It doesn’t matter if you get traffic to your beautiful, well-functioning website if the content doesn’t engage your potential customer or client in a way which is meaningful to them. You can’t engage them if you don’t know who is your customer. In this miniseries, I am going to focus on the sadly much overlooked CONTENT aspect of the website. While most marketing is careful about the content, websites sometimes aren’t.
The first and most important aspect of any marketing is to know who is your customer. Effective content feels as if it’s written to address the potential client individually. No one wants to feel like they are ‘anyone’ or ‘everyone’, so thinking of your potential client base as ‘anyone who breathes’ or ‘anyone who has a body’ isn’t very special. Narrowing it down to ‘woman entrepreneur’ or ‘male manufacturing president’ is much better.
Developing a niche is important even if you still serve the needs of a broader community, because people think, “If you took that much attention to know the needs of that group, you will also pay attention to my needs.” And the truth is, ‘what is most personal is most universal’ (Carl R. Rogers). If group A has certain needs, fears and objections, there is a good chance that groups B and C do too.
For people to know, like and trust you, you first need to show that you care about them. The first step in caring about anyone is to get to know them.
Start by asking, “Who is your customer?”
Imagine your ideal client in your mind so well that, if you met one on the street, you would know them right away. Answer these questions about them:
- What do they look like? Age, attitude, race, sex?
- Where do they live? Are they local, domestic, international? Suburban, rural or urban?
- What is their income level? How are they likely to spend their money and where?
- What keeps them up at night? Do you know their fears, hopes, dreams?
Once you really know your ideal potential client, you can answer the questions I will write about next week.