The Golden Rule of Marketing (How to Share a Message That People Actually Care About)

Transcription:

When I use the term marketer, I use it in the best way possible. Some people have negative connotations to words like selling and marketing, but I see marketing as simply just building a relationship with people. That’s all it is.

Whether that’s done through a podcast like this one, content, a webinar, or in a single message on a Facebook ad, marketing is simply a medium for bridging a gap. The gap is closed when people knowing who you are and are motivated to do business with you to help them solve a problem.

The importance of empathy in marketing

The one thing you have to master in order to see the desired results in your business is something called empathy. Empathy is the ability to get inside someone else’s shoes and understand what they’re going through.

One of the exercises that we do in our workshops is called the “Emotion Inventory.”  We provide a great worksheet and thinking tool that helps you get into the shoes of your prospects to understand their fears, frustrations, and desires.

That’s an important place to start. We talk about our perfect client pipeline; a very simple model we use for our business. The simple model we teach and help implement into our client’s businesses is this; a simple Facebook ad invitation to a webinar, then inviting people from the webinar to a strategy call, with an application before the call.

It seems simple, right? But why is it that some people crush it while other take a bit longer? Why is it that some people work well with a product launch formula while others don’t? Why is it that some people do extremely well with paid traffic, joint venture promotions, selling an e-Book, or selling high-tech items while others struggle? it doesn’t really matter what you’re offering. The key is empathy.

Let me illustrate this with something that might resonate with you. I lost my hair when I was 17 years old to an autoimmune condition called alopecia. When I was in my early 20’s, I was taking the subway to work to train some clients. A guy came up to me on the platform, looked at me, and said, “Hey, do you have alopecia too?”

Immediately he found his tribe. He found his peeps because he knew that I had gone through something that he was going through. I could tell in our conversation that he was having a tough time going through the experience of having lost his hair. It was interesting to see my perspective versus his. He was really depressed about it.

I said, “You know what? It’s only hair. It’s no big deal. There are worse things that can happen.” I tried to lift him up a little bit, and we had an instant bond because we knew what the other person was going through. There’s nothing more powerful in this world than the ability to do that.

There’s a belief that if you can explain someone’s problems in language better than they can explain to themselves, they’ll inherently think you have the solution to that problem. Going back to the story, the young man who was my age at the time wanted my contact information to stay in touch and see if we could support each other.

The key is it all comes down to this bond. It’s not about pushing your stuff onto people, it’s about understanding where they are and communicating that in your messaging, Facebook ads, webinars, podcasts, content, emails, and everything you do. That undertone that permeates everything is understanding the fears, frustrations, and desires of your perfect client.

Examples of a missed connection with the audience

Even if you’re the best copywriter and have all the techniques dialed in, if you don’t understand your marketplace, it’s not going to work. I’ll give you another example.

One of our partners that we do a lot of business with and have promoted on the health side are good friends of mine. They’ve a couple of products that we don’t offer, which means that we’re happy to support them. It’s something that I use every single day so it’s a great fit.

They reached out and asked if they could run ads on my behalf on my fan page. They would pay for the ads and give me commissions. They just need access to my fans.

I agreed and asked them to send over the ad creative before moving forward. They sent over the ad creative which was five or six different ads. To give you some context before I describe the ads, my audience for the health business on Facebook and my email list tends to be female and older.

They sent over the ad copy, I looked through it and thought, “Are you guys on drugs? What kind of messaging is this?” The ads were saying things like, “Do you ever struggle building muscle? Do you go to the gym, hit it hard, then wonder how to recover properly?”

I told them, “Guys, you know my audience. There’s no way I can run this on my page. This is so far-off. This is not even in the same universe as the people that I help.” I said, “Redo the copy, here’s our audience.” They did, and it was better.

The same company had also set-up a specific landing page for us. I looked at the page and, although it looked nice, the first images were of a guy, a bodybuilder, in his Speedo on stage. The page talked about muscle, protein absorption, and things like that.

Again, this could not resonate with my audience because it was so far disconnected from who they are. The importance of understanding cannot be underestimated. As health professionals, if we pay attention to this and spend any amount of time dealing one-on-one with people, we’ll have all the intel we ever need.

Examples of knowing your audience and understanding their pain point

You don’t need to do online surveys. Spend years, months, hours, whatever it is, with people one-on-one. Know what they’re going through, and know what keeps them up. Know what their challenges are. Document that stuff and keep that front and center at all times.

If you live in their world, watch what happens to your marketing and your business.

It can be something as simple as one sentence. For instance, one of our best-performing ads to health entrepreneurs in the coaching space is, “Are you tired of one-on-one coaching?” Or, “Is one-on-one coaching wearing you down?” Just that single sentence immediately gets the prospect thinking of what they’re going through right now.

I was in that position when I was a trainer for seven years. I was exhausted. I understand because I’ve been there and I’ve served a lot of people in that space who are also there. If I can get into that situation and bring up what that emotion feels like, what that experience looks like, it becomes really powerful.

It’s not just a matter of, “Is one-on-one coaching wearing you down?” That’s a statement similar to saying, “Do you feel tired?” The power is when we relate that to their day-to-day situation. Let’s look at fatigue and tiredness because that’s an area of expertise in my health business.

Instead of saying, “Are you tired,” expand on that. You might say, “Do you ever get home after a long day’s work and all you want to do is lay on the couch? Meanwhile, your kids tug at you because they want you to play with them, but you’re just too tired and drained to really be the best possible parent you can be?”

I took that frustration, due to lack of energy, and I’ve superimposed it into a daily occurrence; a situation that this person is experiencing on a daily basis. When you can do that, the prospect will think, “Wow, this person understands what I’m going through.”

When we feel understood by someone else, we’ll open our eyes and ears to pay attention to what they’re saying. But if you don’t understand their situation, if you don’t have that empathy, nothing else you do is going to make a difference.

Your mission for today is to make this your mantra. Understand who your perfect client is and live in that world. It’s not about you, it’s about them.

Head over to the blog, healthpreneurgroup.com and find the latest episode discussing empathy and the golden rule for improving your marketing.

An opportunity for training and upleveling your business

To go a little bit deeper, I invite you to a special training we have called The Seven Figure Health Business Blueprint. See how we put this in action, attract our clients, and most importantly, how you can do the same. It’s not about me and it’s not about this cool stuff we’re doing. It’s about you and your business.

If you want a predictable and consistent method that generates clients for your business, without manual prospecting or relying on the occasional referral, then I’d like to show you exactly what we’re doing. You can go through the entire training absolutely free at healthpreneurgroup.com/training. I promise it will be one of the best 75 minutes you’ve spent on your business in the last couple of months or maybe ever.

Check it out today.

It will help you understand that the old way of building your business online is no longer valid unless you want to spend the next 5 to 10 years doing that. If you want a faster path to your desired outcome of making more money, helping more people, and enjoying more freedom in your life to travel, hang out with your kids, get up whenever you want, not sit in traffic, whatever is most important to you, this business model will show you exactly how to do that.

You can do it quickly whether or not you have a following because this really levels a playing field. I’m very, very excited about this and that’s why I’m offering this as a free training for you.

That’s all for today. Thank you so much for joining me.