We spent the last few posts talking about a very important concept to your business – getting clarity. I mention that because it provides a nice segue into what I want to talk about for the next couple of posts.
It’s an area you definitely need clarity on in your business. One where you need to be as clear as you possibly can about what your objective is; what you’re trying to do; what success will look like, etc.
The area I’m talking about is getting clear about your communication with your prospects and your customers or clients.
And when I say communication, it could be anything. It could be emails. It could be a report. It could be videos. It could be blog posts. I mean, you name it. It doesn’t matter. I’m talking about communication in any format.
The Most Important Reason For Being Clear About Your Communication
So first let’s ask, why do you communicate with your prospective market? Well there’s the obvious answer – to make more sales. You want them to buy your stuff.
But that’s not really clarity. There needs to be a deeper reason. And you need clarity on that.
I don’t know how many of you will remember, but in the past I’ve talked about my retail clothing store. And how our goal when a customer came in was not to just sell them clothes, but to sell them on the store as well.
Doing that gave us the opportunity to sell them again and again and again. Had we just focused on selling them the thing they came in for, we would have probably sold it to them anyway, but we wouldn’t have created a new, frequent customer. We would have only created a sale.
So if your answer to why you communicate with your prospects, clients and customers is to make sales, then what you’re doing is narrowing down the potential of what you can get. You’re losing all ability to leverage each and every sale.
What are some of those other clarity goals you might have as you communicate with your prospects, your marketplace, your clients and your customers?
Communication Clarity 101
The first thing I’d say is that you want to give quite a bit of thought to who. Who is it you want to attract with your communication? Who are you trying to appeal to?
You need to think about this because not all prospects in any given marketplace are the same. When you target one prospect, you’re likely going to turn off another. And in fact, the better you target one segment, the more likely it is you’re going to turn off a different group of the same marketplace.
So you must know who it is you’re trying to attract. Who are the prospects that spend the most money? Who would be your best customers? Who are the people in it for the long haul who will give you a higher lifetime value? Who is that?
The next goal of your communication should be connection.
- Do they feel like they know you?
- Do they feel a connection to you?
…Obviously, that is another goal that you should be striving for in all of your communications. You want to build that connection.
Another goal is you want them to accept your positions, your perspective on things.
You’re not just trying to make a sale. You’re trying to get your prospects to buy in to your philosophy; your position; your perspective about whatever it is that they’re trying to accomplish (or trying to get rid of) which puts them in your marketplace.
You want to establish loyalty.
Not just loyalty in terms of making purchases, but loyalty so that if someone attacks you in a forum or attacks you on a blog, they’ll argue in your defense. That’s loyalty.
Retention is something else you should be looking for in your communication.
If you’re talking to clients you obviously want to keep them. If you have any continuity programs then you want to keep them a month longer, five months longer, a year longer, whatever it is. Retention should always be a goal of your communications.
And if you are using an ascension model – smaller purchases leading to bigger purchases – then ascension would be another goal when you’re writing to clients.
Think About Every Piece Of Communication You Send
Now not every communication has to accomplish all those goals at once. But these are the things you should be thinking about in every communication you send.
For example, if I’m writing an email or creating a video to my Founders Club members, I could just create the video, communicate the thing and be done.
But if I want to try to promote ascension, getting Founder Club members to ascend into the Business Growth System, then I would be smart to think of any stories that I can tell about somebody that was in Founders and made the leap into BGS and the magical things happened. And of course I’d relate that back into what I’m trying to communicate.
Take a look at your communication goals and then think through how those things could that be achieved.
To build connection with your market, you might share certain things about yourself with marketplace, your prospects or clients. What is it and can you tell a story about it?
Ideally, you want people in your marketplace, your prospects, your customers, your clients to feel that you care about them; that they get value from your relationship with you; that they share common values with you; and ideally, and this is a higher level.
It’s not easy to accomplish, but ideally you want them to be fascinated by you. In other words, you want them to always be interested in what you’re doing because that gets you the attention that you need to sell more, grow your business more, etc.
How do you know when you’re doing it right? How do you know if right now you’re not doing it right? Well I’ll give you a few ways that you can tell in the next post.