If you’re just jumping in, this is the second installment in a series of small business marketing posts. Take a few minutes to read about creating customer personas before diving in to this post.
Before we get to any actual writing, and don’t worry there will be plenty of writing coming up soon, we need to first focus on how we will write. The next few activities will help you create a solid foundation for your marketing messages.
The benefits to this exercise are 2-fold.
- we’ll be developing an early list of keywords for your web content (we’ll get there soon) and
- you’ll change the way you think about presenting your business to prospects so that you’re always speaking their language, not your own.
Exchange Your Jargon For Theirs
Imagine you are a financial planner. A potential client wants to discuss what path they should be on to create a suitable retirement plan but during your meeting all you can do is talk about is 529s, Keogh accounts, and rebalancing. They leave feeling confused and overwhelmed, their search for a financial planner continues without you.
Regardless of your products’ and services’ technical level, chances are there are words you use to describe what you do that your customers would never, ever say. Littering your conversations and writing with industry terms will alienate and confuse the people you’re selling to. By using your words instead of their words, you’ll miss the “AHA!” moment where they realize you can help solve their problems and ease their fears.
Make a habit of noting the words your customers use to describe your products and services. Are they the same words you use or are there some differences? Try spinning their own vocabulary back around on them, even if you don’t feel like it is technically correct.
The exercise for today’s lesson will help you bank your clients’ vocabulary and start creating product and service descriptions that speak to your customers rather than your colleagues.
Use Tools
We asked our friend Pam at Pam Ann Marketing for some input on tools to use to get inside a potential customer’s head. Here’s her advice:
Sometimes you may not be certain about how your customers describe things, or there may be multiple ways to say the same thing and you’re unsure of which is the most commonly used term. Here’s where search engine data can come in handy.
- The Google AdWords Keyword Planner is a tool that will show you how people type things into Google searches. It will also tell you how many times per month a phrase is searched. This can help you figure out exactly how your target customer would refer to your products and services (and using that language on your website can help you appear in search results).When debating amongst several different ways to say the same thing, the search volume can be your deciding factor.
- Google Trends is another tool you can use to see what terms people search for from a more global view. Understanding what’s popular and on people’s minds and finding a cross-section between those trending topics and your products is a great way to introduce your offering in a relative and meaningful way.
Get Started!
Get our language worksheet and start changing the way you write and speak to match your customers’ language.
