Grow With Soul Ep.06: The Two Foundations Of Marketing: Your Why & Who
Today on the podcast it’s just me, and I’m digging into two of the most crucial elements in marketing, that just happen to also be the two things people struggle with - knowing your why and knowing your audience. These are so important because they inform your whole marketing strategy - the content you create, where you put your brand, even the products and offerings you provide must all stem from these things. In this episode I talk you through why and how you can use this information to grow your business, and the exercises I go through with clients to help them find their why and get to know their audience.
Here's what I talk about in this episode:
Why you need a why
How to find your why
The 21st century elevator pitch
How audience knowledge helps you in your marketing
How to get to know your audience - goals, challenges, watering holes
Understanding the eco-system of your audience
Links and resources I discuss:
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Read the episode transcript:
Today it’s just me and I’m going to be digging into two of the most crucial things in marketing, and these are also the two things that people really struggle with; knowing your Why and knowing your audience. These are the two things that I always do first of all with all my clients, it’s the first couple of weeks of the work that we do together. It’s also the things that you guys have said to me over the course of the podcast being live that you’d love to know more about and that you struggle with.
So why are they so important?
They are important because they inform your entire marketing strategy and actually your whole business all together, so that’s everything from the content that you create, where you put your brand, even the products and the offerings that you’re providing; they must all stem from these two things.
Knowing your Why
This is the thing that people find not boring, but just really boggy. So it takes a lot of thinking about it, it feels a bit complicated, and it’s also really difficult to do for yourself because you kind of know it but you can’t put it into words. There’s a Ted Talk by a guy called Simon Sinek (linked in the show notes) and I get all of my clients to watch it. Part of that talk is that the limbic system in the brain, which is the bit of the brain that controls emotion, is also the part of our brain that controls decision making. While we’re making decisions, it’s not the rational part of our brain, it’s the emotional part of our brain, and that’s also the bit that can’t put things into words, because it’s not the part of the brain that controls language. That’s why, when we’re thinking about making a decision or we’re thinking about our Why, we know how it feels but we just can’t put it into words. That’s why it’s really difficult to come up with this, but it is absolutely the cornerstone of your business.
Why do you need a Why?
First off, it makes people love your brand and not your product. If you are basing your business just around what you do, you’re getting people who will then price compare, they’re shopping around comparing the things rather than getting people to see your brand and they think ‘yes, that’s exactly it, I almost don’t care what the product is, I just want to buy it.’ So think about that for yourself in your own shopping habits - who are the people who you’ll buy a course from regardless of what course it is, or who are one of the brands you’ll always go and buy from and you don’t really need to think about it? That’s because you buy from the brand as opposed to you needing their product, and that’s so much more powerful and that’s the way that you create lasting relationships with customers and a real community around your brand is if you all buy into that one central Why. You can then make them feel like the person they want to be through that Why.
A strong Why also enables you to pivot your business in the future if you want to. So it’s not all about the product, it means that you can then go on and in three years time if you think ‘I don’t want to be doing web design anymore I want to be branching out and doing whole branding design’, if you’re starting your business from a Why, then it makes so much more sense that you can pivot that service rather than you’ve become known as the world’s best web designer. The other thing that it’s great for is that it gives you an anchor for all of your marketing. One thing that I know people really struggle with is choosing what to do, and when there’s every single thing in the whole world that you can talk about and you can write about, all those funnels and things that people advise you to do, if you don’t have that strong anchor of your Why, it’s really easy to get lost. Whereas when you do have that central thing that your brand stands for, it’s much easier to compare what you’re thinking of doing with what you stand for and be able to tickbox it off. The same with all your content is that it can all stem from there and if you think ‘is this piece of content really communicating my brand Why’ and if it’s not, then you probably shouldn’t be writing about it.
Don’t feel like you’re setting up this Why and it has to see you through for the rest of your life, because that’s quite a lot of pressure! Your Why can definitely flex over time - mine definitely has over the last year as I’ve been doing more work and really digging into things, mine has definitely flexed and taken on a slightly new form. When I first started, it was all about helping others get the lifestyle that they wanted, and it still is that, but now it’s progressed along to being about people not feeling like they’re doing things because they should do and releasing them from the tyranny of those should dos and instead doing things that feel soulful to them. It’s progressed and matured slightly over the last year but it’s still pretty much the same. So it will flex and don’t worry about it being the most perfect Why of all time right at this moment.
How to find your why
There’s an exercise in Episode 1 which I know a few people have done about the five Whys, so if you ask yourself Why five times it really helps you get to the nub of that. If that’s not helpful or you’re not quite at that point, start by thinking about what you want to be known for. Get really specific about this; you can’t have a list of 10 things, it has to be one thing. So if there are two people having a conversation and one of them is recommending you, what is that one thing that you want to be recommended for? That’s something I found really useful is in terms of when there’s everything to be talking about in the whole world, what is that one thing? What do I really want to be known for? How can I shine? In my case again, I started off thinking I was a business coach, but then actually when I started to focus, I realised it was marketing that was my strong suit, and all the clarity work that goes with marketing, that’s what I want to be known for. But then not just marketing, because anyone can be known for marketing, there are lots of people out there that are talking about marketing in a certain way, and actually I don’t want to be known for that girl-boss-y side of marketing, I want to be known for a really soulful, different style of marketing aimed at people who aren’t trying to build 6 or 7 figure businesses, I want to be known for that really organic marketing. That’s how you can really start to inch closer towards something that’s more of a niche, more of a specific why to do, but starting to really dig into what you want to be known for.
Another thing I get my clients to do is assess their skills and look into that more. This can help you get to more of the How of what you do - there’s a Why, a How, and a What - and really getting into your How can help you get to your Why.
For example, I have a client who, when she wrote down all her skills, she was quite surprised that it was all really project management, really straight talking, finding systems and processes for things and all her skills were really about that rather than the thing that she was actually selling; her What. When we actually thought about how she was going to be doing it, we asked how it affected her Why, and what we realised was that, given that her skills were in finding processes for things, her Why on top of that was helping people take themselves seriously. That’s what she cared about; helping people take themselves seriously in their businesses and the How was through systems and processes whereas when she just started with her What which was helping women in their businesses, the Why was a bit more wishy washy.
This is an exercise I do with clients and in my courses, and it’s all about getting everything that you’re thinking about your brand and getting it out of your brain and onto a page and then refining it from there, because so often we’ve got so many ideas going round and round in our head and it’s really difficult to get them out. To order them while they’re in your brain and get them out is the best thing to do.
So what I get people to do is to, on a big piece of paper or however you like to work, write down all the words that you associate with your brand, or that you want to be associated with your brand, and also write down the key things that you as a person and you as a brand care about and believe in. Write them all down on a piece of paper and from there you will start to see things that will come up again and again, and you’ll realise that some of the words that you’ve put down are all synonyms for the same thing, and that can then help you draw in a Why and think ‘well, if I’m talking about empowerment then maybe that’s what’s driving me ‘and that’s what you can start to build your Why around.
But mostly, don’t worry too much about your Why. I know it’s something that people find quite stressful because they feel like they can’t move on if they don’t have it exactly, completely right. What I would say is that it’s a work in progress, and if you can feel it then it exists, it’s just about putting it into words, and it will really help you, but sometimes it just needs to sit and stew for a little while and that’s fine. You don’t have to finish listening to this and spend an hour coming up with your why; it might take two weeks and that’s absolutely fine, just keep moving it round and round in your head.
And the last thing to do is, very often even if you have written out like 5 paragraphs and that’s what your Why is, start to refine it down into what we would traditionally call an elevator pitch. As you no doubt know, all through time the elevator pitch has been the thing that if you were stuck in an elevator with your dream client and you had 1 to 3 minutes to tell them all about your business and convince them, what would you say to them in that elevator ride. However, now we’re in the 21st Century the elevator ride has been shortened down to about 5 seconds, because you’re not in an elevator anymore, you don’t have that 1 to 3 minutes, what you’ve got is the 5 seconds that your ideal client is scrolling Instagram and lingers over your profile, or the 5 seconds that they’re on your website before they click over to another tab. So you’ve got that really short period of time to grab their attention and get them to carry on reading.
The new elevator pitch is really just a sentence that is the biggest hook that you’ve got to get them to carry on reading. It doesn’t have to be the full story in that one sentence, but it has to be enough to get them to go over to your About page or wherever you have the full story and to carry on reading. So even if you have a full sentence and then a paragraph underneath, it has to grab them and be what it’s all about. For me, it’s helping you to grow with soul; that’s the thing that hooks people in. They don’t necessarily know what it’s about yet but the words in there, for the right people, are going to make them want to read more. That’s the next stage on, once you’ve found your Why. That’s the thing with marketing, you don’t have to tell the story in one single piece, it’s about eeking people along the journey of your brand, getting them to look at one more thing, one more picture, one more page on your website.
Knowing your audience
This is really the perennial challenge of not just small businesses or bloggers or businesses like ours, this is the perennial challenge of all businesses no matter how big or small all over the world. There are businesses that spend hundreds and thousands of pounds on focus grouping and getting to know their audience better because no business has it 100% and this is the question I’m asked so often.
If you feel like ‘oh I don’t know my audience, I’m not a proper business person’ you know, there are really huge businesses out there who don’t know their audience either. If you’ve ever received an email from a business and wondered why the hell you’re receiving it, it’s nothing to do with you and doesn’t speak to you in any way, that’s a brand that doesn’t know their audience, so it happens all the time, so don’t worry about it. There are lots of little things that we can do to get to know them better. And also, you’re at a huge advantage because you’re a real human being, and through your Instagram or other social media or your emails, you can have 1 to 1 conversations with your audience on a daily basis. Now, the great big shops aren’t going to be able to do that because they are an organisation, there’s not one person who’s in control of that. Because you’re the one leading all of this, you can get real feedback right at the coal face and at the click of button, by putting up a Stories poll or asking a question in a caption or on Twitter. Really use your smallness to your advantage when it comes to this
First of all, let’s look at how audience knowledge helps you in your marketing. I know it’s obvious but there are things that people don’t always think about. What it helps you to do first is know what to talk about and how. It helps you to know the things that your audience are really going to want to read, want to engage with, want to buy, crucially. It can also help you to communicate that to them in the best way, so really talking to their pain points and their goals and helping them to see themselves reflected in your copy. That is the most important thing that you’ve got to do is for people to read what you’ve written, whether that’s a blog post, sales page or product description and see themselves reflected in that so they can think it’s obviously for them, it’s obviously their problem and it’s exactly what they need.
So the more you know your audience and what they’re struggling with and what their life is like, the more you can really nail it and get really specific with the detail of your copy, which means that they, without a shadow of a doubt, know that you are speaking to them, and you avoid all of that generalisation.
The other thing is knowing where to find your audience. This really is the one, isn’t it? Where the hell are they?! Yes, this is really the crucial bit. So not just online, but offline as well, and when you can really kind of think about your audience as a real person and where they’re hanging out online and when they’re on the train in the morning, what are they doing? And where do they go for their lunch and what do they see while they’re there and what are they reading? You can start to build that picture up and it’s so much easier to know where to be finding them, where to be putting your stuff to be getting in front of your audience.
Getting to know your audience is really an ongoing process, so you might do this profile that I’m about to talk you through, and this is what happens with my clients: they do the first one and think ‘it’s not good enough’, but this is an ongoing process. The more that you get to know your audience, the more that you can add into this profile. If you have a profile, it should always be a working document, it’s never finished, you’re always adding little bits in as you’re getting more tidbits of information. So, don’t worry about getting it right the first time, because there isn’t a first time, it’s always ongoing, you’re always, always learning, so this is just the starting point.
The other thing to think about is that the audience you currently have may not be your ideal audience. If you are transitioning from one kind of business to another, or you have an Instagram, for example, that was your personal Instagram and now you want to start using it for business, people you have there may not be your ideal audience. So just be aware of that as you start to think about your audience, as you start to poll and ask questions of your audience just to be mindful that if your current audience isn’t your ideal one, you may have to look further afield for your information.
First off, I want to say that educated guessing is fine to start with. If you don’t have reams and reams of data or lots of survey responses or whatever, it’s absolutely fine to start at the beginning with educated guessing as long as you keep adding more informed knowledge further down the line. The reason that’s okay is because in purposeful small businesses like ours, very often we are our target audience, more or less. Usually because we have started a business we wanted but couldn’t find, or just because it’s very purposeful to us, and we believe in it. So you can use yourself, and your own experience and beliefs to inform that profile, but just be aware that you are bringing your own bias and prejudice to that.
I’ve done this, so for example when I very first set up my newsletter, I had all the ideas I wanted to do for it and I knew what I would want to receive from myself, and I just put it to Instagram that I was planning out my newsletter, what kind of things would you like to see? And what I was really surprised at was that I got a lot of people come back and say that they’d like a personal letter from me about what I’d been doing that month. I was really surprised because I’m me, I’m just like ‘give me all the really valuable things that I can learn from and work on and I don’t want to hear anything about the person’. But it’s good that people said that because that would never occur to me because of my own personal bias. And actually, that letter right at the beginning of my newsletter is always the thing that really engages people and I get responses about it. So yes, use your own experience and beliefs but know that you’re bringing certain prejudices to that, and to challenge those regularly.
The other thing that I wanted to say before we get really into it is on demographics. If you are to Google search ‘finding your audience’, ‘getting to know your audience’, ‘finding your ideal client’ etc, very often the things that you’ll find are about demographics, and yes, demographics are kind of good to build a picture of the person in your mind, but unless you are doing some very targeted, expensive advertising, they aren’t actually very helpful. If you think about it, if you’re thinking about your audience and you go ‘well, I know that they’re aged 25-35, they live in an urban environment, they’re female, they’re a teacher, whatever’, that doesn’t actually help you in a practical way. You can’t use it to write a blog post that really speaks to your ideal client. So yes, have some demographic information in there to give you a ballpark of what they’re life might be like because if you’re speaking to a 20 year old vs a 65 year old, they’re going to have slightly different routines and lives. Other than that, you can really skip over demographics, because they’re not going to help you in a practical way.
What IS going to help you in a practical way is to think about them as a whole human being. This is something that we all do and it must just be the way that our brains work as humans; we like to box people and things off, we like to put them into boxes and be like ‘this is what they think about this’. So often when we approach our customers, we think about them not as a whole person but as a dimension of them that needs what we have. You just think about that. And this is something they talk about a lot in B2B marketing is that the person who wants to buy your service is also somebody that plays tennis at the weekend or loves a cocktail or loves going out for dinner and luxury travel and whatever, they are also the whole person, and just because they’re buying your web design service doesn’t mean that they cease to be that other person.
This is something that was illustrated to me when I went to a talk by the marketing director at the time of Castrol oil, and she showed us a video of some guys working on an oil rig doing the Harlem Shake. So, this was like back in 2015 or whenever the Harlem Shake came out. Anyway, they were all doing the Harlem Shake and it had all gone viral, and then she showed us some marketing collateral that they’d sent to them, and it was all very square, all very fact driven, and it didn’t match up to what we’d just seen; these guys who were obviously a great community on their oil rig, they had a lot of fun, they had a sense of humor, vs this very laced up marketing. And that’s because they were only speaking to them in a business context, not to the whole person. So really think about that; think about your whole person because the more you can think about the emotions and the feelings that they have, the better you’re going to do. If their hobby is luxury travel, even if you sell web design services, all their emotions, all the things that make them happy are involved in luxury travel, so how can you join those two things together? You can talk about the feeling that they’ll have when they go on their holiday, you can use similar language to luxury travel companies through your company so you can evoke that in their mind. And also, just be more blatant about it; if you’re somebody who likes luxury travel, and your audience likes luxury travel, then maybe talk about it in your marketing, on your IG or whatever, because that’s going to appeal to that side of them. And because they’re one whole joined-up person, if you appeal to the hobby side of that person, you’re also going to appeal to the side that’s thinking about their website.
And this can go for product businesses too, so if you sell cushions (which seems to be the only product example I ever use but we’ll go with cushions); your person loves luxury travel but you also sell cushions. Well, how can you make your cushions evoke the feelings that they get in luxury travel? Maybe you have some nice big ones that you can imagine in a riad in Morocco and you can kind of evoke those feelings through your photography, and the way that you describe your cushion, that’s how you can bring those two things together. So yes, you’re thinking of them as a whole person. Some ways you can really dig into that and get that out is to think about what they want. Not just from your business but in their life generally, what are they aiming for, what are their goals, what is their big dream, their 5 year plan? When they’re on a dog walk and they’re daydreaming, what are they daydreaming about? What do they really want to achieve? As I said, both from what they can get out of their business but also out of life. So to use the cushion example, maybe they’ve bought a new sofa and they want to redo their whole living room and make it really cosy, but also out of life they want more space and time to travel. Well they’re two different things but you can talk about both of those in your content and in your marketing.
Then, more importantly, once you know what they want, the next stage is what’s holding them back from achieving that? What are their challenges? What is stopping them from achieving those goals and what is just causing them a bit of a nightmare in their life generally and how can you speak to those again both in terms of what they need from your business and in terms of their life generally?
For my business, some of those challenges are a lack of know-how about marketing, a lack of clarity about what people’s business stands for, a lack of confidence, or icky feelings about selling and not wanting to be that person. So these are all the challenges that my audience have, these are the things that I really speak to through what I produce in my content, it’s what all my coaching packages and my courses are built towards; solving those challenges. Off the cuff things too; in Instagram captions I’ll always think about what is that challenge that I can be speaking to, even in a very small way through an IG caption.
So spend some time really thinking about those things and getting them down on paper so you can start to create content that speaks to those things. These are really great things that you can ask your audience, but obviously not in a really blatant ‘what are your challenges’ way. So a really good one for this is saying something that you might have struggled with EG ‘I’ve had real writers block this week, I’ve just not been able to produce any kind of content - do you struggle with writing or are you always full of ideas for your blog content?’, and then you’ll get people who will tell you that they, for example, struggle with content writing and that’s something you can speak to if, say, you are a web designer, again. Similarly with your cushion company, you’ll have questions like ‘what do you want your living room to look like?’ and ‘when you are relaxing at home, how do you want your room to feel?’ things like that will get those challenges coming through eg ‘I’d love it to feel like this but I can’t because my teenager has put loads of washing in the living room’ or whatever. So start to use those questions in a really creative way to get some real feedback from people on those challenges but very often if you’ve started a business it will have been to solve a problem so you know what those problems are, it’s just taking some extra steps to get really specific about how that problem manifests for your customer.
Going back to the demographics, if you are a virtual assistant and what you do is basically help people that haven’t got enough time to do stuff, if you are helping somebody who is 25, the way that her lack of time shows up in her life is going to be different to somebody who is 55, her lack of time is going to be caused by different things. So that’s how you bring the demographics in, you start with the problem and work out how that problem manifests itself in the people you’re targeting.
The last thing you need to do after you’ve got their goals and you’ve got their challenges is working out their watering holes. Watering holes are things that always get a bit of a chuckle on workshops and things because it sounds weird, or like a pub, but really the watering hole is where your audience goes to get their information and their inspiration. Those are the two things that people online and offline go and look for in content is that they want really specific information about something or they want generally to be inspired and entertained. If you can get yourself in the places that those two things happen, that’s where you’re going to be getting in front of your audience.
Often I don’t tell people that this is what they’ve got to do; so if I was to say to you ‘write down all the podcasts that your people listen to’ you’re going to put down all of them, even the really big ones. But if I asked you to write down all the podcasts that your people listen to that you’re going to actually pitch to, you’re not going to put big ones down on there, you’re going to self-select because it’s really scary. So don’t think, for the moment, about the fact that you’ve got to go and pitch to be in these places, just write down the biggest picture that you can of where your person is getting their inspiration and their information. Rather than just writing down Instagram, you’ve got to write down who they’re following, what hashtags they like, what kind of aesthetic are they drawn to, what sort of pictures are they double tapping on? You can even go a whole lot further, and create a collection in your saves so that when you’re scrolling Instagram and see a picture that your person would love, you can save it to that collection and build up a picture both of the accounts that your person might be following and also the aesthetic that they’re drawn to. That’s another thing that you can use the watering holes information for is to inform your own content in a way that makes you look at what your person is drawn to and create content that uses those themes and tropes.
For example, if your customer is someone that might follow me, then you can look at what themes and tropes I use, which is often cups of tea, notebooks, earthy tones, those sorts of things, and think ‘well if that’s the kind of image they’re drawn to, how can I bring those themes into my imagery in my own was as a signpost to my people that I’m for them and they’re going to want to come and look closer at my account?’
And the same goes for content, if you tend to write your blog posts quite formally but you begin to explore the other websites and magazines that they might be reading and find that they’re more informal, then you should adjust your tone so that it still sounds like you, but it just, again, signposts your audience that you get them, and that you are going to be somebody that they’re going to enjoy engaging with.
Those are the two jobs of your watering holes: knowing where they are so you can then, in the future, pitch to be in those places, and so what I get people to do here is to write a hit list. If you’ve got magazines and podcasts just write them all down and put a date. So this is how you deal with the big scary ones; I have a hit list of my own and I have some podcasts on there such as ‘end of 2019’ next to them, because they’re just too scary and big to think about right now, but I know they’re somewhere I need to be in future so I’m building up to getting to that point. Then I also have others, which I would pitch to immediately, more or less, so maybe a magazine that I have spoken to the editor of on Instagram, so now I’ve got an ‘in’ there I’m going to pitch to them sooner rather than later. Then again looking at the ecosystem that you are now a part of, the ecosystem of your customer, what they’re seeing all the time, their own little echo chamber that they’re built for themselves and how you can earn a place in that ecosystem and also work within it. So, again, that’s your tones, your themes, your topics, making sure that you are showing yourself as somebody that your audience is going to love to engage with.