Audience Teardown
Rules
- Excruciating Pain
People must just not want what it is that you sell, but they must desperately need what you’re offering. The pain or frustration they feel about their business or life will either keep them awake at night or it’s the first thing they think about in the morning. Their degree of pain will determine 1. urgency to buy, and 2. the price that you’ll be able to charge. “On a scale of 1 to 10, how painful is it?” and if it’s a 1, how does that impact their decision to buy? - Purchasing Power
Your audience needs to be able to afford your expertise & skills. Make sure your audience has the money or the access to the money to buy your expertise at the prices you require to make it worth your time. It doesn’t matter how good you are, doesn’t matter how experienced, it doesn’t matter how transformative your product or your offer or your service is going to be if the person doesn’t have the money to invest. - Easy To Target And Engage With
You need to be able to very easily locate and identify where your winning market is hanging out and easily be able to reach out to them and start a conversation. If it ends up being like trying to find needles in a haystack, how are we going to get enough people to see our offer? - Growing Demographic
Simply put, growing markets are like a tailwind, things happen easier and quicker. And, the opposite is for a shrinking market, which means the potential for you to build momentum is less and less likely every single day. And this is also going to be directly connected to purchasing power because industries where there is a lot of purchasing power generally grow and are growing, where the opposite is true for shrinking markets. - Riches in Niches
The key to high converting messaging and sales comes down to knowing exactly who the offer is for, so that you know exactly who you are speaking to at all times, so that you’re talking about exactly the problems that they’re looking to fix. Your number one objective when it comes to developing and defining your market niche is getting it to the point where your customers and potential prospects and clients are saying, “Hell yes, this is for me, I need this, take my credit card, what do I need to sign up” (And they also wonder if you’ve somehow hacked their inner thoughts…). If you don’t get people saying this, then you’re not developing a sharp enough message that’ll resonate in the open marketplace. - Market Awareness
Based on who your niche market is, their current situation, and the dream outcome and the tangible results that they want to move towards, will dictate the level of awareness they have and how you should be messaging who you are and what you do to help them.
Cross off unaware, if you’re trying to convince somebody that they have a specific problem, you’re flogging a dead horse, because people only spend money on problems that they are aware of.
Cross out people who are most aware and product aware, because these are people that have figured out most of the equation themselves. They know what the missing pieces are. They’ve got the majority of the pieces to the puzzle to solve things themselves and they’re only really looking for a designer to come in and play the role of providing a design deliverable. These are the situations where your value is absolutely restricted.
Where you want to be focusing on targeting a market is around people who are solution aware and problem aware. These are the people that only know that they’ve got the problem and only know either very little or nearly nothing about how to actually solve the problem. If you ask yourself who your best clients and customers have been in the past, you will find that most of them fit into these categories, because it’s not only the design services that they valued from you, but it was the guidance based on the fact that they’re not aware of how to move towards their overall outcome. - Why We Can’t Talk About Design
And this becomes the fundamental reason that we should never be talking about design at a business positioning level. This is because of the fact that they aren’t sophisticated enough to know that design is part of the answer yet. These are the people that only can identify the opportunity at a problem level. You have to understand the design is a language, just like any foreign language, It’s only understood by a group who speak it themselves. For your most effective positioning, your best customers and clients need more to hear about the problem that you can solve, and the result that you can get than the type of design skills that you can provide. - The Transformation
What you need to be speaking about is the transformation because this is the thing that people associate with and the reason money exchanges hands. - The Three Main Markets
So when it comes to you defining what your transformation is that you help your niche target market with, you really need to think about which market out of these three it applies to, because at the end of the day, people only invest in things to satisfy these three key areas.
- Health (Things around our body and wellbeing)
- Wealth (generating funds, more sales & hitting revenue goals)
- Relationships (anything to do with our connection with others)
People buy things because of the transformation, not the vehicle that gets them there. Position yourself as the painkiller. We are the person who understands the pain and knows how to remove it.
