You can see this is
about 260 votes. He's basically just positioning himself as the expert
in this field. He's collecting feedback. And then what
happens on LinkedIn, as you can see, he has responded with each
of these answers. So he could then go through and follow up each of these people with more information or he
ask them more questions. But overall, it
lends itself really well to him knowing
what content to create. So even from this
question it could be, how to maximize the Q&A around at the end of
your presentation? It could be, should you take questions at the start
of your presentation? It could be, here's
how to successfully take questions during
your presentation. There's all these
different things that he could write that he knows his target audience
are interested in. And then the final one from Rob. This is quite interesting
because this is him asking his audience so he's
got 143 votes on this. Did you attend a hybrid
meeting in the past week? So this is a good example
of someone who knows the trends in that industry and what it's going to
come up in the future. So he knows that it's not just people having remote meetings, it's not just people having
face-to-face meetings. But now there's this
new challenge which he probably knows from
his audience that sometimes some people are
going to be in the room altogether and some
people are going to be signing onto
meeting from home. So it gives us
whole new dynamic. So he's got a question
out there to asks. How many of his
audience have actually attended the hybrid meetings? He's trying to get a gauge on how many people are
affected by this challenge. Then what he's going to
do is make a load of new content to answer
that challenge. So you can imagine it
will lead to things like how to successfully
run a hybrid meeting, how to be persuasive in
a hybrid presentation, and all these different
things that he can come up with just based
on that question. Another one here from
Rob, just because I think it's really good. He's asked his audience, how often do you have to deliver important presentations at work? So he's really
getting a gauge of how much help people need. So you got every
day, every week, every month and every year, 81 votes and he's going to create content
that answers that. So this could be around
the topics such as burnout or what to do when you give presentations
once a month? What to do when you have to give a presentation every single day? So he can really speak to his audience just by adding that qualifier at the
end of his headlines; every day, every
week, every month, every year and it
becomes more relatable. This example is from
the YouTube channel of Carrie Green who runs the Female Entrepreneurial
Association. So she is constantly asking the one biggest
challenge question and the way the magic wand
question of her audience. What you can see is
that this leads to YouTube videos that pretty
much answer those questions. So you've got how to visualize
achieving what you want. You've got how to
create a product. So you can imagine someone's
their one biggest challenge of starting their business
or growing their businesses. I don't know how to
create the product. So she's written how to
create your product. Then you've got how
to start a business with no money and no skills. You've got how to destroy
your money blocks and then you've got how
to start and grow as successful membership sites. So they're very specific videos that answer very
specific questions. So here's the task
for you this week. I want you to ask the one
biggest challenge question. I want you to ask the wave a magic wand question
of your dream client. This might be on the phone. This might be face-to-face. This might be on a
thank-you page for webinar or freebie that
you're giving away. This might be in a Twitter poll. This might be an LinkedIn poll. This might be from
your email newsletter. Somehow workout a way of tying these questions into your
operations because what you'll find out is
that they lead to you just having all these ideas
for content all the time. Because it's your dream
customers' problems, it will be super relevant. Next, I'm going to show you how to turn your dream customer pains into your website content. [MUSIC]
11. Turning pains into content: In this lesson, you are
going to learn how to turn the pains in your dream customer
into compelling content. By now, you should
have a big list of their pains and frustrations
and challenges. These are been collected from
the imagination exercise, from the questioning
your audience exercise, and from just generally
being obsessed with your customers as all the
best business owners are. What I'm going to
do now is take you through some companies
who've really perfectly taken the pains
and frustrations of their dream customer and turned them into website content. As you will see, this doesn't just have to be website content. There's application
of this information all over social media as well. I want to start with Apotheo, which is a software
for personal trainers. As you can see, they
call themselves a client management software for
online nutrition coaches. Great, that's in the banner
at the top of the side. But then as you go down the site into
the next four places, there are examples
of them perfectly answering their audiences
pains and frustrations. At the top, they've got any
of these sound familiar, so of course they're
going to sound familiar. They know that they're
going to sound familiar. That's why it's genius. The first one is I
want to spend time helping clients not
searching through email. If you imagine their
dream customer is a personal trainer. The personal trainer
has loads of clients, and the personal trainers
pains and frustrations, the ones that they cry
their eyes out [LAUGHTER] about when these person did the pains and
frustrations exercise was that they waste their time
searching through email. Apotheos website is
answering this perfectly. It's basically
saying, no need to waste time searching through email you can just
help your client. They've got two paragraphs underneath that problem
where they answer it. They've also got a handy
little screenshot of what their platform does
to answer that pain. We've got the answer to
another problem here. We've got I keep forgetting
to invoice clients. I must be losing a ton of money. The personal trainers
pain and frustration was, I'm forgetting to
invoice clients and I'm losing money and I'm disorganized, I need help. This software is showing here how it's
answering that pain. Another one is about how
much email they got. They log on to 63
unread and they cannot handle the volume of
emails that they are getting. This website is explaining
again how that solves it. Then the final one is about
chasing their clients. This personal trainer is really frustrated because the clients keeps forgetting
to send check-ins and they hate having
to chase them. Then you can see another
one on this page actually that they've already tried an online
coaching software and it didn't fit their brand. Apotheo is going to
talk there about how their personal training
software can be perfectly customized
to match a brand. What you can see is a
direct application of these pains and frustrations
onto a website. But the thing is it doesn't
just have to be a website. These could be
social media posts, these could be YouTube videos. These could be how to better manage your client
email as a personal trainer, these could be help videos about how to use a
Apotheo specifically. Another really good
example of where problems are shared on a
website [inaudible], is this product Later. Later is a scheduling
tool for Instagram posts. They described themselves as the world's favorite Instagram
marketing platform and much more and their
target audience is social media managers. This is the top of their website and one of the things that
you'll notice is that they've got a load of logos from various different
publications. Say we're going to come onto
a bonus lesson later about pitching to publications
so that you can get these logos
on your website. But just note that they
are there because that is instant credibility
for this software. But then later on, they use three
different opportunities to answer their perfect customer's pains
and frustrations. Firstly, you've
got about finding and sharing the right content. If you imagine the Later team, when they did their pains and frustrations exercise and when their perfect customers were crying and sharing
all their problems, it was all about no
time to create content and not knowing
what to put where. The next one is all about not
being able to track things, not being able to
drive traffic to various different places
because they're so overwhelmed. Then what they've also done, which is a step further, is that they have collected testimonials which also
answer these problems. One really good thing
is if you can answer your customer's problems
on your website. But an even better thing is if other customers can answer your other customers
problems on your website. I'm not saying write
your own testimonials, but I am saying if you
can collect testimonials from your customer that address those pains and frustrations. These are just three
really good examples of practical applications of your dream customers
pains and frustrations. Answering their pain and
frustrations doesn't even need to take up a whole website. In this example on Coachvox, you've got at the top, work smarter, increase your hourly rate and
deliver more value. If you think how these
map perfectly to their dream customers,
pains and frustrations. It's that they're not
working smart enough. They're working all hours, they aren't getting
paid enough and they don't know how to
increase [inaudible]. They don't know how to earn more and they're
worried that they're not delivering all the
value that they can. This website actually
answered it in just three short bursts at
the top above the fold. It's the first
thing that you see. From the pains and
frustrations exercise, we've already gone
down the whole list, we've already prioritized
and we've grouped them and we know the top three. The next step is to answer
them on your website. Maybe you can ask one of your current customers to
give you a testimonial that talks about how you specifically solved a certain
problem for them. What I'd like you to do
now and before we go to the next lesson is look
at your website and look at your social media pages and have a look if
you are answering your audience's pains because this is the point of all this. There's no point to sharing fluffy content
about nice to have. No, this really
makes a difference. What we know about human
nature is that humans either move towards pleasure or
they move away from pain. We're getting them right
now to move away from pain. But you have to explain the pain and then explain
how you solve it. Another question to ask when you're looking
at your website and your social media pages
is why should I care? Put yourself in the shoes of your dream customer and imagine them asking
that question. Does your website and do your social media
pages answer that? This could be as simple as creating a load of how-to posts. You imagine all the one
biggest challenge question, we've got the wave and
magic wand question. We've got the pains
and frustrations. Every single one of those
things that I mentioned could be a how-to video that
you could create. It doesn't have to be lengthy. It could be five ways to, it could be three ways to. It could be a video, it could be a TikTok post, it could be in a LinkedIn post. The first step to creating compelling content that
your audience love to consume is perfectly answering their pains and frustrations. Next we're going to
talk about taking these how-tos guides and turning them into headlines that you can pitch to journalists. [MUSIC]
12. Bonus video: Get your headlines published: In this lesson, you
will learn how to pitch your headlines to
well-named publications. My goal for you is that you
can pitch journalists for inclusion in very well-known
publications like Forbes, TechCrunch, Vasco Inc, Entrepreneur, and Lowe's, more specific to your industry. Why might you want to do this? Credibility. It's all credibility. You want your dream
customers to see your name and your information in those publications that
they see as credible, that they read, that they use
to select their suppliers. The goal is for you
to be associated with those well-known
publications that your audience
members read a lot. Most journalists who contribute articles to publications
including me, get pitched all the time. Their inboxes are
overflowing with requests, everyone wants them
to write about their story or their company, and I just cannot possibly
write about all of them. The purpose of this lesson is
to help yours breakthrough. What I want to do is show
you a really good example that you can ambulate
with your business. Apart from the email
that you're actually going to send to the journalist, there are three components
of a perfect pitch. The first one is the headline. With every practicing headlines, you've got a whole
list of headlines that you know your dream
customer wants to read, that you know are clickable, compelling and that
bit is very sorted. Then is the bio. This
is your credibility for including this information in the publication that
you are pitching to. The third component
of a perfect pitch is those bullet points that will accompany your headlines that's
maybe 5-7 bullet points. It's the meat of
the piece and this is what you're going to include your sentences and
your quotes in that the journalists can then
write up into a piece. I want to show you exactly
how this looks in action. This article here is
one that I wrote up in Forbes after being pitched
by someone called Ed Cooke. The title of his
article is how to develop a world-class
memory within a year. Just to break this down, Ed Cooke runs a company called Memorize and it helps
people learn languages. Part of learning
languages is having a better memory so that you can retain information
for longer. He knows that people who
are learning the languages want to develop a better memory. So that's what he
teaches people. Within a year it gives
it some urgency, some kind of time frame, and actually within a
year is very relevant to his expertise
because he taught someone to win the US Memory
Championships within a year. So that's the headline
that he pitched, which I think you'd
agree is pretty compelling and it starts
with that how-to. The second component of
this pitch is Ed's bio. Right here you can
see his job title. You can see the
company that he runs, and you can see the
different elements of the company that show how he is credible in delivering that information on
this publication. You've got that he trained an American journalist to win the US Memory Championships, you've got this US Memory
Champion then wrote a book. There were quite a
few different lines of credibility there. That could be as simple as how long you've been
running your business. That could be as simple as the kind of clients
you work with. That could be your job title, your area of expertise, the kind of results that
you get for your clients. All that stuff can
go within your bio, maybe awards you've won or different experience
that you've got. This can all form part of the bio that you are
pitching to journalist. Next, we've got the
bullet points that Ed sent over that then made
up the meat of the piece. He sent over 5-7, but actually, three of them were really
compelling and all of his quotes fit
under these three. The three we're; laying the foundations
to have a great memory, improve your memory and specific things that
people could do, and then test yourself. Under these three subheadings, Ed sent over sentences, phrases, small quotable elements that I could then
write into a piece. This is what journalists
are looking for. They're looking
for you to make it super simple for them to write a really compelling
piece that they know that their audience
is going to love. Ideally, you pick a publication where they share your
target audience, where your dream customer
reads that publication, where your dream customer
matches that dream customer because then you
know that that is content that they
will want to consume. Now you know what
you're pitching. The next part is to
find the journalists who write about the topics
that you want to pitch them. One of the things
that you can do is look on the publications
themselves. Let's imagine that you wanted
to pitch an article to Forbes in a certain section
that they write about. Go in that section, find the journalist,
find their name, and find them on Twitter. Most of them will have Twitter. What you might find is that they've left their
contact details right there so you can get
in touch with them directly. But there's more
stuff to do here. Click on their profile and go to Twitter Lists and
then what you can do is find list that they've been put in on Twitter
with other users. Chances are the other users are going to be journalists
just like them. So this is how you can find absolutely loads that all
cover the same topic. Another way of finding
journalists is #journalrequest. This is also on Twitter. If you look up #journalrequest, you will find
journalists putting out requests for all
sorts of sources. Scroll through the list,
check it every day, bookmark it and see if there's anything
that applies to you, and then go ahead and respond. This is a really
amazing way of getting featured in publications
that your audience read. Another tool I want to
tell you about is HARO, H-A-R-O stands for
Help a Reporter Out. HARO is where journalists
sign up to look for sources. You are a source, so you'd go on HARO, you would sign up as a
source and you would tick the boxes that correspond to your areas of expertise. Every single day HARO sends
you an email containing all the requests from
journalists that matched the areas
that you know about. Is then your job to
go through all of these and respond to
those that are relevant. Of the email you get every day, loads of them won't be relevant, but some of them
will be perfect. Some of them will be
asking a question that you know perfectly
how to answer. That's where you can
respond with your bio and with an answer that perfectly matches what the
journalist wants. Keep a track of those you send, follow up the journalists, and just keep going with it. I'm also a really big fan
of the tool RocketReach. If you found a journalist, you can type their name
into RocketReach and it will try and find you
their email address. The easy bit is getting
the contact details, the easy bit is getting the email address of the
journalist you want to pitch. The hard bit is creating the pitch that they will read and they will ultimately use. My advice to you is
just don't give up. Be persistent with this. Set yourself a task, set a goal of approaching a certain number of
journalists every single day, and just keep going with
it because sooner or later you'll get a yes and
it will all be worthwhile. Once you've got that, yes, once you've been included
in a publication, that's when you can use
that publication's logo on your website,
and straightaway, you've got that
credibility of being associated with
that publication. [MUSIC]
13. Over to you: [MUSIC] Congratulations on completing this class on how to define your dream customer and create content they
love to consume. We have covered a
lot. [LAUGHTER] It's been intense, but you are now equipped with
the knowledge and skills to complete your project
and build your business. If you take away one thing
from this class is that the best business owner are obsessed with their customers. This has manifested in the exercises that we
went through together. Understanding your
dream customer, being familiar with who
they are as people, knowing their pains and
their deepest desires, being able to describe your dream customer
to someone else, collecting feedback from them and asking them about
their challenges, all with a view to
creating content that speaks directly to them. My goal for you is that your dream customer knows
that you understand them, they trust you, they feel
sure that your product or service will be
exactly what they need. You should now be well
on your way to having a complete picture of
your dream customer. How to spot a rabbit or
an elephant, or a deer, [LAUGHTER] as well as
be more familiar with the type of content your dream
customer wants to consume. The next step is making it. The product details
within class information say go ahead and complete your
workbook and submit your dream customer avatar, and share any ideas
that you have for headlines and content
that you know, not just that environment. Please do subscribe to
my Skillshare channel to be notified of new
classes when they come up. Also feel free to say hey
on Instagram or Twitter, I would love to hear from you. It has been my absolute pleasure to take you through this class and I wish you all the best for your successful
business endeavors.
Jodie Cook, Entrepreneur, writer, athlete.
