How's your social media presence been lately?
Did you know about this one button that will make your more money?
What's your YouTube marketing strategy?
Is your search traffic at risk?
Marketers ask coaching, healing or creative business owners these questions all the time. (In fact, I pulled these questions straight off emails I received myself over the past month or so.)
I'm going to tell you something that may surprise a lot of other marketers.
Those questions don't matter. Not right now anyway.
"Where Do I Start?"
One of the things I often hear from potential clients is some version of one of these questions, combined with real worry and overwhelm. There's so much in marketing to focus on, they say, they often don't know where to start.
Where you need to start with your marketing doesn't sound much like marketing at all.
Your starting point is to have a succinct, clear, and resonant way to state who you help and what you help them with. I call it having an Authentic Core Statement. Your Authentic Core Statement (or ACS) is a single sentence that defines both your ideal client (the who) and the thing that you help them with (the what).
Everything else in your marketing flows from this point. I mean, everything.
Building Your Marketing
All the other main components of your marketing foundation then get built upon this specific way of defining who you help and what you help them with. Let me explain .
Your offers.
In order to develop, talk about and ultimately sell an offer effectively, you have to know who exactly it's designed to help and what precisely it's constructed to help with.
Your web presence.
If you aren't clear who your business is supposed to help, the language you use on your website is going to sound vague, and general. And people, specifically, your people, your ideal clients, might have trouble connecting with it.
Your content.
When you have a defined picture of who you help in your business, you can more easily identify the things they struggle with. Writing content that your ideal clients will find valuable is then much easier.
It also takes less effort to promote effectively. People are much more likely to click and engage with your content when they feel the thing you're writing about applies to them, directly.
Your marketing plan.
When you set up your marketing plan, especially when your business is newer in its development stage, you need a simple, sustainable strategy. The more precise you are about who your ideal is and what she struggles with the more effectively you can identify where to you might find her.
That information, along with what you're naturally gifted and talented at, helps you build a marketing plan that allows you to connect more quickly with and build an audience of true fans.
How Do you Know if You Have a Strong Starting Point?
If you have no idea how to answer the questions who do you help and what do you help them with, don't worry. You can begin here to get more clarity.
If, on the other hand, you think you have a pretty good idea of who you help and what you help them with, you might wonder if you're clear enough. This is something I help clients with all the time; here are a few things to do and consider.
Test it out
Find a trusted group of friends or colleagues and ask them if they'd be willing to help you with a marketing experiment.
Once you have a list of people willing to help, contact them. (If there's any way to do this live or via phone/video, that's ideal. Email can work, but the nuance and immediacy of live feedback can't be replaced.)
Let them know you are refining your marketing statement and that you want to share it with them. Then share the statement and ask if anyone they know pops into their mind when they hear you say who you help and what you help them with. You're looking for either a yes (yes, they can think of one or two people specifically) or no (no, no one comes to mind.)
That's all. You don't need to know details about who they thought of unless they want to share. It's interesting, but not crucial.
A word on wordsmithing
Some people love to wordsmith! So sometimes when clients share their statements with friends or other coaches and healers, they get advice telling them to choose different words or perhaps say it differently.
Take all that with a grain of salt. If you keep getting the same feedback about a particular word, for example, you can consider it. Otherwise, you can thank them for the feedback and re-ask if anyone comes to mind when you say the phrase.
One caveat
If you've been sharing your Authentic Core Statement with individuals and are coming up blank, take a look at who you've been sharing with. It's quite possible that the individuals you're sharing with are so far from who you help and what you help them with they don't know anyone at all that would fit the bill.
For example, if you help middle managers who want to help their team members grow but are struggling with overwork and you're sharing your statement with your friends who've been stay-at-home moms and don't work outside the home, they might not know anyone right now that they could think of. That doesn't necessarily mean your statement's off.
If you're wondering what to tackle next in growing and marketing your business, make sure you have a solid cornerstone before heading off to tackle anything else.
SEO, social media channels, and effective copywriting and a whole lot of other marketing "must haves" all have their place in marketing business, but you need a strong beginning point or you won't be able to create an effective marketing foundation.
If you want to know if your ACS is effective, you can test it out by sharing it with trusted friends, colleagues or others in your life.
If you share it and most people say yes, they can think of specific people that it applies to, then you know you're heading in the right direction. From there you can tackle creating compelling offers, building or refining your web presence, creating valuable content and constructing a plan to share it in the most authentic way possible. And if it's more no's than yesses, you can go back and see how you can get more specific and craft a stronger starting point.
Photo by Chloe Leis on Unsplash