Whether you’re developing a product, defining your promotion or designing a Website, you’re going to be guided by your experience. If you’re a raw foods coach, for example, you’ll look to how you went raw, what obstacles you faced, how you succeeded, what you’d want to see from a coach and so forth.

Your experience is a great starting point. But it could lead you and your business down a dead end.

If Your Clients Were You, They’d Already Have Changed!

I’ve spoken for many years at animal protection events, such as the Taking Action for Animals conference. Many of the participants are vegetarian or vegan advocates. They’re enthusiastic about the lifestyle and about helping animals. And given their time as vegetarians or vegans, they see eating this way as easy and natural. But they forget that the people they’re trying to reach may not see veg eating as easy or natural. So they don’t address people’s concerns and their outreach has less impact.

One of the real strengths of raw foods outreach is the number of chefs, coaches and others providing recipes, classes and more to make the lifestyle doeable. But do you really remember what it was like to be a newbie? Are the struggles still fresh enough in your mind? If you’re a life coach or natural healer, are you able to think from the perspective of your prospective clients?

Continue reading You are Not Your Target Audience

Beatrice Johnston of Raw Pathways spoke with me this week as part of her series of interviews for Vegetarian Awareness month.

Check out the interview on my vegetarian / raw path, not only to learn a little more about me, but also to get ideas for your own business. You’ll find out:

• Where I was when I began to go veg and what animal played a key role… then think about whether you have a fun story that’s engaging your potential clients.
• What was the big mistake I made trying to go raw. Are your clients falling into the same trap?
• Which action Beatrice took after the interview. Is it something that would help you or your clients save time and enjoy food more?

Making Inspired Choices for Your Blog

This interview series was an inspired choice for Beatrice and I hope it will spark some creative ideas for your blog. It’s a great fit because Raw Pathways reaches out to people wherever they are on the dietary spectrum and encourages them to move forward with more healthy choices. By presenting a series of interviews, she showed that veg eaters are in a variety of places and got where they are in different ways. The series reflects her philosophy and approach that there’s not one “right” answer.

Bringing in other voices makes Beatrice’s message on the benefits of healthy eating more compelling, because it provides additional validation from others who’ve enjoyed the results. For anyone who may think veg or raw is difficult for all but experienced pros like Beatrice, the different speakers show that lots of people make these changes and that they do it in ways that work for them.

So what can you make work for your business from this example?

1. Consider how your blog content reflects what’s special about your business. Is your “Popular Plus” or point of distinction coming through… or does your blog read just like many others?
2. Can you bring in other voices to reinforce what you’re doing? Are there interviews and articles that would support your message, but with an additional perspective that would help people?
3. How about interviewing some of your clients? What a great chance to learn more about how they chose you and what they’ve gotten out of it. You’ll not only discover important ideas for your business but sharing these stories could bring some exciting new clients your way.

And while you’re at my interview at The Raw Routine blog, be sure to check out the site. Beatrice is a design pro and you’ll definitely get some helpful ideas from the great job she’s done.

Thanks to Beatrice for the invitation to be part of this wonderful series. Enjoy the audio and let me know if it inspires new ideas for your blog!

My last post discussed that creating awareness isn’t enough. You want to focus on moving people to action. That post also asked you to think about a recent purchase you’d made, how the business helped you move from awareness to action and what you could learn for your work.

Now let’s push on that more by looking at an offer that’s come your way that didn’t inspire you to act. Think about either a business or personal product or service that you didn’t pursue.

• Was it simply that you weren’t interested?
• Were you interested, but ultimately decided not to pursue it? Why?
• Maybe you actually decided to go for it, but you actually haven’t done it. What happened? Fallout at this stage is more common than you might imagine. It often comes from unanticipated barriers such as a complex or confusing ordering process.

I bet you’ll find you didn’t take action because at some point in the process the barriers were greater than what you perceived as the benefits. Could the business have done something different that would have made the difference?

I hope this example helps you understand more about the decision-making process your clients undergo. And more important, I hope it gives you some ideas of how you can manage your business to help people move from awareness to action.

Because yes, you must make potential clients aware of you. But you also have to help them through every part of the decision-making process in order to get the sale.

Inspired Action
Use the following three-point diagnostic to take a hard look at the customer experience you provide and how it does or does not move people to action.

1. Do your communications feature compelling benefits that interest people in doing business with you?
2. Do you provide enough information for them to feel confident deciding to take the next step?
3. Do you make it easy for people to act? Does your Website provide simple, clear ordering? Do you return phone calls quickly, enthusiastically and professionally?

Set some time aside to do this. Consider evaluating just one point per day, so you can give it some deep thought. You can discover easy-to-implement ideas that will make an amazing difference for your business!

Are your results as inspired as your raw lifestyle? Maybe the problem is with your Website (or lack thereof). You can win a free Website analysis or concept design, each valued at $599. Visit http://tinyurl.com/winrawweb to learn more and enter. (Sorry to my international friends, but this one’s US residents / businesses only due to legal issues).

Are you spending too much time making new prospects aware of you?

That may seem like an odd question. Isn’t getting out there to let people know about you with your blog, Website, Twitter, Facebook, advertising, speaking and so forth crucial for your success?

Of course visibility is important. But hits and retweets aren’t sales. So are you focusing enough on moving people to action? Let’s look at the process and how a three-point diagnostic can help you fine-tune your business for better results.

My recent two-part blog article, Are You Marketing to People Where They Are? (part 1), (part2 ), presented the stages in the decision-making process that people experience when adopting a behavior. They go through the following steps when trying something new, such as changing how they eat, undertaking a new natural health therapy or adopting a more environmentally friendly practice.

The same process applies when people look to do business with you. They move through these stages. Or they don’t. So you want to focus on how you can help as many potential clients as possible get through this process. Because your efforts to make prospects aware of you aren’t much help if you’ll most likely lose them along the way to results.

To see this more clearly, think about a business you’ve recently begun working with such as the provider of a training program, a web host or an insurance company. Or you can consider a product you’ve recently purchased, professionally or personally.

• How did you become aware of this opportunity?
• What interested you in moving forward?
• How did you decide whether to take action or not?
• Now that you have done so, how do you evaluate whether to stick with the business, program or product?

Did you immediately make your purchase as soon as you became aware of the opportunity? Why or why not?

Inspired Action
Think about what the business did to help you move from awareness to action. Then look at your work. What processes and communications to do you have to move people form prospects to repeat clients? Based on the positive experience you had with the other business, see if there are ideas you’d like to implement for your own.

Your Website is a big part of inspiring people to take action with your business! Don’t miss my Teleseminar “3 Must-Do Steps for Websites that Get Results: How to get MORE CLIENTS, achieve MORE IMPACT and earn MORE MONEY with Your Raw-Inspired Business.” There’s still time to register to join us on Tuesday, September 29th at 5 pm. And if you sign-up by noon on September 24th, you can submit YOUR SITE to be considered for a live review on the call (all times US eastern). Go to http://www.tinyurl.com/rawweb to reserve your place on the call.

My last post discussed a young energetic, theater group that missed the mark on target marketing. Their Broadway review with songs from more recent musicals probably didn’t score a hit with an older audience nostalgic for tunes from decades long past.