Connect to the Heart of your Ideal Client
When you write, you’re putting something from inside you, out there. And that can be scary stuff. Writing is an act of vulnerability for many of us because it’s so easy to criticize our own words that we see boldly emblazoned in front of us on that glaring white screen. You may have never felt that writing is your strong point, and yet you know that you have a message inside you that is trying to come out and you know it’ll help someone out there. OR you may love writing but feel like your message doesn’t come out strong because it’s all fluffy beautiful words but you have trouble with talking in circles without it feeling solid.
What if you were writing to your best friend? You’d know what to write then, wouldn’t you? Or another acquaintance of yours, or your child’s teacher, or your husband. If you know who you’re talking to, it’s so much easier coming up with words to say because you know how they generally think and you have a connection. You know what they connect with and what grosses them out and what makes them laugh. Even with your child’s teacher, you may not be best friends with her but you do have a connection point and you know the subject matter at hand to write about.
So why not pretend that you KNOW who you’re talking to when you write content for your audience? It’ll help a TON for making your writing sound solid and like you know what you’re trying to say. You won’t sound flaky or circular because you know who your ideal client is.
Get to know your ideal client. Who do you want to serve? What type of person are you passionate about helping? What struggles does she have? Does she have children, or pets, or is she single? Those things will make a HUGE impact on what kind of content she connects to. Humans WANT to group together with people who are similar to them, in similar life stages. It provides a comeraderie and a feeling of belonging, of understanding one another. So if your readers can’t feel a connection to the words you say or write from your business page, they likely won’t buy from you in the future or the present.
How old is your reader? Is she a 9-5 employee, a career woman climbing the corporate ladder, a well established entrepreneur, or a stay at home mom? Those things will reflect in your words and your perspective as you write content for your ideal client.
How do you know you’re writing the kind of content that connects to your audience? If they say things like,
- I feel like you read my mind!
- That’s exactly what I needed to hear!
- Thank you for sharing this. I really appreciate this.
- Get out of my head!!!!! These are literally my thoughts!
- Wow, you hit the nail on the head.
- I could swear you’ve been reading my mail.
- Did you peak into my journal from last night?
- I could have written this myself.
- I definitely know what you’re talking about.
- Yes, This is something I deal with
You don’t have to be a particularly amazing writer to connect to your audience. It doesn’t take an amazing writer to create relationship. It just takes a real human connecting with their own real heart, having empathy for other humans with real hearts. Connect with your audience in the places they’re in. Speak their language. Don’t use words and concepts that sound haughty and knowledgeable without the purpose of teaching humbly to them how to understand those concepts. Sounding knowledgeable without the purpose of helping your audience forward is useless, and will lose you customers more than gain you customers if you sound like you are way beyond them.
Listen to the words your audience use. Listen to how they express their frustrations. Listen to the way they phrase things and use those phrases and terminology and connect to their heart knowingly and lovingly, and you will win their loyalty because they feel known and understood by you.
Find your audience in facebook groups that relate to your niche and just listen, listen, listen. Learn their hearts, and then speak to their pain points and bring the solution you have. Most facebook groups (unless you are the creator of the group) do not allow self promotion so just be listening, and be HELPFUL, without promoting yourself. When you are an active member of a community, people notice and they may seek you out. It is safe to believe in the spiritual principle that it is better to give than to receive, so don’t hesitate to give give give more than you take and more than you promote. There is a lot that you can learn from others. A practical tip for you to try is, go into a facebook group that is directly related to your niche or would most likely contain your ideal clients, and type in the group search bar “How do I” or “Help” or “frustrated”. These key words and phrases usually signal an area in YOUR NICHE where people are stuck or struggle and gives you a clue on what topics your ideal clients might love to hear your teaching on whether that’s in a blogpost, a podcast episode, or a live video. There’s a lot of benefit you as a business woman can get out of participating in facebook groups that do not including actually posting or promoting yourself.
When you find people in your life who ACTUALLY reflect your Ideal Client in real life, why not message them and ask if you can get on a video call with them to ask them about their pain points in that area? I’m not talking about cold-messaging strangers from random facebook groups. I mean, after you’ve done some posting on your own timeline and have gotten some interest, you’ve perhaps made a few sales and are wanting to expand; fb friends who actually interact with you and perhaps are already asking you some business-related questions — these are the openhearted people that you have an open door to just interacting with them in a more intentional way. I promise you, this does work. This can be incredibly helpful to do market research on friends and acquaintances and strangers who are happy and willing to answer your questions. It seems humans are very easily eager to answer questions about themselves. I think it makes us feel like we will somehow be discovered and either you or they themselves might end up learning something new about themselves, and that seems, and is, empowering. To be known is to be empowered — so you probably won’t have a very hard time doing some solid market research this way.
And when you’ve pondered all these questions and learned what your Ideal Client loves, dislikes, struggles with, is afraid of… then you can begin speaking to those needs and thus create powerful, loyalty-building content for your readers.