Cutting through to attract clients

We live in an age of massive choice. No matter what business you’re in, you will face strong competition.

If you want to cut through and engage your audience, you need to effectively communicate – via your marketing message.

You have less than 3 seconds to engage a new visitor that lands on your website or they click away. The way you respond to “What do you do” will make all the difference between polite indifference to “tell me more – I’m interested. How could you help me.”

If you can’t get attention, interest and desire, you’ll never be in the position to engage in a sales conversation where a prospect takes action and decides to work with you.

You need to immediately appeal to something your prospect is interested in. Something that will motivate them to want to know more.

It all starts with WIIFM – or What’s in it for me?

Talk about outcomes. What your prospect gets.

Speak directly to your prospects’ interests, desires, problems or challenges.

Communicate the value or benefit your clients will get if they work with you. If they’re in your target market and don’t say, “That sounds valuable, I’d like to know more”, you’ve failed.

Use this formula to get attention:

1. State your Target Market or Ideal Client.
   
   Your message needs to state exactly who you work with so your prospects can self-identify themselves. If you make it too general and vague it is very hard for people to get a handle on whether they fit your profile, eyes glaze over and you lose them.

   In conversation, keep it simple.

   In our case, “We work with business owners and managing directors of organisations employing between 5 to 200 employees and turning over between $500K to $20M per year.”

   This is more specific than saying, “We work with small to medium businesses” – as who knows what that really means size wise.

   You would create a far more detailed version for your written material, an example of which you can read here.

2. Their Problems, Issues or Challenges

   State the issues your prospects are facing and why they need your help. Don’t make this complicated. Talk in simple language your prospects will understand and resonate with.

   “Our clients want to attract and retain good quality high value clients.”

   We don’t say “marketing or sales” which can be nebulous and very general. Everyone understands “attracting clients”.

3. Describe Your Solution or Outcome.

   Your message must communicate the specific value and benefits your prospects will get if they buy. Appeal to the WIIFM. The easiest way is to mirror image the problems, issues or challenges.

   “Our clients get a steady stream of good quality, high value clients, resulting in a healthy growing business.”

4. Detail Your Uniqueness or Differentiation

   This final aspect of your marketing message is your uniqueness. That is, what makes you different from all the other consultants, coaches, accountants or products out there?

   This is an appeal beyond, “What’s in it for me?” It answers the question, “Why you?”

   This is the important extra that gives your prospect rational and emotional reasons to choose you over everyone else.

   It takes creative thinking and has to go beyond the usual platitudes of Quality, Service and Value.

   Your uniqueness could come from your proven expertise. Articles you’ve published, books you’ve written. Or client success stories where you can prove results.

   You can’t always present this as a sound bite. A longer narrative client story is a very effective way of promoting your uniqueness.

   In our case we have a string of success stories where clients have doubled or tripled their results. We then pick and choose which ones are most relevant for the particular audience we’re speaking to.

Contrast this approach with what most people do.

They label themselves by stating, “I’m an insurance agent” or “I’m an accountant”.

Or describe a process. “I’m a management consultant who runs change management workshops”.

Neither talk about what your prospects get. There’s no value or benefit statement. People aren’t actually interested in your process. They just want an outcome or result.

So if you fall into this camp, stop right now. Use the formula above and I guarantee you’ll get more interest in your services and convert more prospects into clients.

Need help with fleshing out your marketing message?

We’re often too close to our own stuff. We have trouble articulating our message effectively. If this is you, sign up for a 12 week Two Heads Program where we’ll cover the 4 points above in detail.

Together we will work on your unique value proposition and how you can differentiate yourself as well as exactly what audience to target and how to get your message in front of them.

We’ll then create an effective marketing message which will cut through to your target audience and coach you in how to deliver it.

Call us on (02) 9499-7958 for more information.