Today’s lesson is about why so many businesses fail with their first list-building efforts, why it happends, and how to avoid this trap.
There’s a right way to do this in 5 steps, but bear with me, because there’s a piece missing that a lot of people miss.
Here’s the standard advice:
- Choose your ideal customer
- Get in front of an audience
- Design your offer
- Lead your audience through a conversion mechanism (sales letter, webinar, call, whatever)
- Deliver the product / service
But here’s the problem. Most businesses fall over between steps one and two, like this:
They start out with an idea of the customer they want to attract, but then the very next step isn’t towards that customer.
Their ideal customer is one with money and momentum.
But their first steps are building an audience of beginners, making offers to solve beginner problems, converting sales using methods that appeal to beginners, and delivering beginner services.
Why does this happen?
The lure of top of funnel metrics is just too strong for most people to resist.
- There’s more people in the crowd than in the arena.
- There’s more beginners than winners.
- There’s more wantrepeneurs than entrepreneurs.
Now, you can go after this bigger beginners market if you want to, but you’ll probably end up hating your life. You’ll spend all your time repeatedly solving the most basic of problems, and a massive portion of your audience won’t take action at all.
That’s why they’re still at the beginner phase. They’ll never start.
Or you can go for a more sophisticated audience, one that has real expertise in one area, but needs your help somewhere where they’re weak.
It really doesn’t matter which path you take, that’s just down to who you most want to spend your time working with.
Just be deliberate about lining up the steps.
Finding the beginners steps is easy, they’re the same for everyone, but finding the stumbling blocks for more mature audiences is harder. You need to do a significant amount of extra research and yes, actually talk to people once in a while so you understand the issues they have.
Often these won’t be the ones they talk about in public, so you need a way to get them into a safe space where they can be honest about their problems.
For example, I pick up a lot of work from people who have tried to automate their marketing and ended up in a spaghetti of email series, zapier automations, and horrible plugins.
Few of them admit it in public and a lot will blame the technology rather than their own failure. But for the ones I can help fix, it unlocks massive growth potential and I can share in that growth.
So, if you’re looking foranyone except beginners, who are you trying to target, and what are you talking to that audience about?
