163. How can you think like your audience?
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Wondering how you can read the minds of your ideal customer? đź”® This episode will give you the tools to think like your audience! Hosts Phil and Lauren share their techniques for stepping into the shoes of your target market. You'll learn how to abandon assumptions, survey truth-tellers, listen to tough feedback, and connect with your customer by solving their most pressing problems. For a fun reality check, listen up!
Episode transcription
Phil
Well, hello there. Welcome to Brand Therapy. I'm Phil.
Lauren
And I'm Lauren.
Phil
And this is the podcast where we help you position, build and promote your brands. Well, you made a good decision today and a good decision was turning on this episode. Good one. We're going to be talking today all about your audience. Now, listen, we've talked about this topic before, but we need to revisit it today, because we're coming at it with a new angle, how to understand your audience. And we're not talking hypotheticals. If you know, Miss Lauren Moore and me by now, you know, we don't spend time in hypotheticals. We're going to give you some practical tips today to identify or let's say, revisit identifying your audience. I feel like would you say more on that, as business owners, this isn't something you just do. In the early days of starting a business. This is something that should be a practice, this is something that we should be doing routinely to revisit who needs us not? Who wants us, but who needs us? Who are they? And how do we satisfy that? That audience?
Lauren
Yes, specifically through the lens of content. Now, a lot of what we've covered about thinking about your audience to date on Brand Therapy has been within the context of sales. And don't get me wrong. When you're posting on social media. The end goal is for someone to buy from you. But I think what inspired this episode today was actually from something I've noticed, with our clients when they're launching their brands and trying to build an audience on social media. Now, we've used this line before. If I've used it 10 times Phil's use it a million times,
Phil
Maybe use it again, come on.
Lauren
When you try to appeal to everyone, you effectively appeal to noone.
Phil
We didn't do a good job of doing that in sync, but we tried.
Lauren
Well, you changed up the pace.
Phil
Yeah, yeah, I like to make rules. And then I like to break them, even if they're my own.
Lauren
Ah, man, well, here's the thing, when you're launching a brand, whether it's a new company, or a new brand, or a new goal on social media, whatever it is, I've noticed that people start to get a bit scared about being specific. And they try to make their message super, super broad. So that in hopes that it'll generate the most likes and appeal to the most number of people.
But the challenge is, is that when you aren't specific, then you aren't going to emotionally connect with a specific audience member. And so for today's call, we're going to be giving you some really, really tactical ways to get to know your audience. And I'm actually going to push you to think of your audience on social media as one specific person. I'm going to give one example of a client we have who I think does just an incredible, incredible job of speaking to her audience on social media. So I think you know where I'm going to be going with this. But Dr. Lora Shaheen, if you don't follow her, go check out her profile. She's on Tik Tok. And she's also on Instagram. And she is so specific with her content. It's unbelievable.
Phil
Also on YouTube, showing you to auto places.
Lauren
So as a reproductive endocrinologist, Laura helps people build their families. And she specifically helps with fertility medicine. So these aren't just general tips for people who are thinking about building a family. These are people who are either in the midst of seeing a fertility specialist, or they've tried fertility treatments, they're in a very, very specific stage of their lives, where they have questions about what specific type of hormone shots should be taken at a particular time in their cycle. It’s really, really granular. And because she meets her audience, where they are in their life, right now, she's able to build a really, really incredible engaged community on multiple platforms. So anyway, that's a little a little nugget before I dive into the tactics.
Phil
Yeah, I think it's a good reminder though, and a good tangible examples so that you can go right now unless you're driving focus on the road. But if you're not driving, you can pull up Laura Shaheen on social media and see her in action. I think this specificity keeps her going. I think it keeps her motivated to keep serving her audience in a really valuable way. I think it drives her. I love that she shows up almost every day, you know, follower =question of the day or client question of the day like she does she a patient question of the day, I guess in her context, it's just amazing.
And I love how specifically she speaks her audience which as you said, gets me scary in the early days because you're like, oh my god, how can I go so specific with this audience? We tackled this a few years. ago we thought EU companies want to hire us. But then we love working with personal brands, smaller budgets and companies. But what about the specificity? Should we risk it, and potentially turn companies away? Because we go all in on personal branding. If you go to our website is all about personal branding. But guess what? Company brands still hire us, they still hire us because we confidently state who we are, and how we serve our audience. And the irony of this is you'll actually attract people outside your audience by speaking specifically to one audience. It's amazing. So don't worry about that. The fear is, is justifiable, but it's not something you need to worry about, in my opinion, go specific specific is better than general in almost every instance.
Lauren
Yes. Okay. So some examples of how you can get to know your audience better.
The first one is, I would do a big brainstorm of who your audience is down to an avatar, like think of a person and a human being in your head and think about how they spend their day, what brands they like, where they go shopping? Do they buy their groceries at Safeway, or do they buy their groceries from Whole Foods? What's the highlight of their week, really, really put yourself in their shoes, so you can understand where they're at right now. And then once you've figured out what brands outside of your industry they like, go check out that brand on social media and look at what they're doing. Look at how they're speaking to their audience. Are they doing this or that polls? Or are they doing more kind of asked me anything very open ended questions. Get inspired by industries outside of your own, because they still run parallel to what you do. And they're ultimately appealing to the same person.
Phil
Can I add to that, get inspired by brands that have unlimited budgets. Or probably not on a limited budget, but what feels unlimited compared to our budget, as an individual or as a personal brand, they have an army. A lot of these big brands have an army of people whose job it is to come up with social media content and post it. You probably don't have an army. But why don't you go be strongly inspired by what the army is doing and do it in your own unique way. That's the beauty of the internet, everything is out there, you can go get inspired by this. That's the only point I wanted to make.
Lauren
I love it. I love it. Now, another thing that you can do is actually create a survey and go after about five to ten people, you can find them online or you if you even know them. And there they fall into your ideal audience and have them fill out a survey. Now it could be a brief one. And ideally, you're going to be giving them something in return, like a consultation or a quick call or feedback on something, whatever it is. But I want that survey to be really rooted in curiosity. I think all too often we make assumptions about what our audience wants from us, but we don't actually pay attention, or we're not really open to really hearing what they want.
I'll give an example. There's a brand I love college nutritionist, Dr. Rachel Paul, she's built an empire. Truly an empire on her Instagram and Pinterest. And also in her private community, she must make so many millions of dollars a year, it's actually really, really impressive. But when she was first starting out her account, college nutritionist, she knew that she generally wanted to go after people who were in college and who wanted to lose five to 20 pounds. And she sent out about 10 surveys to different people to ask them what they wanted. And she was completely shocked by the answers because she assumed that they wanted to have recipes to help save money, and to help save time. But actually what this audience was interested in, were recipes for one person. Which again, is a no brainer. Obviously someone who's in college wants recipes for one person, they're not cooking for other people, it's only themselves. And they don't need something that's going to create like a yield of four to six servings. And that was how she got her start because she really truly listened to what her audience had to say. And didn't make any assumptions. I love that story so much.
Phil
Where did you hear that story?
Lauren
I took a course that she had years ago on building an Instagram audience. And it's sadly gone. It's not on teachable and I actually DM’d her., where is this because I paid for it. But I didn't get a response. So I don't love that about the brand experience. But it's burned in my brain because she talked about how humbling it was to realize that what she had in her brain about the angle was completely wrong.
Phil
I was just thinking it was interesting that she told that story. So she made content. Yeah, out of something she realized. That was fascinating. And it was It resonated so much with you that even of course doesn't exist anymore. And you still remember that point.
Lauren
Yeah, yeah. Well, it just, it just made me realize that we all carry different biases. And sometimes the answers just right in front of us if we want to hear it, you know?
Phil
Absolutely. And I love that like, not only do you navigate that in your business, but then you go and create content out of it content that sticks with someone who took your course, years later.
Lauren
I know, I know, I think I took it four years ago or something, I think about it all the time. Okay, another this is actually from Rachel's courses. Well, this little tidbit is, Rachel, really try to make sure that her content that she created, addressed the deep life needs of her audience.
And so I'll explain what that means. Obviously, when we're choosing to engage with a brand, or buy from a company or put our time into something, there's a part where we're wanting an immediate fix. I want more Instagram followers. So I'm gonna listen to this episode of brand therapy. That's an example of a quick fix. But ultimately, there's always a longer reason that's driving that short term fix. So the longer reason is, okay, well, why do you want more Instagram followers? Maybe it's because I want more sales. Well, why do you want more sales? Because I want to be more secure and the money that's coming in my business. Well, why do you want to be more secure with the money that's coming in your business? Because I want to live a life on my own terms, and I want to impact as many people as possible. So think about what your audience really, really wants, the big picture wants, there's a technique called the Five Whys which I just kind of played out. You ask yourself, well, why does my audience want a tutor for their child, then give the answer. And then ask yourself, why again, and ask yourself, why five more times to really, really get to that base reason. Because then you're going to know the emotional motivator behind someone following your account and or buying from you. And ideally, you have three of those big why's in your brain with your audience, and you're addressing one of them, at minimum in everything that you post.
Phil
I've seen coaches do this exercise when they ask this “why five times”, but it just occurred to me that this is something you can do for yourself, you can do this yourself, you don't necessarily need a coach to ride for these questions. Or you could actually sit and reflect maybe take out a pen and a paper journal. And just really push further, further, further. Why why why I think it probably takes about five times to really arrive at something where you're like, oh, wow, okay. I knew that. But maybe I never thought of it this way. Good exercise.
Lauren
Totally. So some other techniques for figuring out what your audience wants from you, you can take a more general survey and send it out to your mailing list, that's a really easy way to get some responses. However, I would encourage you to still go directly after those people who won't fall into your audience, because their results might be a little different from someone just filling in a general survey. You can also survey people on Instagram stories with that kind of this or that, yes, or no poll function, and get to know their answers that way. And that could be done to figure out what kind of posts frequency they like, what time of day, they like, what types of posts they enjoy, I think more kind of operational questions.
And the final thing that I would say that you could do is look over past clients or customers and ask them to give you honest feedback on your social media channels, why or why not they don't engage with you. Make sure to tell them that this is a free space, and you genuinely want to hear what you could change to make them become your number one fan on social media, and really listen to what they have to say.
Phil
It is scary to ask. It is scary to ask. But it could be one simple piece of feedback that you learn from them in that. It could even be maybe they say, you know, I engage with this other person's content. And they're kind of similar but not quite the same that maybe you should check out and you didn't know about them. There's so much to learn from your audience, from others. But asking for feedback can be very humbling. It can be scary, I would say chances are you're going to get the feedback you're going to get is more positive than maybe the negative you might be expecting, even if it's one little tidbit of gold that you can take and run with that it's worth that vulnerable moment. That humbling moment of asking for feedback. We've always found that
Lauren
Okay, those are my ideas.
Phil
They're good ideas. Hopefully this episode is helping you understand your audience a little more. We want to hear from you on social media. I'm@philpallen
Lauren
I'm @thelaurenmoore
Phil
#brandtherapy to continue this conversation. Let's continue it. You've taken the time to listen this episode this far, you might as well let us know what you think on social media. Also, as I always say if you have time and energy we will do love if you could leave a review in the iTunes Store five star five star that helps other people discover this podcast that we work hard to create for you. You know how this works. We'll be back next week with a wonderful guest that's going to teach you lots. Until then, thanks for hanging out with us on Brand Therapy.
Lauren
Bye bye