Prime your audience to buy | How small businesses can get more sales | Laura Rees
Assuming that your potential customers already understand how valuable your help can be to them is one of the biggest mistakes I see small business owners and solopreneurs making. It’s preventing you from connecting with the type of customers you can truly serve, and it’s keeping you from making as many sales as you could be.
If you’re like a lot of my clients, you’ve been frustrated because you see people that need what you have to offer. You can see exactly the challenges they’re facing and how you could help solve them.
They have a problem.
You have a solution.
But they’re just not making the choice to work with you.
So what is going on?
You aren’t adding in one crucial piece to your marketing communications: and that is priming your audience to buy. You can have the best solution for clients in the entire world, but if they can’t see how it fits into their life, they don’t have any more use for it than a moon rover. Which means that you’ll spend tons of time trying to sell something people don’t think they need.
Instead, what I teach my clients to do is establish the rules of your universe.
Did you ever watch a James Bond movie? You’re going to see James Bond have car wrecks and fall from bridges and get punched and drink martinis the whole time and never have any lasting damage, or get any STDs from the hundreds of women he sleeps with. Q is always going to provide James with exactly the gadgets he needs for the particular adventure you’re watching and James is always going to remember how to use them when he’s trapped in a submarine that’s filling up with water at the bottom of the ocean. As a James Bond fan, you’re ok with that because those are the Rules of the James Bond Universe.
The rules of the universe are the beliefs an audience needs to have (or at least accept for the sake of the story) to be able to understand and enjoy the story.
If it bothers you that James Bond isn’t dead yet, you’re probably not interested in watching his films.
Your business has rules for its universe, too.
Take the Hello Fresh group, for example. This is a company that has several meal kit brands like Hello Fresh and Green Chef, where they send pre-measured and pre-portioned ingredients directly to your house along with a recipe, and you use those things to cook dinner.
Instead of buying Hello Fresh, you could look through some of the cookbooks on your shelf or find some good dinner recipes on Pinterest, and go to the grocery store and buy ingredients for those. It would be a lot cheaper than the Hello Fresh kit.
Alternatively, if you wanted to save time, you could just order takeout. Pizza Hut delivers! That would be quicker and take less work.
Hello Fresh needs to convince people that it’s worth spending the extra money for and spending the extra time on.
So what’s the rule of their universe?
Having a Hello Fresh delivery is the best way to get dinner on the table.
It cuts stress and saves time because you don’t have to make decisions about what to eat, shop or measure ingredients. It’s also whole food that’s healthier and cheaper than takeout.
This is one of the big things they need people to understand and believe before they will buy.
Here’s how to start defining the rules of your universe.
First, think about the top result you get clients. In the case of Hello Fresh, it was getting dinner on the table. If you’re an SEO expert, the result you get clients is more eyes on their website.
Then combine that result with your offer in a formula like this:
[what you do] is the best way to [get the result you offer]
For Hello Fresh:
a Hello Fresh delivery is the best way to get dinner on the table.
For an SEO expert:
Search engine optimization is the best way to get more eyes on your website.
This is the rule of your universe in its simplest form. Now you need to put together the evidence that backs that up.
Which brings us to our next step: listing alternatives - how else could someone get the result you can bring them?
We listed those for Hello Fresh already - Pizza Hut and going to the grocery store.
In the example of the SEO expert, people could drive traffic to their site by posting regularly to Instagram or Facebook. They could do it by running YouTube ads.
Once you have a list of those alternatives, go down the list one by one, and for each alternative way, write down what’s different and better about what you do.
Again, for Hello Fresh - it’s better than going to the grocery store because it saves the time to shop, the time figuring out what to fix, and makes things more efficient with premeasured ingredients.
For the SEO expert, SEO is better than posting to Instagram or Facebook because the lifespan of social posts is generally around 48 hours or so, while the lifespan of an optimized blog post is years. SEO is better than ads because it’s cheaper and longer lasting to optimize your site than run ad campaigns.
When you have the rule of your universe defined, and the evidence gathered, this becomes content you can use across your marketing channels to promote your business.
The rule of your universe is just one of the foundational elements in the brand framework I teach to my small business and solopreneur clients. To see all of those, download my ultimate guide to social video at lrees.com/svultimate, which will not only walk you through the steps of defining a brand that makes you memorable, but help you decide which forms of social video will be most effective for you, and show you how to start producing videos that will make you the only expert that matters to the type of clients you love working with the most.
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For more information on using social video to grow your business, Download my free ultimate guide to social video here.
It will walk you through the steps of defining a brand that makes you memorable
It will help you decide which forms of social video will be most effective for you
And It will show you how to start producing videos that will make you the only expert that matters to the type of clients you love working with the most