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Episode 183 - Understanding Your Ideal Clients (w/ Sam Jacobson)
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Today's guest is sales and copywriting expert, Sam Jacobson, who is helping us dive into understanding our ideal clients and how that understanding can transform our website and our marketing efforts. If you've been listening to the podcast the past few months, you know that client avatars and understanding our ideal clients has been a topic that is top of mind.
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As always, links and resources can be found in the show notes. Check 'em out at https://daveyandkrista.com/ And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review over at Apple Podcasts.
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Transcript
Understanding Client Motivation
00:00:05
Speaker
When you know what it is that motivates somebody to make decisions in life so that they can achieve or reach the kind of happiness that is most important to them, then you can really target and pinpoint very specific messages that your brand delivers to them in the form of a service or a product.
Introduction to The Brands That Book Show
00:00:26
Speaker
Welcome to The Brands That Book Show, where we help creative service-based businesses build their brands and find more clients. I'm your host, Davy Jones.
00:00:34
Speaker
Today's guest is sales and copywriting expert, Sam Jacobson, who is helping us dive into understanding our ideal clients and how that understanding can transform our website and our marketing efforts. If you've been listening to the podcast for the past few months, you know that client avatars and understanding our ideal clients has been a topic that's been top of line.
Ideal Clients and Marketing Strategies
00:00:55
Speaker
I think you'll find that this episode is a really helpful starting point for thinking through your ideal client in a more intentional and thorough way.
00:01:02
Speaker
Sam obviously knows his stuff. I think that's going to be obvious in this episode that he's a guy that's been thinking deeply about this topic for a long time and has a lot of practical experience helping his clients figure this out in their own businesses. This is also one of those episodes that could have lasted three hours, but I hope to have Sam on again in the future to discuss a sales related topic.
00:01:23
Speaker
As always, links and resources can be found in the show notes. Check them out at davianchrista.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review over at Apple Podcasts.
Exploring Basecamp for Project Management
00:01:34
Speaker
Alright, a big thanks to Basecamp, the project management platform for sponsoring this episode.
00:01:40
Speaker
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Speaker
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00:02:19
Speaker
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Sam Jacobson's Personal Insights
00:02:51
Speaker
So out where you are right now, it is probably a little darker, right? It's got to be a little earlier in the morning. It is, yeah. I'm an early riser. I used to start work at 6 p.m. and finish at 4 a.m. And over the years, I've come to actually wake up at 4 a.m. and go to bed at 6 p.m. So yeah, it's real dark where I'm at right now. I'm up in the San Juan Islands in Washington state. This time of the year at the Winter Solstice, it gets light at about 8, 830 and dark around
00:03:19
Speaker
I think sunset might actually be a little bit before four right now. Yeah, it's probably pretty this time of year though. It is. It's gorgeous. You know, we live in a bit of a banana belt as far as a rain shadow in the Northwest. So we get about half as much rain as a Seattle or Portland or Vancouver, BC. It's pretty mild still. Although right now we do have over a foot of snow on the ground, which is great. We've got a couple of teenagers and we've been out kind of frolicking around over the last couple of days. It's been fun. So different kind of beautiful.
00:03:49
Speaker
Yeah, that's awesome though. I mean, especially around Christmas here, you know, we might get snow in the next couple of days and we're really excited about just the possibility of a white Christmas, right? So that's awesome. Also, really appreciate you getting up early to do this. Kindred Spirit, I'm also up early in the morning and
00:04:04
Speaker
I don't know if I could have ever worked from six in the evening to four in the morning. My body just not designed that way. I remember in college, there always be at least one or two all-nighters around exam time. They were so difficult for me. All my friends though, it was just normal.
00:04:21
Speaker
I was always a go to bed late get up late kind of guy through college like you but you know when you work a hospitality schedule
The Genesis of ID Action
00:04:29
Speaker
like I was in restaurants you know it's which I did for a decade different kind of life so I was a Thursday through Monday kind of guy had Tuesdays and Wednesdays off and then I worked the night shift at the bar and grill or the fine dining restaurant and it just kept me there late
00:04:44
Speaker
And then eventually I had a kiddo and everything changes when you have a kiddo, including your sleep schedule. So I did a complete 180 on it. If you could choose early riser or working in the evening, what would you choose?
00:04:56
Speaker
You know, I like getting up early. I really do. I feel like I'm most creative and most productive in the morning. I do my deep work in the morning. I typically block about 20 to 25 hours a week from my schedule so that my one-on-one clients or the team that I manage can't have access to me because I treasure those early morning hours so much to get the most important work that I need done, done.
00:05:20
Speaker
Yeah, I find the same thing to be true. I mean, there's no demands on your time at four in the morning. You know, you're not getting emails, right? You're not getting Slack messages for sure. Well, Sam, I'm really excited to chat with you. We got to connect at Spark conference and maybe we'll see again at Spark conference in 2024, you know, whenever they're having it again. But we got to chat a little bit and today we're chatting about creating a site that targets your ideal client in key areas like messaging, copywriting,
00:05:46
Speaker
image selection and layout. So we have a lot to cover. So I'm excited to tap into your expertise a little bit. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about what you do, a little bit about ID action and how that started. Just give us some background information.
00:05:58
Speaker
Yeah. So my wife, Katie and I own ID action. It's like a Swiss army knife for wedding professionals who want to grow their business. We do copywriting, we do business coaching, and we have online courses and in-person retreats. And our hope is to give people either the skills or
00:06:18
Speaker
the tools to grow the business. And that's either typically one of two things, booking more clients or booking better clients at higher prices. And so we work with all kinds of wedding pros in just starting out all the way through ultra luxury and every kind of field you can imagine. We work a lot with planners, photographers, videographers,
00:06:43
Speaker
stationers, DJs, caterers, venues, you name it. And we've been doing this now for, gosh, we're going into our seventh year, which is pretty hard to believe. We have a team of eight altogether, including me and Katie, six full-time copywriters that stay busy. We do a lot of work that we feel very good about because we love helping others reach the kind of success that's important to them.
00:07:07
Speaker
Yeah, that's awesome and I can imagine your copywriter staying busy. I think people are starting to really wake up to the discipline of copywriting and how much of a difference it makes on a site. I always tell people when they're talking to me about website design and they're considering copywriting and we're always encouraging people to book a copywriter because it's going to be the one thing I think that people, they maybe overestimate what they can do on their own and it's always the one area where people really get hung up, I think.
00:07:35
Speaker
It is, you know, it's interesting. I like to tell people, it's like if they're a photographer, for instance, you know, just because you give me a camera doesn't mean I can go out and photograph a wedding. Just like I gave you my keyboard, it doesn't
The Power of Copywriting in Marketing
00:07:46
Speaker
mean that you can write copy. You know, just because you have the tool doesn't mean that the skill is there. And like all wedding professionals would tell their clients, the couples who get married, you shouldn't DIY something that's so important. We feel the same way when it comes to your business. You know, I've been doing
00:08:02
Speaker
wedding work since 2006. My wife since 1997. We're both expert in sales, which is our background. We both sold for venues. I have a lot of operations background and you sure you could trial and error. You could give it a shot and see how your website goes without having a professional involved in it. But it's a lot faster to success if you hire somebody who knows the way and has gotten there hundreds of times in the past.
00:08:28
Speaker
Yeah, and I tell people it's really what I think sets apart, one of two things I think that really sets apart, you know, May average website from a stellar website. Copywriting makes that much of a difference. Again, it's just, I think your point of, you know, just because so and so is good with their camera phone, you know, doesn't make them also a really skilled wedding photographer.
00:08:49
Speaker
Right. And what ends up happening is that, you know, I think a lot of creatives wedding professionals get a beautiful template like you sell and they get it and they're like, okay, great. Finally, I made the purchase. I pulled the trigger. I'm ready to go. Let's, let's get this done. And then they sit down and it's like that proverbial blinking cursor on the screen or they type it in, you know, it doesn't sound right. It doesn't
Researching Ideal Buyers
00:09:10
Speaker
sound good or it doesn't fit or, or maybe it's, you know, half as much as the field allows.
00:09:14
Speaker
And all of a sudden, they're stuck. And I think they get super frustrated because they had built up so much to completing the site. They got all the photos. They updated their blog and transferred everything over. And the last little thing that they think is going to need to be done is copy. When in reality, as you and I have talked about, so many great sites start with
00:09:34
Speaker
And actually, I'm sure we'll dig into this. So many great sites start with identifying who's your ideal buyer, what kind of story do they want to hear, what kind of psychological triggers do they have. That's actually the preliminary work that needs to be done before you ever do anything as far as design or copywriting goes, or even image selection.
00:09:53
Speaker
Yeah, I mean we preach all the time that copy really drives creative. It does over in the random website design agency over here, David and Krista. And then I talked about that over at Till Agency a lot and the advertising agency. Copy is always driving the creative process. And even for people who start with a template, one of the best ways to make sure your template doesn't look like a template is I think good copywriting, good visual brand. I'd say those are the two things that really separate
00:10:16
Speaker
an average website from a really good website, and so it really doesn't come down as much to whether the website's 100% custom or not. If you can really nail those two things, then your website is going to stand apart. A topic that I've been really interested in lately are just client avatars, ideal client, that conversation, so I want to get there for sure.
00:10:35
Speaker
Can you just give us a little bit more insight into what it looked like starting that business with your wife? We have a lot of people who listen, I think, who are husband and wife teams, you know? So it's always so interesting, even for me as, you know, co-owning an agency with my wife, what that relationship and dynamic looks like with other husband and wife teams.
00:10:53
Speaker
It is an interesting dynamic. I think we've learned over the last several years how to work together and how to work in our own area of the company. When I started ID Action at the end of 2016, it was really an opportunity for me to consult and coach with
00:11:10
Speaker
wedding professionals. And so I did that for the first few years. My wife Katie was the director of catering out of Four Seasons in Dallas, Texas. So she had, you know, a nice cushy job and she'd been doing that for 14 years. And we decided to move back to San Juan Island where I had spent the better part of 15 years before I moved out to Dallas.
00:11:33
Speaker
And so there's no four seasons on san juan island and so you know i was doing coaching but we move back and and we realize that. There was a hole in the needs that my coaching clients had and that was in copywriting i remember very specifically one day i had back to back coaching clients who were getting their copy back from.
00:11:56
Speaker
agency that they've been working with and they were both in tears when I called them up because all of the time, energy, money that had been spent on getting copy for the site to generate more inquiries so that we could continue our sales coaching work had fallen through.
00:12:12
Speaker
And I got done with the calls. I remember walking upstairs and Katie had been helping me kind of behind the scenes doing some social media and admin work just to fill in some areas that were not getting done. And I said, Katie, I think we got to take your writing background and your sales background and your wedding background. And we got to get some training and learn how to do copywriting so that we can help generate more inquiries for our clients. And so she went through a conversion copywriting program and
00:12:40
Speaker
combined with her journalism education that she had received and then the 20 plus years of direct sales work, we just started doing internal copywriting projects for my coaching clients. We ended up filling up very quickly and we realized that this could back to be... That's a dangerous combination of skills, right?
00:12:59
Speaker
It is that we write using conversion copywriting principles. It really is based on buyer behavior and behavioral science and persuasiveness rather than content or creative approaches. We were seeing really great success and this was something that she felt like she wanted to do full-time. Then we started opening up to friends of our clients and then it was people who had just heard about us on referral.
00:13:24
Speaker
And so you know here we are three plus years later with six full-time copywriters and lots of clients that
Running a Business with Complementary Roles
00:13:32
Speaker
we're doing good work for. You know I think that going to your initial question of what's it like to work with my wife or for her to work with me, you know I think that we complement each other very well.
00:13:42
Speaker
I'm kind of the idea guy and the driver for what we're gonna do to meet the needs of our clients and she is really focused on making sure that our team is prepared and trained and motivated to deliver
00:13:59
Speaker
the services that our clients need most from us. So I really kind of look forward with my head up and I'm in business development and strategy and thought leadership, forming strategic partnerships, coming up with new services for our company to offer. And she's really more focused on the execution side and the nurturing of our team to make sure that it's a good company culture and we continue to retain happy, engaged employees.
00:14:25
Speaker
It's kind of a division of labor and we both play to our strong suits and what we're most interested in. Yeah, that sounds like a similar setup to what Kristin and I have. Well, I want to get into some of these principles of conversion copywriting, starting really with what an ideal client is. Maybe we could just start there for people and dive into like, for somebody who's, I think so many people go into this thinking, well, I have an idea of who my client is. But outside of that general intuition that they have,
00:14:53
Speaker
of who they want to work with and what they want to do, they don't really put a ton of thought beyond that. And I certainly back in starting a bunch of businesses fall into that trap, so no judgment there. But maybe you could just kind of explain what an ideal client is and why people really should invest in figuring out what drives that person.
00:15:13
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm a student of behavioral psychology. I'm actually enrolled in a program at Texas A&M University. It's applied behavioral economics and it's really the intersection of marketing, sales, and psychology. What I've learned in that program and through the dozens, I don't know, maybe hundreds of books that I've read about this topic
00:15:34
Speaker
is that most people stop at surface level, skin deep demographics.
Client Psychology in Marketing
00:15:39
Speaker
When we think about our ideal client, we think about what kind of career do they do and where do they travel and whether things do they buy. Those are important things, but it's just a start. If you peel back the layers like an onion and you start going to the next level that's below that, you get into what are called ethographics.
00:15:55
Speaker
And ethographics are values and beliefs that your ideal client have. And those are really important because humans are driven by a need to connect with people who are like us, who believe the same thing, who value the same thing. And so we as a brand have to know how to connect with our ideal client's values and beliefs. But below that at the core of everything are psychographics. And these psychographics are the psychological motivations that human beings have. And there are
00:16:23
Speaker
You know, many different ways of looking at it. The way that I look at it is through nine different core motivations that we're all driven by. It could be, you know, recognition. It could be achievement. It could be a sense of belonging or maybe taking care of other people, whatever it may be. But when you know what it is that motivates somebody to
00:16:43
Speaker
Make decisions in life so that they can achieve or reach the kind of happiness that is most important to them then you can really target and pinpoint very specific messages that your brand delivers to them in the form of a service or a product and so the copy is the how.
00:17:01
Speaker
or the image is the how that's delivered, but the core message is the what that you're really truly trying to say. And so if you don't know what triggers psychologically your ideal client, you can't create those messages that are gonna make your copy or your image or your design meaningful.
00:17:18
Speaker
Yeah, there's so much there I think to explore. So maybe we can unpack this a little bit, you know, and get into sort of practically how people can sort of uncover those psychological triggers. You know, what is it that they should be looking at? Like if I'm sitting down and I want to, you know, I want to tackle this for my business, where do I start there?
00:17:35
Speaker
Well, going to your clients is the most important thing. And so when we do a copywriting project for a website, we may spend 60 to 80 hours altogether doing work on the project for the client. Out of that, about half will be spent doing research and digging around to understand all three layers of the demographics, ethnographic, psychographics,
00:17:58
Speaker
as well as looking into the brand itself and then also looking at the comp set. You want to look at those three areas, your ideal clients, your brand, and then also your comp set. When you go through and you start, you always start with the ideal client. Everything builds from there. The best way to do that is to ask them questions, but ask them the right kinds of questions. We'll send out maybe
00:18:21
Speaker
you know, 10, 15, at most 20 client surveys, we typically get about two thirds of them back. And we ask a dozen or so questions and they're very pointed questions, not just about the experience of receiving the services from the service provider, but also what was going through their head when they were looking for a service provider looking for
00:18:45
Speaker
Somebody to fix their problems to meet their desires and so we'll ask questions like you know when you were looking for a vendor for your wedding or whatever say photographer planner whatever whatever you are you know when you're looking for a planner what was most important when you were seeking out somebody to plan your wedding.
00:19:04
Speaker
Another question that we would ask is, just when you were prepared to say yes to booking this person for your ex-services, what was it that held you back from signing that contract? And when you go through and you identify, the first question picks up on what are your biggest desires. And the second question is, what are your biggest concerns?
00:19:28
Speaker
And what you really want to do with your ideal clients are ask questions like that that are going to uncover what are their biggest desires and concerns. We as businesses exist to solve our clients problems and the services we offer solutions to those problems, whether it's having less bad things happening or more good things happening,
00:19:46
Speaker
we need to know what those good and bad things are. When we know what those are deep down, then we can start creating a hypothesis of what's gonna motivate this person to make a decision to choose our services or somebody else's. And do you find that, you know, I guess what motivates somebody falls into, you know, just a few different buckets, you know, like not really like infinite amount of possibilities out there? Yeah, absolutely. In the wedding industry, I found that there are four main motivators.
00:20:16
Speaker
So couples are choosing vendors no matter what vendor you are for four main reasons because this is really what they're doing with all consumer choices that they're making and so those are esteem which is recognition from others typically their peer group it could be engagement which is indulging in life's joys and pleasures another one is belonging which is connecting to other people through meaningful experiences
00:20:42
Speaker
And then a fourth is autonomy. And that is freedom and independence to do what you want to do when you want to do it with whom you want to do it. And so typically we see a couple of those as the primary drivers for couples making decisions with their vendors. And what we're really looking for when we get that customer feedback, not just the specific desires and concerns, but how could we categorize those into those couple of top buckets? Is it esteem? Is it engagement? Is it belonging? Or is it autonomy?
00:21:12
Speaker
And do you find that for different types, like different levels of business – and I hate to use that word – but if you're running more of a luxury level brand, that some of these categories apply more? So for instance, I would assume that esteem, that to me sounds like reputation. Somebody who's trying to book a luxury level service provider probably cares about how they look to their peers.
00:21:34
Speaker
I think so. I do think that esteem, especially because it is about recognition and so much about affluent purchases is about being recognized as having made it. So many who are affluent and wealthy, they earned their income. You could have married it, you could have inherited it, but typically you earn it or you invent something, whatever it may be.
00:21:55
Speaker
There's a sense of wanting to have respect and recognition for the idea or the effort that you've put in. I think also one of the things that we see at the luxury level as well is a desire to be a good host, to be a gracious host, to honor family traditions.
00:22:12
Speaker
And so I do think that there's a sense of belonging that drives a lot of decisions at all levels, but also especially in the luxury space, you know, destination weddings, as they've grown in popularity over the last half decade, especially whether it's regional or international.
00:22:29
Speaker
that's all about engagement people spending their day to day existence and creating a space and time for three four five days where their closest family and friends can indulge in life's pleasures eating drinking dancing recreating you know connecting with other people staying up late and having conversations
00:22:50
Speaker
And so i think that you know the motivations are there at all levels but there are certain types of clients that you might have that pretty traditionally motivated by you know one or two of these kinds of desires.
00:23:02
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, just in you talking though, you can kind of see already just the nuance involved in this, you know, and how, you know, for the luxury level one, you know, just thinking about how, you know, in your experience, how a lot of luxury level where people who are looking for a luxury level service provider also care about, you know, the family tradition and, you know, paying respect to their family, you know, whatever. So, I mean, those are the sorts of things that you could easily see, you know, how that would make it over into the copy on your website or in your marketing collateral.
00:23:29
Speaker
But it requires a little extra, you know, digging in thought to get there. It's not something that most people have even thought about. Most people are like, I want to show my product in the prettiest way possible. Or I want to demonstrate my expertise or authority. But somebody who's driven by belonging, for instance, doesn't really care about your expertise or authority. And in fact, they may not even care about how pretty your product is. What they care about is how you make them feel on all the days leading up to the wedding. They care about how you handle
00:23:56
Speaker
the group dynamics of all the different decision makers. And so what you know about your buyer is what you should be focusing on with your marketing material and your sales messaging. We were just talking a little bit about ideal client. You had mentioned brand and comp set. Can we talk about those levels a little bit as well? And comp set, can you explain what that is?
00:24:14
Speaker
Yeah, so CompSAT is the comparable set of vendors that are in your category that a potential client will compare you with as they're looking at different products. And it's important to know who they are, not because you're competing with them in the sense that you want a negative sell or market directly at them, but because you want to create some space between what you're communicating and what they're communicating.
00:24:38
Speaker
you as a brand can talk about 50 different things that you offer as a benefit to your clients. But it's important to make sure that you're picking the right ones and the ones that separate you from the others and the ones that are going to connect most with your ideal client. We want to make sure that you're positioning your messages in a way that helps separate you easily so that when they look at apples to apples to apples, they recognize that there are some observable differences between what you do
00:25:06
Speaker
for them and what other brands do for them so that's really important to know another really keep part of this is your own brand you know you wanna make sure that you are working with clients and projects that fill your cup that make you feel good about the work that you're doing that excite you creatively that.
00:25:26
Speaker
Create long-term happiness with the kind of work that you're doing otherwise you'll face burnout when we attract flawed buyers instead of perfect buyers ideal clients oftentimes burnout happens very very quickly and so we want to make sure that we understand what it is that we want from the work that we're doing with our clients before we set about selling our services.
Aligning Brand and Client Motivations
00:25:48
Speaker
Yeah, I had a friend I was just meeting with the other day, and he had mentioned that, and this is not related to work at all, but I thought it was very insightful. He talked about looking at the things that people ask you to do, putting in categories of green, yellow, and red, and he said that the green things are the ones that fill your cup, the red things are the ones that obviously don't, and he said the category you have to be most worried about is yellow, because those are the things that, yeah, I can do that.
00:26:10
Speaker
And I think for businesses, that's so true, right? I mean, like, you do that day in, day out for years and really maybe not realizing it because you're not, you know, taking the time to, you know, intentionally think about it, like through an activity like this. And then all of a sudden, you know, you pick your head up and you feel incredibly burned out.
00:26:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's so true. We just got back from a retreat that we hosted for clients in St. Lucia and we spent five days going through and the first day was just kind of welcoming everybody. But the second day was about kind of cleaning out the gunk that's left over from all those yellow and red clients that we've been dealing with. Only when you do that process, it's cathartic. Can you open things up to imagining what success might really look like?
00:26:52
Speaker
but we give away so much of our time to projects and people that are not filling our cup, that don't make us happy. So we've got to make sure that we begin with that and then work backwards on how we're going to reach that with our business. In looking at your brand, is that primarily what you're looking at is basically what is the type of work that is most fulfilling for me and who is it that I want to work with?
00:27:17
Speaker
That's part of it. That's an important part of it. In addition to that, we would want to get the voice of the client, of our client, of the service provider. One of the things that we'll do is we'll go through and we'll look at correspondence that they've written. We'll look at, it could be social media posts that they've made.
00:27:35
Speaker
We'll also record about four hours worth of interviews that we do with them. And this is way more effective than a questionnaire because, one, we get better answers. Most people don't know how to write and communicate and articulate their ideas. That's why they've hired a professional writer. And so why ask them to write the information that they want us to communicate? So we'd rather just have a conversation with them. But interestingly, people talk very differently than they do write.
00:27:58
Speaker
And we also tend to write at a much higher education level or grade level than we communicate when we're talking. And so we want to make sure that the voice and how the copy sounds is going to come through with consistency when somebody inquires and either emails and it sounds consistent with what they read on the website or
00:28:17
Speaker
they have a sales call and it sounds consistent with what they read on the website so that's super important when we're going through and thinking about the brands and we want to make sure that they're offering the most perfect solutions for the ideal clients needs and most people that we work with don't have a clue what they do that.
00:28:37
Speaker
best for the client. They're like, I'm a floral designer. I plan weddings. And a lot of the things that they do come across as general or generic features that pretty much everybody else who's offering the same service does. And so what we're really looking for when we dig into the brand excavation part of the communication strategy is what are the truly unique
00:29:02
Speaker
positionings that this particular brand has? What are the perfect solutions that other planners or photographers or videographers or calligraphers don't have? And what are you offering that is different and unique? And so we're actually coaching the client through that process because they don't know where to begin.
00:29:22
Speaker
And I'm guessing these things that you're talking about now, whatever this perfect solution is, it ties more back to these drivers of the ideal client rather than maybe the product itself. Would that be right? Correct. I think one of the disconnects that I see is
00:29:38
Speaker
As soon as you start talking about the perfect solution, people are like, well, I have an eight-hour collection and it includes X, Y, and Z. And it's like, well, everybody has an eight-hour collection that includes X, Y, and Z. The question you have to answer, I guess, is how is that collection, how is what you're doing there really serving somebody who cares about esteem, engagement, belonging, or autonomy?
00:29:58
Speaker
That's right. So I'll give you an example. So there's a misconception out there amongst couples. Let's just use photography as an example that the engagement session is about getting the photos so that they have that and can put it into a frame, right? That's not actually what an engagement session is about. If you ask
00:30:13
Speaker
most photographers they'll tell you that you know the most important thing is that they get practice with the couple and the couple learn to become comfortable in front of the camera we also know that feeling awkward in front of the camera is one of the biggest concerns that a couple has especially at the non luxury level and so.
00:30:32
Speaker
When you can identify that you have that as a concern in your buyer, then you can create marketing messages that talk about engagement sessions, but not in a generic way of I do engagement sessions. It's in, I help you feel comfortable in front of the camera. And the best way for us to do that is to spend 30, 60, 90 minutes practicing ahead of time. And the byproduct of that is that you get some photos. That's somebody who might feel a bit nervous and is motivated
00:31:01
Speaker
by, could be a negative motivation, what they call a cautious mind state, less bad things happening. That would be, you know, related to recognition. But if they have more good things that they want to happen with that motivator of recognition, then you would talk about all the amazing things they can do to share those images with their family and friends. You can post it on social media. You can look back for years to come at how beautiful you were before your
00:31:24
Speaker
you know you aged or you stop taking care of yourself so much you know whatever it may be you tune into what that looks like we know for instance to carry on with with photography that in the luxury space having photos that might be published is really important to somebody who's driven by esteem and engagement and so like that might be something that you want to focus on as your services is that you get published a lot.
00:31:46
Speaker
And so you would want to create marketing messages that announce that to your ideal client. So there's lots of ways that you can incorporate it. It's different for every buyer and every brand. It's going to be generally the same and that you really want to start with these first.
00:32:00
Speaker
Yeah, so if somebody is sitting down and looking at their ideal client, maybe they've gone through some of these different activities and we're gonna link to your website and different resources so people can check out more about this for sure. Investigate their ideal client a little bit. What does that process look like? Actually taking some of these different things, some of these different drivers and then converting that to the copy on your website or tweaks that you can make to your website. And I'm just using website as an example just because
00:32:27
Speaker
Let's start with something that's easy because I really do believe that copywriting is something that is best done by a professional. But let's look at like quick fixes that anybody who's listening to the podcast can make that don't require a ton of work or skill. Image selection. So image selection is a great way for
00:32:43
Speaker
this approach to make a big impact in your marketing and in your lead generation. So let's say that you have a website and you work in the wedding industry and you know that your ideal client is driven by belonging. So meaningful connections with others, loved ones, friends and family at the wedding.
00:33:01
Speaker
One of the things that you want to do is you want to pick images that resonate with that motivation. So images that resonate with that motivation could be things like your parents walking you down the aisle, right? So you would have like a mom and dad or a dad walking a daughter down the aisle as she's ready to get married. You're going to want to show emotions that demonstrate meaningful connection. So it could be, you know, somebody wiping away a tear.
00:33:25
Speaker
or it could be an embrace with eyes closed, and you look at somebody's face over his shoulder. It could be a sweet smile that a mom gives a daughter while she's putting her dress on to get ready. It could be a first dance with the couple that's getting married or maybe a daddy-daughter first dance or a mother-son first dance. It could be the ring being slipped on the finger as a close-up. Those are the images that are going to trigger somebody who is motivated by belonging.
00:33:55
Speaker
I'm not motivated by a belonging. I'm motivated by engagement. So if you wanted to market to somebody who is motivated by engagement, instead of having a close-up of somebody putting a ring on a finger as one of your ceremony shots, what I would want to see is people walking out from the ceremony doing the recession with their arms in the air smiling like they just won a marathon.
00:34:18
Speaker
Or it might be somebody popping champagne or pouring bubbles into a champagne fountain. It could even be something that's not wedding related at all, where there's some kind of activity that they're doing before the wedding. It could be some sort of people dancing their faces off. Or a classic one is raising a glass in a cheers or a toast. Those are celebration images.
00:34:44
Speaker
And those are going to really excite people who are driven by engagement. So you can imagine how this is done depending on what motivation, but it's very easy to go through and pick 20 to 25 images from your portfolio that really resonate with this ideal buyer's motivation.
00:34:59
Speaker
Those are all really great tips. Is there anything else that we can do beyond image selection on our own to sort of start getting at this? I think when you go through and you look at another part of what you're trying to communicate, it's not the what, it's the how. And so I won't get into it. I will reference a podcast episode that I have
00:35:22
Speaker
that you can go through with my own podcast called Own Your Business. And it's about buyer types. And we break the buyers into four different types of buyers and how they prefer to communicate. And as an example, somebody who is say a boss buyer type, they don't have a lot of time to bend on looking at websites or even in the sales process. They need to know the bottom line real quick, real fast. And so if you knew, for instance, that you had a boss buyer type as your ideal client,
00:35:52
Speaker
then you would want to keep the home page especially very very short and so if you're keeping that home page short it could be you know maybe three hundred words for instance whereas if you're working with an analyzer buyer type they actually consume all the information and they do it in a very linear way and so you might have.
00:36:11
Speaker
six hundred seven hundred maybe even eight hundred words on your home page because they're the twenty percent of the readers will read everything the first time through so knowing what kind of buyer you're working with helps you structure and layout the website.
00:36:27
Speaker
It could be not just word count, but what the image ratio is or like dreamer buyer types need a lot of calls to action. They look at everything like they're click happy. They're like, I want to press a button. You know, they like moving images. They like a lot of stuff, but a relater buyer type gets overwhelmed by that. They need a lot of white space. They need a step by step and they want to connect with, you know, you personally. And so depending on what buyer you're working at, you would want to structure and lay out your website differently.
00:36:55
Speaker
so that it's easy for them to consume the information and at least not stressful or overwhelming or boring for them to do so.
00:37:03
Speaker
Yeah, my guess is that one question people might be asking themselves, especially even as we look at different motivations and desires, the different benefits that people care about, different kinds of buyer types, how much do you find that people fall into multiple categories or they sort of spill over into another category, and how do you address that as well? My intuition is that it's not like somebody fits into all four buyer types. It's like maybe somebody is mostly this kind of buyer type,
00:37:31
Speaker
also have a little bit of this in them as well. So maybe that solves the issue a little bit. But do you get that question often? And how would you address that when approaching a marketing collateral?
00:37:42
Speaker
So, yeah, you're right. Absolutely, Davey. In the sense that, you know, most people don't have just one. They usually have a couple. That's good to market to. You want to look towards the primary motivator for your primary buyer. And that's really important. The thing that makes weddings specifically super challenging and a very complex marketing and sales
00:38:01
Speaker
experiences because you're not trying to sell just one person. You're selling two different people at bare minimum. And the bigger you go in budgets, typically the more people are involved. So, you know, a typical scenario that I see would be a bride to be inquires and she is a relater buyer type that's driven by belonging. And then she has a fiance who's the opposite of her, right? Cause opposites attract. So he's probably driven by engagement and he's a boss buyer type.
00:38:31
Speaker
But then because of the dynamic that they have, maybe her family is helping to pay for the wedding and she may have a mom who is over involved in the wedding planning process, which is pretty typical with related buyer types because they don't have great boundaries or people pleasers. They don't know how to say no very well. And so now the mom is super involved and maybe she's trying to make sure that her daughter's wedding is better than her friend's daughter's weddings.
Navigating Buyer Dynamics in Wedding Services
00:38:57
Speaker
And so she's driven by,
00:38:59
Speaker
esteem and recognition, but the dad who's actually writing the check is an analyst who is very concerned with the reducing risk and making sure that this is a good investment. So you're marketing to all of these people. The key is to know how to provide the right information at the right time and in the right way to each one of them. And so when you're looking at, say, early stage marketing on social media or
00:39:27
Speaker
in a blog post or something that's maybe Pinterest, something that's top of funnel, an ad if you're paying for one. It may be that you're marketing to that bride who's driven by belonging that is wanting to connect with the brand provider personally. But then as you go through the sales process and you get to the end where somebody's looking at a proposal, it's typically the one who's writing the check that's making the ultimate decision. They are the authority.
00:39:54
Speaker
you might be writing directly to dad at that point where you're offering lots of social proof and reassurances and competitive advantages of why this is the best choice that they can make so it's different and this is why it's so complex and just like.
00:40:11
Speaker
Wedding planning should be done by professional wedding planners and photography should be done by professional photographers. Your marketing and sales should be created or directed or guided by professionals that have this kind of know-how, especially the done-for-you components of it. It makes a massive difference in the outcomes for your business.
00:40:32
Speaker
Yeah, and I think what you're saying is especially important realizing that there are multiple stages to the purchasing process, right? And I think anybody, you know, you could sit down and map out your customer journey and probably get 70% of the way there, you know, and certainly absolutely meeting with professionals that can help you, you know, see some of the nuances there and understand some things that maybe you just are getting lost because you're in it. You know, it's always nice having an outside perspective.
00:40:59
Speaker
but you don't have to. When we're, for instance, in the ad agency, we often talk about how you don't have to sell the entire product in the ad itself. The point of the ad is just to get somebody to click to the landing page, to the sales page. I think something similar is here, where if you include all that extra information for the analyst on your website, but that's not really who your first touch is with, then that can be a distraction or it could even be a turnoff potentially to who your ideal client actually is.
00:41:27
Speaker
the bride and groom that you're serving, not necessarily the father who it's important to have that information for, but you can include that information down the line in the correct order and the correct marketing collateral, right? So I think that stuff is just so important.
00:41:42
Speaker
It is, yeah. If you go back to a guy named Eugene Schwartz who wrote a book called Breakthrough Advertising, I mean, this is like marketing 101. He talks about five different stages of awareness. You go from unaware to problem aware to solution aware to product aware to most aware. And your job throughout the buyer's journey is to get people to go from one stage to the next.
00:42:02
Speaker
And when somebody is at the unaware stage, you are communicating to them other people's problems because when they see what other people want to need, they're like, oh, I want that too. And then they get to the problem aware stage and your content is going to be driven at what are the solutions to the problems because they don't know those. So they can go from problem aware to solution whereby you talking about here are the services that meet the needs that you now just discovered.
00:42:26
Speaker
When you move them from solution to product aware, what you want to do is you want to offer an insight that they were like, oh, I had no clue that you have to do these things to get those results. And so that moves them to the next stage. And then finally, towards the end, when you're getting them at the product aware stage, you're trying to show the unique differences between one product and the next. They need to know very clearly what are the differences and why is one better than the other.
00:42:55
Speaker
And so it's really really important to make sure that you're providing the right information at the right time but first you've got to know where are people in that buyers journey and how can you connect with what they want to need most it's very nuanced it's like acupuncture you know i think a lot of people go into you know their marketing and sales and they go in with like a meat cleaver.
00:43:15
Speaker
And they're like, I'm just going to start hacking away. I'm going to throw this up.
Precise Marketing Approaches
00:43:19
Speaker
I'm going to put more posts out. I'm going to try and get on these lists. I'm going to hit them with an ad and that's the meat cleaver approach. But if you go through with a very teeny tiny needle and you know exactly where to place it, you can just tap it in with the lightest of touches and all of a sudden everything's better and people are doing the things that you need them to do.
00:43:38
Speaker
And so the more we use needles instead of meat cleavers, we'll find more success. You'll be less frustrated towards the end of the buyer's journey. It's usually not what happened at the end that messed things up. It's usually that they were never really your client in the first place because you hadn't connected with them in meaningful, important ways. Yeah, less frustration and I think less effort in some ways, or maybe more intentional effort rather applied.
00:44:01
Speaker
You know, the problem with an interview like this, Sam, is that I feel like there are a thousand different ways that we could take this conversation, you know, and you're obviously I mean, there's just so many different topics that that I would love to explore with you to keep things to respect your time. Are there things that we should be chatting about that we haven't brought up yet?
00:44:17
Speaker
I think that we've really touched on some big ideas and the concept of looking at your website as more than just a place to showcase your product and your bio and to have a contact form is really, really crucial. I see that the number one problem that most of our clients have and that I hear from most wedding professionals and most creative types of solopreneurs is that they don't get enough qualified inquiries.
00:44:45
Speaker
And as we go through and we think about that nexus of where people are walking around in your online storefront and you wondering why the right kind of people are inquiring, there's not enough time spent on really digging into what is going on when they're in your storefront.
00:45:02
Speaker
And so making sure that your website is targeting and communicating in effective ways, effective messages with your ideal client. That's enough, right? Like spend time on that and look at more than just getting a pretty visual brand.
00:45:20
Speaker
That's important, right? You and I both know, Davey, that there are milliseconds where people are forming snap judgments about whether or not they want to work with a brand based on the visual branding. But the mistake that I see a lot of creatives because they like visuals is that they spend so much time, energy, and especially money on how things look and that component of it. But the real
00:45:44
Speaker
important part of the website is going to be in what it communicates, how it communicates, and so please, if you're listening to this, spend more time on that. Put some thought into it. It's worth every second that you do. Yeah, and I think that everything that we do, whether it's visually or whether it's in messaging, is going to stem from putting together that customer avatar, that client avatar, really understanding these different triggers that you're talking about based on different things that your ideal client might desire.
Resources and Learning Tools
00:46:14
Speaker
Well, I really appreciate your time, Sam. And I know people are going to have questions. I'm going to search for that episode on Own Your Business about the different buyer types and make sure that's linked to in the show notes. But for people who want to learn more, dig into this further, want to reach out to you and maybe talk about how they can also go to St. Lucia for a retreat or Costa Rica. I know you have more planned in the future. Where should they go to find out more?
00:46:38
Speaker
Yeah, we've got a ridiculous amount of free content available for anybody who's interested. Great place to look for it is through Instagram ID action consulting is our handle. We offer three to four posts a week with great tidbits and techniques that you can apply. I have a free newsletter that goes out every week on Wednesdays and over 5,000 people get that. You can sign up for that by going to our website ID action consulting.com.
00:47:04
Speaker
and go all the way down to the footer, just need a name and an email and you'll start getting good pieces of advice delivered weekly. My podcast, Own Your Business, is available on any place that you get podcasts. I do a weekly episode and a lot of sales pricing and copywriting specific episodes. I also bring in some of the best in the business and the wedding industry to
00:47:27
Speaker
hear about what it's like for them to own their business, which I think is really helpful because so many of us solopreneurs or small entrepreneurs are kind of siloed in our home offices. And we forget what it's like to have a community of people that are out there and going through the same thing we are. So, you know, Instagram newsletter, social media, and also the podcast. Great places. If you're interested in connecting further, you know, hit me up, Sam at ID action, consulting.com, or you can DM on Instagram.
00:47:54
Speaker
that's a great way to get in touch. I answer the DMs myself. Awesome. Yeah, that's good to know. So we have an intern right now. And the one thing I feel like we're trying to teach her before she goes off to whatever's next is some at least basic copywriting skills. I always tell people, maybe copywriting is not your thing, but if you can just learn some basics, you can be dangerous.
00:48:16
Speaker
and think about how much writing we have to do even if we don't like writing or just a caption on social media, right? Those sorts of skills can go a long way. So head on over to idaction.com. We'll make sure that we link to those resources in the show notes as always. And Sam, thank you so much for your time this morning. Thanks, David. Appreciate you having me on.
00:48:37
Speaker
Thanks for tuning into the Brands That Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review in iTunes. For show notes and other resources, head on over to dvandchrista.com.