One Deadly Marketing Mistake Most Practitioners Make

While I am not a great believer in the one size fits all system when it comes to marketing your business - I am a firm believer in certain core marketing tools that are simple, down to earth, common sense and work!

One of those is language.

If we are not speaking the same language as our ideal client (knowing who your ideal client is a must as I shared in my last article “The Power of Choosing a Niche”), we have very little chance of them coming and working with us.

Here’s a prime example of a big hearted service professional who loves her work and just wants to help people, but is not getting the clients because she is not speaking their language.

How not to do it

Jenny is a life coach who loves to work with teachers who are stressed to the eyeballs. She knows she can help them find the peace of mind they are looking for while still managing their workload.

So Jenny has a website.

And Jenny’s best friend, Laura, has recommended that her sister, a stressed out teacher, visits Jenny’s website to find out more about what Jenny does.

So Laura’s sister lands on Jenny’s homepage and sees this:

“Life Coaching to help you with everyday life!”

Hmmm……so far she is confused – what’s Life Coaching?

Next she reads……

“My name is Jenny and I am really passionate about helping people achieve their most desired goals, identify their hidden limiting beliefs and changing them into a positive so that they can live their best life ever. I know this works because I have done it myself!”

Now Laura’s sister is really confused! But because this is a recommendation she decides to give Jenny the benefit of the doubt and read a bit more. If it hadn’t been a recommendation she would have been out of there!
So next she reads………

“Life Coaching is a means to facilitate people to become in line with their values, beliefs and goals”

Well at least she knows what Life Coaching is now!

“I never tell anyone what to do; my style of coaching is to ask powerful questions and allow my client to find their own answers. It is amazing what can come up in a session – one time I had someone realize that they didn’t want to stay in the teaching profession and she quit her job that very same day!”

Laura’s sister leaves the page. This is not what she is looking for – she wants to find a way to manage her stress, not leave her job!

This is a perfect example of not speaking your ideal client’s language.

Jenny, our life coach, has really good intentions and really wants to help her clients, she is even speaking about teachers, but she has not got the right language. She hasn’t communicated in the language of her ideal client, using words she can relate to and understand.

Laura’s sister wanted to feel that Jenny understood her needs, her struggles and her desires and she needed to hear it in her own language, her own words, as if Jenny had somehow been reading her thoughts. That way she could identify herself in the words, and say “Wow! Jenny really gets me! She is speaking about me!“

That is the power of using the right words when communicating with our ideal clients.

They recognize themselves – it’s like having a magnet that attracts them to us. It is so clear to them that we know who they are and now we have connected. And that means we don’t have to convince them of anything.

This is all part of building the marketing bridge, meeting people where they are. If we don’t meet people where they are and speak using words they can understand, we might as well be speaking a foreign language.

It would be like me going out to my local shop (I live in Spain) and speaking in German asking for a tin of tomatoes and expecting them to say yes, there you are! It’s just not going to happen. I have to learn to speak Spanish – their language – and ask for the tin of tomatoes – that way I get what I want!

In actual fact, what happens here on the Costa Blanca, is that the shopkeepers who are “switched on” and want to make more money and be of service, learn to speak the language of their clients – English, French, Dutch or German – and meet their clients where they are! It’s really simple!

Simple and yet so overlooked.

I see it all the time. So many small businesses leave money on the table or send it to the next business because they don’t take the time to get to know their ideal clients and speak their language.

And so back to you and your business.

Are you leaving money on the table or sending it to the next practitioner because you haven’t taken the time to get to know your ideal clients?

Are you speaking their language?

If you have a flow of ideal clients, then the answer is yes, congratulations!

And if your flow is non-existent, or blocked, then my guess is that you are not speaking their language and it’s time to do some research.

Please hop on over to my blog and let me know if you agree, disagree, have an experience of any of this; I would love to hear from you.