Episode 17: How to Get Clients Online: Part 2

Episode 17: How to Get Clients Online: Part 2

The #1 question that online service professionals are asking right now is “How do I find my ideal clients online?” In Part 2 of this 3-part series, Pamela walks you through the critical connection steps of online client attraction.

You’ll discover:

• 3 important decisions you need to make to streamline your online client attraction
• How to spend 2 hours and save yourself weeks of effort online
• The subtle writing technique that makes your message more compelling

Timecode Guide:

02:41: Pamela explains the three important decisions you need to make when you streamline your client attraction.
04:34: Discover how to properly message so you engage your ideal clients.
13:17: Learn how to create your Marketing Complete Sheet.

Podcast Transcription

Episode 17: How to Get Clients Online: Part 2

Streamlining Your Client Attraction

Intro (00:00):
You’re listening to ‘A Profitable Impact.’

Pamela (00:02):
When you’re thinking about what, or how do I post online to get the attention of my ideal clients? There are three really important decisions you need to make to streamline all of your efforts.

Gene (00:13):
Welcome to ‘A Profitable Impact,’ where every single week we help experts like coaches, healers, course creators and other online professionals to expand their reach, increase their impact in the world and to be well-paid for their extraordinary skills and talents. My name is Gene Monterastelli, and I am the lead coach in Pamela Bruner’s Impact Accelerator coaching program. And now I’d like to welcome my friend, my colleague, and the CEO of Attract Clients Online, Pamela Bruner. How are you doing, Pamela?

Pamela (00:43):
I’m great. And I’m so excited that we’re moving into the second part of this three-part series, because it’s probably the number one question that I get asked. And I think that we get asked, which is how do I find my ideal clients online?

Gene (00:58):
If you are just joining us in this three-part series, after you listen to this particular episode, make sure you go back and check out episode number one, as the concepts in this three-part series work together in a really natural way. And as you’re listening to the series, if you’re in a situation where the concepts and the information that we’re sharing with you is something that’s really useful for you, but you’re struggling with the implementation in your own business, we would love for you to have a conversation with one of our coaches, absolutely free. All you need to do is go to BookMyBreakthroughCall.com. That’s BookMyBreakthroughCall.com. And you can get on the calendar of one of our coaches who will help you to become more skilled and execute the stuff that we’re talking about today, so that you can find more of the perfect client online.

Pamela (01:43):
In the first episode of this series, we talked about identifying your ideal client, identifying who you want to find, because it makes it easier for you to find them. Once they’re identified today, we’re going to talk about the connection step of online client attraction. And I want to share what I feel are the three important decisions you need to make when you streamline your client attraction, and this makes life easier so that you’re not spreading yourself too thin online. Then we’ll talk about how to spend two hours and save yourself weeks of effort online by creating a simple document that makes your marketing just that much easier. And also there’s a subtle writing technique that a lot of people get confused about, that makes a message more or less compelling online, and we’ll talk about that subtle writing technique.

Gene (02:33):
So, you just teased that there are some important decisions that we need to be making in order to do that. So, what are those three important decisions?

Pamela (02:41):
Because there are so many different social platforms right now. Partly people get very confused initially with platform. Should I be sharing on Facebook? Should I be sharing on Instagram? Should I be sharing on LinkedIn? What’s the right platform for me. And I believe that the first thing that you need to do is not so much decide the platform, although that is a critical decision, but to look at what is the message that I am sharing once you know who your ideal client is, partly the platform question will be handled, but the message is the most important thing. If you get the message, right, then you can share a message on multiple platforms. The second thing to distinguish is the format that you prefer, sharing your message in. So for example, we are currently in an audio format called a podcast. Um, I also really like the format of video, particularly Facebook lives, because I think that video is a great way to connect with people.

Pamela (03:39):
Not everybody likes video, not everybody feels like video is the appropriate format for their message. You might be more of a writer and just love writing articles and writing posts and writing nuggets and things like that that attract your ideal client. So what format do you love when you look at how you want to express yourself in the world? And then the third decision to make is about platform. And we can go into more about that, but message format and platform, all impact how much you do and where you do it. If you try to do too many messages, if you try to do too many formats, and if you try to do too many platforms, you can see that you would spread yourself and your work too thin. You’re probably working too hard and not making enough of an impact.

Messaging to Engage Your Ideal Clients

Gene (04:28):
The question for you as you go through that, what exactly do you mean by message in this particular?

Pamela (04:34):
I love that question and we can take that question and spin it into a very particular action you can take to help you move forward. So by message. I mean, what is the information that is most useful to my ideal client? Or as we were talking about the other day, my avatar, but let’s just for now call that person the ideal client. And we tend to want to share messages that are about the transformation that we provide or about the outcome. I’m going to suggest that one of the most important things to do is share messages about the pain points or the struggles. For example, we’re in the middle of a podcast broadcast right now for three episodes of how to get clients online, that directly addresses a pain point. In fact, perhaps one of the biggest pain points of our ideal clients. So in thinking about message, yes, you know, I have content to share. We have tips too to share, but this message is built around a pain point. This message is built around. What is the challenge that people talk about?

Gene (05:37):
I think one of the things that’s important to recognize when we’re thinking in terms of the challenge and the pain point that people have, this is one of those moments when we’re doing the messaging, that it’s really important that we’re making a distinction between what people want and what people need. Oftentimes as providers, practitioners, transformational entrepreneurs, we understand on a very deep level what the actual real problem is and the work that we do responds to the actual real problem. But there are lots of circumstances in which a client, our audience, our avatar doesn’t know what the underlying issue is. They only know what the symptoms are and what the pain is that they are experiencing as they are going through that. And so, as we are speaking into these pain points, it’s important that we’re speaking into how they define their problem at this moment. Not what we know the actual problem might be.

Pamela (06:35):
That’s such a great distinction. So, when we talk about message and I’m using a term that is pretty general, what is the message that you want to share? It’s more a combination of what are the pain points that your ideal clients are coming with? What is the actual problem, as you said, what is the actual problem that’s occurring? And how can I give useful information about what the actual problem is? Even in this series, we’re looking at, how do you get your clients online? And we’re sharing three particular aspects of the problem that goes along with the symptom or the pain point called, I need to get clients online. How do I do that? So now that we’ve got a message, or now that you’re looking at what is the pain that my ideal client experiences, what do I know about that pain? What do I know the actual problem is?

Pamela (07:23):
And what do I have to offer? That’s useful for that. Now we can talk about crafting something that we have all of our clients craft, which is called a marketing complete sheet. A marketing complete sheet is a sheet that you can use as a guide for your marketing that you create. But the nice thing is you create this once and it will take you an hour or two hours or something like that to sit down and do this. But then it is a sheet that you can return to over and over again, to pull marketing language, to craft your posts and your emails and your articles and your videos and all of that. So let’s talk a little bit Jeanne about how to craft a marketing complete sheet, and maybe start with a distinction between problem pain, emotion. Yeah.

Gene (08:06):
Yeah. So, the difference between the problem, the pain and the emotion is the problem is the thing that is going wrong. The pain is how it impacts me. And the emotion is how I feel about that particular thing impacting me. So for example, my problem might be, I’m not sleeping very well. The pain is I wake up groggy in the morning. The negative emotion is really frustrated by the fact that when I sit down to work, I can’t focus and I can’t get my work done, which means I’m falling farther and farther behind. And the reason why we make the distinction between problem pain and negative emotion is that our buying decisions are emotional buying decisions that we then justify intellectually. And when we’re able to touch and tune into the emotion, someone is feeling about something. When we say, you know, when you’re experiencing this and you feel really frustrated because you’re falling behind our target market goes, Oh my gosh, she gets me.

Gene (09:08):
He knows exactly what my experience is because the pain is something, their experience, the emotion is the thing that they are living in. And it helps us to create a deeper connection and demonstrating that we are helping that we understand where they’re coming from. In some times we might have a target market that knows something is wrong. And when we start to describe it in these very specific emotional words, they’re like, yes, that’s exactly what I’m feeling. And if we’re able to help them to define their experience by giving it vocabulary immediately, not only are we making a connection with them, we’re seen as an expert because we’re helping them to understand their life in a more specific way.

Pamela (09:48):
You know, it’s a common misunderstanding between people that an emotional response is always a normal, emotional response to a situation. So when I say, well, this thing made me angry, another person might say, well, that happened. Yes, but why are you angry at that? We assume that our emotional response is the emotional response everyone else will have when we’re talking about transformation, or we’re talking about a struggle that transformational services can help overcome. Often the emotional response is not the same. Like we think, Oh, if you’re not sleeping, then of course you understand all of the pain and all of the emotion that goes without one simple sentence, if you’re if you’re not sleeping well, but the truth is that people have different emotional reactions to that situation. And talking about those emotional reactions, reaches people on a very deep level.

Gene (10:45):
The other thing that happens. You mentioned that Pamela, that people have different experiences that oftentimes when we’re creating our messaging, we feel like every single word that I say needs to resonate with my audience. And the reality is is that when people are communicating with us, the stuff that resonates with us lands and the stuff that doesn’t resonate with us, we don’t go, Oh, gene doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Instead, what happens is it just passes by them as white noise. And so I could say that this situation might make you feel angry, sad, and overwhelmed. And the person who is sad goes, yeah, it really does make me sad. And they don’t think, Oh, he mentioned two other emotions that aren’t me because we hear the part that resonates with us. And so that is one of the reasons why it’s important to have something like a marketing complete sheet with lots of examples and lots of different details about how our target market is experiencing stuff so that when we’re creating our messaging, it’s so easy to leverage all of those different pieces and insert them into whatever we’re communicating.

Pamela (11:47):
I want to put a distinction and a caveat on that though, because especially when I’m dealing coaches or healers, I know that they’ll say something well, I can help someone with so many different things. They may say I can help someone lose weight and I can help someone with their relationships. And I can help someone with their money and their business problems and with their fear of failure. And all of those might be problems. They’re not pains, they’re not emotions. They’re all different problems that people might have. And you might know that at the core, there is some core problem that you can explain. Their energy is out of alignment. They’ve got low self esteem, whatever it is, there is some underlying tie between those two while different emotions will wash over someone and they will pick out the one that resonates with them. Different problems will not. If you say, if you’re struggling with your weight and you’re struggling with your relationships and you’re struggling with your business, and you’re struggling with your feeling connected or something like that, and you list all of those different problems, you will come across as confused because most people who are not in the transformational world, don’t see the relationship between those. They consider that a person may struggle in one of those areas, but probably not in others.

Gene (13:04):
I really love that distinction that we want to be speaking to a specific problem. And then speaking to the emotional variety of responses to that particular problem, because then we’re able to communicate in a sharp manner.

[Activity] Distinction of Problem, Pain, and Emotion

Pamela (13:17):
And that’s why it’s important. So important to niche down what you’re doing into a particular result. And that’s part of the distinction of message. When we talk about message, format, platform, the message is around a particular problem and then the pain and the emotion expand on that problem. So another example that we’ve used in the past that I really liked Gene to bring home this distinction of problem, pain, and emotion, because I know when we work with clients, sometimes they’re confused between the three. The problem is very factual. It might be like I sprained my leg. The pain is my leg hurts. The emotion is, I feel like my body has betrayed me. And that’s just another example of the distinction between problem pain, emotion. So as you are writing down assuming that you take on this challenge of creating your marketing complete sheet, as you’re writing down the problems that you help people solve, you can delve into the pain and emotion behind them.

Gene (14:10):
And I want to stick a pin in taking on the challenge in writing this down, because it is really easy for us to think like, Oh, I understand my market. I’ve gone through this particular activity before for me, my marketing complete sheet is my bowl of Legos. Whenever I am creating anything, be it something as short as a Facebook post, something as long as a week-long program, that it is easy for me to forget the vocabulary because I live inside of this stuff all the time. And I need to re remind myself of it so that I’m using the best sharpest vocabulary when I’m communicating, even though my target market basically hasn’t changed in the last seven years in my private practice, before every single strategy session that I have with a potential client, I take three minutes and I reread my marketing complete sheet.

Gene (14:59):
So that, those words, those vocabulary, those things that we have worked at over time to be sharpened, our communicating is back at the front of my mind so that I don’t get casual. I don’t skip over something. And I’m fully present to that vocabulary because it’s easy for me sometimes to be disconnected from the Tran the pre transformational state, because I’m on the other side of it. And so not only is it a good thing for us in communicating, it also becomes a tool that helps us to ground where our target market is so that we’re always communicating more effectively in their vocabulary.

Pamela (15:37):
So take on that challenge, sit down and write down the problems that you know, that your clients experience and see if you can generate from that a list of pains and list of emotions that they experience as well. And I promise you, it will juice up your writing. It will juice up your speaking and your communication online. And it’s going to make you far more attractive to your ideal clients. Now let’s talk about what I call the subtle writing technique that makes your message more compelling. As I was working with someone the other day in writing an elevator speech, they were giving me very good questions. Like, do you struggle with this? And do you struggle with that? And I said, those actually aren’t appropriate for an elevator speech. They’re what I call poll questions. They pull you in. So you may see those kinds of questions on a website.

Pamela (16:30):
For example, when we teach one-page website templates in our coaching program, and often they start with full questions like that, do you struggle with this? Do you struggle with that? Are you challenged with that second person? It is speaking to you and the word you was in there. Instead speaking in third person saying something like I help experts, coaches, healers, and service professionals who blah, blah, blah. That’s speaking in. Well, first-person because I’m saying I, but I’m speaking in third person about my clients and writing in second person versus writing in third person feels totally different. One of the reasons that this differentiation has come up is because I run a Facebook ad agency as well, because we were in Facebook ads, Facebook doesn’t like you language for the most part. Do you struggle with this? Facebook sees that as, as targeting. They fear that it will give readers on Facebook a negative experience.

Pamela (17:34):
And so they’re much more likely to be friendly to third person language. So a Facebook ad might say, instead, you know, it’s very common for coaches and healers to XYZ. We’re not saying you’re a coach or healer. We’re not saying you’re an expert. We’re saying it’s common for people to do this. That’s third person language. So as you write your message, you want to give some thought to do I want to write in second person, or do I want to write in third person, if you are writing a blog, or if you were speaking a video, second person may be very appropriate for you. You may be addressing the camera as though you’re talking to one person. You’re saying you, you, you, but if you are writing something that might be advertising or paid media on a lot of these platforms, you’re going to want to use third person language and you’ll notice it feels very different.

Pamela (18:23):
Second person language also is something you usually don’t want to do on first meeting someone that you don’t know. Well, think about that for an elevator speech. If you’re delivering an elevator speech to someone or to, you know, even a small group and you know, some day we will network in small groups, um, offline again, if you’re in a group of three or four people, do you struggle with these? Do you struggle with that? It feels very confrontational rather than saying, I help people like this who struggled with these situations to get these results. That’s much less aggressive sounding

Gene (18:59):
Pamela. I actually really appreciate that. Um, I had never thought of the distinction between second and third person in that particular way. And for me, I have always found myself erring on the side of speaking in that second person, because I’m a very personal person. Am I like connecting in that way? And I think you’ve shown some really good light on recognizing that there’s appropriateness and context for both of those things. And by giving a little thought, it makes a great deal of sense of how we can do it in a way that is more natural. And it’s going to make us communicate in a clear,

Pamela (19:31):
And if you’re questioning, which should I work at right in the second person, should I write in third person, I would default to third person as the safer option, unless you know, that you can write in second person and write well without sounding preachy, I would consider third person as a way of distributing the information and letting people pick it up rather than feeling like you’re being pushy with it. But it’s going to depend on your brand and coming back to ultimately your message.

Gene (20:00):
So I really hope you enjoyed this conversation today. If you are in a situation where you recognize the value of having a really clear message, understanding format and which platform you should be on, but you’re struggling to figure out what exactly that is for you and your business. We would love for you to have a conversation with one of our coaches so they can help you navigate those three areas. So you’re communicating in an effective way in the right platform to the right people, to have one of those conversations, you can do it absolutely free. All you need to do is go to BookMyBreakthroughCall.com. That’s BookMyBreakthroughCall.com. You can get on the calendar of one of our coaches and they will help you to navigate those three important decisions. As you are marketing and sharing your message with the world.

Gene (20:43):
If you enjoyed the conversation today, and you know, another transformational entrepreneur business owner who could really benefit from this particular conversation, please pass the podcast along. It might make the difference that they need today in order for them to be clear communicators so they can grow their business as well. If you haven’t done so already, please subscribe to the podcast. Subscribing to a podcast is always free. You can subscribe to the show by searching for A Profitable Iimpact. You can do it in Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Music, Audible, basically everywhere you get audio. All you need to do is search a profitable impact, click subscribe, click follow, turn on the notifications so that when a new episode comes out, you are notified right away. If you have a question, a comment, or a topic that you’d like Pamela and I to talk about on a future episode, we would love to hear from you. All you need to do is go to AttractClientsOnline.com, click on that contact link, send a note and put in the subject or in there somewhere question for the podcast. We’d love to hear from you. For ‘A Profitable Impact,’ I’m Gene Monterastelli, and until next time, I hope you have an impactful week.

Want to know more about how to attract your ideal clients online?

Check out my blog post, “3 Ways to Attract High-Paying Clients Online” to learn more about how to find high paying clients today. I know that #1 will probably surprise you!

ABOUT THE PODCAST

Building a business as a coach or expert is challenging, especially if you’re trying to find your clients online.

Join business coach and online marketing expert Pamela Bruner as she uncovers the secrets of successful transformational businesses. If you want to make a difference in people’s lives, expand your reach, and attract high-paying clients, you’ll love this show!