The Brain Audit
Page 6
Solution: Here’s how to create a website strategy that’s ethical, yet extremely profitable.
An allergy clinic
Target Profile: Tricia M.
Tricia M. is a pseudonym for a real person. Tricia found that at about 8pm, she’d start sneezing. At first she suspected it was a reaction to dust, or pets. But over time she realised she was sneezing after a couple of glasses of wine. She’d start to sneeze. Then her eyes would get itchy. Then she’d have to dig in her handbag for anti-allergy pills. She hated the fact that she loved drinking wine, but had to abstain simply because of the fear of an endless number of ‘achoos’!
Problem: Do you find yourself sneezing after one or two glasses of wine? Do you find that you literally launch into a sneezing fit and have to take an anti-allergy pill every single time?
Solution: Here’s how you can get rid of the allergic reaction in less than 24 hours (and without any pills or medication whatsoever).
Yes, I know you noticed that the ‘target profile’ came before the problem and solution.
First you need to know whom you’re speaking to. That conversation leads to a clear profile where you get a specific problem. And a specific solution. And yippee-yahooey, we’re well on our way.
Or are we? You may feel that you’re doing fine with the concept of ‘target audience’. Is target profiling right for you? Let’s find out.
A martini designed for just one playboy on the planet. What kind of marketer would create a James Bond kind of martini? And who would drink it? You know the answer. Every person who aspires to be James Bond, would want a martini just like Bond drinks. And of course, the suit to match.
The Profiling Journey
Okay, so profiling a client is starting to make a lot of sense.
If you were starting up a new business, that is.
If you didn’t have so many different clients, that is. If you weren’t already selling products/services, that is.
There are several reasons why you may love target profiling—and the clarity it brings—but still be unsure of how to implement it for your business. So let’s look at the situations where we run into target profiling, and see how we can implement it for your business.
There are several reasons why you may think that target profiling doesn’t seem to work.
These situations are:
1) Won’t target profiling really start to exclude people?
2) What if I already have a sales message that seems to work for me?
3) What if I already have several audiences that seem to buy my product/service?
4) What if I have multiple products/services?
5) What if my products/services solve multiple problems?
Why aim for the bullseye, when you can hit any spot on the dart board?
Let’s take a simple analogy of a bullseye to answer all of these questions. And then take a case study where a real business owner is trying to get a message across to his client in the most effective manner possible.
Question 1: Won’t target profiling really start to exclude people?
If you were throwing darts on a dart board, what are you aiming for? The bullseye, right? Well, why would you want to do that? There’s the entire board. You could throw the dart just about anywhere. Yet, you exclude the rest of the board, aiming only for the bullseye. You do this because you know the bullseye gets you the maximum number of points. And so it is with profiling. You could try to include everyone (include any part of the dartboard, that is), and yet focusing on your bullseye is what gives you maximum impact.
If you want to get maximum impact you’re going to have to exclude people. Strangely, the more niche you make your product/service seem, the more you’ll find people attracted to it. Just like on a board, where the tiniest part of the board seems to attract the largest number of dart-throwers.
Question 2: What if I already have a message that’s working for me?
You probably do. And on the dartboard, you can not hit the bullseye and still get points. Does that answer your question? The key is to get the maximum impact. If you’re happy with reduced impact, you can continue to sell as you’ve always sold. It’s not that your product/service won’t sell. It’s just a factor of impact.
Question 3: What if I already have several audiences that seem to buy my product/service?
Every product/service has several audiences. Think about the board. Do only Guinness-swilling guys throw darts on the board? No, Heineken-swilling guys do too. And so do Steinlager-swilling guys. And Kingfisher-swilling guys. And non-beer-swilling guys.
And not just guys. But girls. And women. And kids. And yes, there are going to be several audiences. We call them target audiences.
But what problem does the dartboard serve? It depends on the ‘target profile’, doesn’t it? Because the problem it solves for kids isn’t the problem it solves over a margarita party, is it? So that still leaves us with the problem of several audiences. And we’ll answer that in Answer 5.
Question 4: What if I already have multiple products/services?
Let’s drag that bullseye back into the picture and you’re going to have several colours to choose from. Several parts of the board. Well, the board is separate from the wall, you see.
The wall represents pretty much everything that’s possible in your field.
Every business has many products and services. And each product or service will have many audiences. In today’s world, it’s easy to tackle all those audiences—one at a time.
The board represents your company and profile. And you can have many products and services, as you’ve seen in the case studies. You just have to pick a profile for each of those products and services in order to attract the right audience.
But what if you have thousands of products/services for sale? Would you pick a profile for every darned product/service? Hey, yeah. You don’t have to do it now, but each product/service has a maximum impact point. And customers have limited bandwidth. They will pay attention to your product/service, only if you get, and keep, their attention. If you waffle, you’ll miss the bullseye.
A good start would be to work with your best-sellers, in order to make them even better-selling. And then work your way down to products/services that aren’t so hot.
Question 5: But what if my products/services solve multiple problems?
Your product or service will solve multiple problems. See that dart board. When you get really good at communicating your product/service, you get really good at throwing multiple darts on the bullseye. So heck yeah, you will get all your darts on a bullseye. And today’s technology allows you to send out several messages to different audiences.
Every product will solve multiple problems. Yet if you base your marketing on individual profiles, each message will be far more powerful than if you simply try to get every single problem across in the same message.
So if you have five bullseye messages, and want to attract different people through your website, you can create five landing pages. If you’ve got five bullseye messages and want to create five different brochures, you can do so with little effort thanks to digital printing.
You can create five different videos, audio files, booklets, screensavers, etc. The world is digital. You can, if you choose to, put your five bullseye messages into several separate media and packaging options with just a little work on your part.
Case Study
Which brings us to a real case-study (and gets us off that darned dartboard!)
Greg from the holistic healing centre solves several problems.
1) Migraines
2) Chronic Lyme Disease
3) Insomnia
4) Weight-Loss
5) Fibromyalgia.
Let’s ask the questions again:
1) Won’t target profiling really start to exclude people?
2) What if I already have a sales message that seems to work for me?
3) What if I already have several audiences that seem to buy my
product/service?
4) What if I have multiple products/services?
5) What if my products/services solve multiple problems?
If he focuses on just fibromyalgia, will he start to exclude people?
You bet he will. Is it a good idea? Hey, that’s a rhetorical question. He could be the mecca of healing for fibromyalgia sufferers. But he already has customers and already has a sales message, and already has several audiences. Sure he does.
But what if he could focus on the bullseye of fibromyalgia? Because this is what fibromyalgia sufferers go through. And to quote Greg:
Fibromyalgia clients are not getting better. They live a nightmarish existence:
- feeling like a doped-up zombie on medications
- exhausted by lack of sleep
- wracked by daily chronic pain that gets worse with the wrong food, wet weather, strong emotions
- hopelessly depressed about their future of more pain, fatigue
- other complications like arthritis, osteoporosis, addictions.
So if we were to isolate just the factor of pain from the list above, we’d still get a lot to choose from.
- wracked by daily chronic pain that gets worse with the wrong food
- wracked by daily chronic pain that gets worse with the wet weather
- wracked by daily chronic pain that gets worse with strong emotions
- wracked by daily chronic pain that causes extreme fatigue.
So yes, Greg’s service solves many problems and appeals to many audiences. Yet it’s only by profiling that we learn to focus on that bullseye. And yes, with today’s digital technology, it’s easy for Greg to have five different signs in the same vicinity of his healing centre.
By aiming for the bullseye, we’re eliminating 90% (or more) of the dartboard. Yes, you read right.
The purpose of profiling is indeed meant to ‘exclude’ customers who don’t fit the profile. And does it work? You bet it does!
Five signs with five specific messages. And each message appeals to a different profile. The profile may all have the same problem: namely fibromyalgia, and yet, it’s the specificity of the problem that will cause them to choose one problem over the other.
Remember one other thing. It’s not always the profile that’s looking out for your product/service. Our partners, friends, relatives are all looking for a product/service that will solve their own issues. But they’re also looking out for a product/service that may help you.
While you as the exact profile may know and recognise all the symptoms, it’s possible that your partners/friends/relatives aren’t that clear about your multiple symptoms. And even in their minds, one thing will be higher priority than the other. E.g. Wet weather vs. food. Or wet weather vs. strong emotions.
And while they may recognise the wet weather message, they may completely ignore the food message. Your ability to communicate single-mindedly is what makes the difference. If you choose to have one sign and depend on that one sign, then go for it.
If you choose to have twenty thousand signs with twenty thousand symptoms, then be my guest. Just remember one thing: each sign, each message, should be singularly focused.
That’s what makes profiling so interesting.
It’s not just a factor of boiling down to one person but then isolating it to one factor E.g. fibromyalgia. And then isolating it further to one symptom/problem E.g. Wet weather that causes fatigue.
When you are clear whom you’re speaking to, the problem becomes clear. And so does the solution. And immediately the muddiness goes out of your communication.
Magical as this understanding of problem, solution and ‘target profile’ may seem, the magic moves up to a whole new level when you combine the problem, solution and ‘target’ together.
Because you’re about to set off a trigger in the brain of your client. Let’s find out how.
Summary: The Target Profile
There’s a difference between ‘target audience’ and ‘target profile’. An audience represents a group of people who seem to have something in common. The ‘target profile’ is just one person. A real person, with a real name, with a real address, and real phone number. And with real problems.
And while it’s hard enough to restrict yourself to a ‘target audience’, it seems almost nutty to restrict yourself to a ‘target profile’. And yet, restricting yourself to a profile gets you to easily focus on the problems and solutions of that one person with extreme clarity.
To create a profile, we have to take five
specific steps:
Step 1: Start with a demographic;
Step 2: Choose a real person from that demographic;
Step 3: Speak to that person and find out the list of problems (with regard to a product/service);
Step 4: Choose one problem then expand it;
Step 5: Use a real person to get feedback.
Profiling does exclude a lot of people. And conversely it includes people. It excludes those who aren’t interested in your product or service. And includes people who are actively searching for your product or service.
Every product/service appeals to different audiences. And every product/service solves a range of problems. Profiling helps you figure out how you can systematically speak to different audiences using different messages.
Today’s world allows for digital-this and digital-that. It allows you to test your messages more effectively than ever before. And unlike in the past where you had to produce thousands of fliers or signs, you can now create just one message at a time. One flier. One sign. One brochure. One page on a website. And you can easily test which profile draws the biggest audience. That’s when you’ve hit pay dirt!
Pop Goes The Trigger!
Some scientist or researcher somewhere worked out that we see about three thousand new messages per day.
Ooh, that’s a lot of messages.
When the brain gets a ton of stuff, it only pays attention to what’s really important. Or to something that causes intense curiosity.
But let’s suppose we didn’t see three thousand new messages.
Let’s suppose we saw only seven hundred and fifty. Or maybe two hundred and fifty. Or even fifty.
What would it take for something to cut through those fifty messages? What would it take for the client to ignore the rest of those forty-nine messages and focus on your message?
I’ll tell you what.
It’s called a trigger. And a trigger is simply the ability of a message to stand out, and get your attention. A trigger instantly gets the attention of the brain. And when faced with the trigger, the brain—your brain or the client’s brain—has very little option but to respond in an excruciatingly predictable manner.
It’s excruciating, because no matter how hard your brain tries, the only set of words it can think of are: ‘How do you do that?’ or ‘What do you mean by that?’. But how do you get the brain to respond so consistently? You get the consistency when you use the combination of ‘the problem, solution and target’ in one phrase or sentence. Let’s look at three examples to see how a trigger is set off.
Example: Yoga centre (training)
Target: New mums
Problem: Loss of pre-baby figure
Solution: Get back pre-baby figure
Trigger: We help new mums quickly get back their pre-baby figure.
Example: Recruitment agency (service)
Target: Small businesses that want part-time staff
Problem: Big fees
Solution: Get part-time staff without paying big fees.
Trigger: We help small businesses get part-time staff without paying big fees.
Example: Face cream (product)
Target: 50 year-olds/ 50+/soon to be 50/ or even 40+
Problem: Looking like a 50 year-old
Solution: Looking like a 30 year-old
Trigger: How to look 30 when you’re 50
So yeah, when you put the problem, solution and target together,
you get a trigger every single time. Or do you? Actually, you don’t. Just stringing the trio of problem, solution and target won’t always create a trigger. And there’s a reason why.
So let’s take an example, and let’s deliberately water-down one of the three elements that make the trigger.
Target: Women who want to improve their fitness
Problem: Women who are feeling unfit
Solution: A system to get women fitter again
Trigger: We help women improve their fitness.
By not concentrating on a niche, we’re watering down the trigger. And it’s easy to see that despite following the rules of ‘trigger-construction’, we find that the curiosity factor is missing. We’re no longer compelled to say: ‘How do you do that?’ or ‘What do you mean by that?’ . The trigger is no longer compelling.
And when you water down the trigger, you get the ‘kiss of death’.
So what’s the ‘kiss of death?’. When you run the trigger past a potential client he/she says something like:
1) That’s nice
2) Hmmm
3) That’s interesting.
If you fail to set off the trigger in the customer’s mind, they’ll make polite conversation with you, and then quickly slink away.
What the client has told you—very diplomatically of course—is that you’ve not piqued their curiosity at all. It may well be that the client is interested in what you have to offer, but in trying to appeal to a broad target profile you’ve failed to set off the trigger despite getting the ‘trigger-construction’ technically right.