Successful Blog

Reality Check from Kent Newsome

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Pass It On

Sometimes a sentence jumps out and grabs me by the ears. It’s always something easily forgotten so simply and elegantly said that I must pass it on.

Those who promote blogging for one thing or another always pretend that corporate non-tech America has or is about to embrace blogging, when the reality is that other than email, corporate non-tech America hasn’t even embraced the internet. —Kent Newsome

How many ways do we only see ourselves?

Thank you, Kent!

–ME ‘Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

A Model to Describe One Ideal Customer

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Get Specific

insideout logo

Our ideal customers — those folks who love that businesslike thing we love doing, that we do to serve them — they are the foundation of our business. Pick one of them.

One? But the marketing guy said . . .

Yep. One — only one. Get specific. Get up close. Make it a real person. Crawl inside his or her head.

From one real human being with whom you have had a success, we can extrapolate many facets of what will and will not work for a business. Think of the one you choose as your prototype ideal customer. Use this model to get closer to whom that customer is.

A Model to Describe One Ideal Customer

Use these questions to make sure you are specific because we’re building a model.

  • What job or group does this person represent? (designers, new mothers, undertakers, college students, used car buyers)
  • What is this one person’s biggest worry, threat, thing that wakes him or her up at 2 in the morning?
  • How does this one person see him- or herself? What is the value that this one person thinks that he or she brings to the world?
  • What problem did you solve for this person? How long did it take? How would you value what you provided? How would he or she value it?

Answer these questions. Then write, record, or tell a friend a description of your prototype ideal customer. You’re ready to explore what he or she needs, desires, and wants.

We learn as writers that individual readers share common interests. We learn as marketers to meet each individual where he or she stands. I learned as a publisher that a well-defined prototype is exact and as explicit as possible. A strong prototype is like a single stone in the water — we can extrapolate it in rings to larger and larger views.

Who is your prototype customer? C’mon describe one for me.

Next: How to define your niche market, moving from one to a group.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Is your business stuck? Check out the Start-up Strategy Package. Work with Liz!!

Related
To follow the entire series: Liz Strauss’ Inside-Out Thinking to Building a Solid Business, see the Successful Series Page.

The Ideal Customer Test

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Pick One

inside-out thinking

Who is your customer? Before you answer, if you are going to say “small business owners,” STOP. You can’t build a business foundation trying to read 25 million minds at once. Small business owners is not a niche it’s a population.

In my presentation at SOBCon07, I had a single slide that said

Choose your customers.

I didn’t spend nearly enough time talking about those three words.

The key to a successful business is truly connecting with the ideal customers for the service or product we offer. The process starts by doing what we love, because doing what we love makes good business sense. The next step is to find the folks who love what we do.

How do we do that?

Look to your past successes. Who has come to you in the past for what you love doing and then loved what you provided?

Make a list of the people who have already loved what businesslike thing you love doing for them. Now you have some idea of who your ideal customer might be. Use this model to see who on that list passes the Ideal Customer Test.

Ideal Customer Test

  • The ideal customer is part of a group. You don’t really want customers who are loners. Let someone else sell to the hermits and the recluses.
  • The ideal customer’s group is relational. They don’t have to sing kum-ba-yah by the campfire. Lawyers are relational. They talk to each other and ask what works. Even corporate clients check out the competition and do horse trading.
  • The ideal customer wants to be better . . . to keep up with the folks at the front of the group.
  • The ideal customer has money and the potential to make more.
  • YOUR ideal customer looks a lot like YOU.

It’s true none of us are a field test or focus group, BUT, pay attention to that last point. If you are looking for the folks who love what you do . . .

Your ideal customer is likely to think, act, and respond like you, because it’s human nature to think people who think like we do are brilliantly smart.

That’s how our customers look like us.
That’s why they love what we do.

Skeptical — huh?
Try it this way It’s unlikely that an information geek is going to feel comfortable working with me. I’m just not linear. I’d send him to my friend. Greg Balanko-Dickson the Remote Control CEO. He’s a self-proclaimed information geek. The chart at the top of his blog shows the difference immediately. Greg does what he loves and the information geek would love what he does.

Do what you love in service to those who love what you do. —Steve Farber

Who loves what you do?

Next: Questions to Describe Your Ideal Customer

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Is your business stuck? Check out the Start-up Strategy Package. Work with Liz!!

Related
To follow the entire series: Liz Strauss’ Inside-Out Thinking to Building a Solid Business, see the Successful Series Page.

Blogging Lessons I Learned in Dancing School

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One-and-a-Two

ballerina bag via morguefile.com

I learned these lessons about blogging in dancing school, when I was a wee thing.

  1. Looking in the mirror can be distracting.

  2. When I try to be someone else, I’m not graceful.

  3. Expression isn’t much, if I don’t know what I’m doing.

  4. Stuff that looks easy sure takes practice to do well.

  5. Smile.

My dance teacher was brilliant.
The World Wide Web didn’t even exist then.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Words We Search with, Words We Sell with

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When Words Fuel the Internet

Customer Think Logo

Words are the fuel of the Internet. We type the name or description of a product, service, or topic into a search engine, and the search engine takes us to it. With luck we get where we would like to be. Easy enough from our end — usually.

Of course, our search words have to match those that marketers use to describe their product. And therein lies the problem. Sometimes as marketers, we are too clever for our searchers, or as my husband would argue, “Peach is fruit, NOT a color.”

In his post Words That Work at Marketing Profs, Gerry McGovern, uses the book “Words that Work,” by Frank Luntz to show that the words we sell with are often not the words we punch into a search engine. Take a look at Prof. McGovern’s examples:

However, according to Overture, in December 2006, 730,958 people searched for “used car,” while only 949 searched for “pre-owned vehicle.”

Nearly 73,000 people searched for “housewife” (122,000 searched for “desperate housewife”), while only 43 searched for “stay-at-home-mom.”

Over 30,000 searched for “gay marriage” while 19,000 searched for ” same-sex marriage.”

While about 17,000 people search for “impotence,” over 100,000 search for “erectile dysfunction,” proving that some words are indeed falling into disuse, even from a search point of view.

The point is that the words that might bring us to products — cheap office supplies, budget hotel — aren’t the same words that sell us when we get there — office supplies at great prices, campy hotel. Prof McGoven wonders whether we need to use more than one set of terms to describe things. Hmmmm. I don’t know.

I keep thinking that transparency and deep knowledge of our customers as people would lead us to write copy that naturally avoids the problem.

I’d love to know what you think.

— ME “Lia” Strauss

Related
Enough About Me, Let’s Talk About What You Think
Do You Know the Difference Between Quality and Cost?
Blog Promotion: How to Write for People and Search Engine Spiders

It’s Always about the People

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Everything Else Is Immaterial

I had to pass this along.

No business is so good that the wrong people can’t mess it up. And no business is so bad that the right people can’t fix it. If you think about what a business is, it’s a collection of people who have been organized in attempt to profit from offering a product or service to the marketplace. So if you don’t get the people part of the equation right, everything else is really immaterial. –Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures

Thank you, Fred, for saying that.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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