Branding Byte #008

Let’s be clear about one thing: if you don’t understand the awareness level of your ideal client, you won’t sell sh*t. I said what I had to say, but don’t worry. In today’s newsletter, I’ll cover in 3 steps how you can properly understand your audience and how you can attract them.

For service-based companies or product-based ones, the process is quite the same:

1. Identify the pain point you're trying to solve.

2. Highlight the benefits people get with your solution.

3. Build a story in which you’re the Guide, and your clients are the Heroes.

4. Design a content strategy that delivers on the 3 previous elements.

A straightforward 4-step framework? Yes.

Unfortunately, most fail at it because they’re too self-centered, either on themselves or their product.

You don’t know how to design your persona

Your persona is the person you want to onboard in your journey. The one that can’t let your product/service down because they’ll be worse off without it.

Here are other reasons most fail at building the right persona:

1. You’re feature-focused.

2. You didn’t study your competitors.

3. You didn’t build the Story Brand for your company.

4. You didn’t take the time to exchange with the Ideal client.

No worries, I went through that phase for the last 8 months, and I took the last 2 weeks to build a seamless framework everyone can use.

Here's how to step by step:

Step 1: Uncover your Ideal Client decision process

If you don’t put yourself in the same condition your audience is going through on a daily basis, how do you intend to uncover the path that leads to the purchase decision?

So here are 5 steps you need to follow:

1/ Create detailed personas

• For each of your hypotheses, have a profile.

• Classify them based on demographics, psychographics, and behavioral traits.

• Map out their needs, consumption preferences, and motivations.

2/ Identify pain points and series:

• Identify what competitors are doing.

• Match their solutions with a specific pain point.

• Match that pain point with a specific desire.

• Match that with one of your previous personas.

This point is super essential as it will give you elements of differentiation. Once you have them, put them forward – that’s your unique value proposition.

3/ Define the stages of their journey:

• Each of your clients is at a different stage in their journey.

• Build different actions your IC needs to do at each stage.

• Trigger interest and convert into the next stage.

• Build lead magnets that provide free value.

• Use those as ‘foot in the door’ opportunities.

4/ Align content with journey stages:

• Content = eternal copy on the net.

• Every new follower is at a different stage.

• Those pieces of content will resonate with different people.

• Resonate = convert, until they become a client.

Make sure it’s easy for new followers to understand how your brand can help them transform their current state into the desired one.

5/ Measure and assess:

• Some content will drive more engagement.

• But also flag for you those that are at which stage.

• Analyze your posts and assets most people are at which stage.

See points 4 and 5? I know they can be challenging so let’s get straight to the next step.

Step 2: Analyze content preferences

Your audience's content consumption habits will influence the platforms you decide to use to share your content and the format of the content you'll create.

That's exactly why it should be the first step in your creation process.

Here’s what you can do:

1/ Monitor IC’s online activity: 

• Use tools like BuzzSumo or Mention to gather insights on what trends work.

• Research by keywords that fit your positioning.

2/ Analyze competitor’s content: 

• Identify which platforms they're getting the most engagement on and follow the lead.

• Bonus: Match your competitor’s audience awareness with yours. If the audiences are similar, then you can base your decision on that.

3/ Test different formats: 

• You can't guess what works with perfect accuracy, so test.

• Build content hypotheses and iterate (Blog posts, Lists, customer feedback…)

4/ Optimize and refine:

• Get insights gathered from your audience and the platforms they frequent (you can use Quora and Reddit), and based on those, double down on what resonates with your audience.

You won't be able to align your content strategy with the decision stage your customer is in if you don't understand their preferences and get the right feedback.

Now that you got the right process to frame your content, you need one last key element:

Keep a full funnel of potential clients that will feed each of your customer journey stages.

Step 3: Encourage engagement

You can craft the best content and strategy, but if you fail to get:

• Reach

• Virality

• Feedback

• Interaction

It’ll be hard for you to build an audience that could purchase from your brand.

How to solve that? Here’s how I did:

• Personalize my branding

• Comment on creators from my niche

• Ask in DMs what my IC struggles with

• I respond to 95% of my post comments

• Ask open-ended questions in your posts

Be close to your audience and be reachable. People will engage with you, and that is the quickest way to get feedback and an important audience.

When your offer is clear to people who read your content, you can ask them to follow, and they will.

Building the right content strategy for the right audience is the faster 'shortcut' to building a brand.

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I really hope this can help, do not hesitate to reach out if you need help with your LinkedIn content strategy.

If you found that useful, don't hesitate to follow me on Linkedin, I help 2500+ people daily get their LinkedIn strategy right.

Till next week for a new Branding Byte!