Transcript

Hi this is Darla LeDoux of Aligned Entrepreneurs, and welcome to Testing Your Way to Success for Intuitive Entrepreneurs. When I started my business, I really wanted to make sure everything was perfect, like I had it all figured out, right? My offerings, my messaging, what was the real difference I was making for people, what was going to happen in week 1 and week 2 and week 3 when I worked with people? Have you been there?

Yeah, and here’s the thing, is a lot of times that can really hold you up, so there’s some solutions to that. The first is a lot of my clients, they choose to target an audience that is some version of them that they were a few years ago, or 10 years ago or 20 years ago, whatever, or 6 months ago. The reason for that is it’s much easier to figure out what to do with them and how to talk to them when you’ve been one of them because then you just know. Well, this is where I was when that happened, right? It can make crafting your messaging much easier, but sometimes you still need to know a little more specific.

For example, if you’re a weight loss coach, what’s the bigger pain for them? Is is that their clothes are too tight or is it that they hate they way they look in pictures? Which one is more important? Do you want to know? In the world of masculine business and online marketing, the answer would be: Test it. There are plenty of tools out there where you can just really quickly create a couple of opt-in pages, you can A-B test that, you can set up a Facebook ads to run traffic to your pages and see which ones converts better, e

It actually is really nifty, and if you’re like a lot of intuitive entrepreneurs, you maybe just started to glaze over, like, “Oh my God, I have no idea how to do that,” so there are other ways you can test your messaging. It is called actually talking with people. There are two ways to test your messaging. The fist way is you actually talk to people. You go out networking and you practice with that message and see how people respond. There’s two things you want to notice. You want to notice how does it feel for you internally, how aligned does it feel. The more you start to become aware or conscious of how you’re being in the world, the more you can really notice how you feel when words come out of your mouth.

Have you ever noticed yourself say something and you’re like, “Oh God, that was total bullshit?” Right? Yeah, exactly. You have your own internal bullshit meter, so go out there and practice the different messages and notice how you feel internally.

The second thing you can notice is how do they respond. Do they say, “I’d like to hear more about that,” or do they glaze over and look for someone else to talk with? That can be painful if you create that glazed over look but don’t worry. It’s just a test, right? No worries. Let them go on their merry way and try something different the next time

That’s the first way to test, is really talk with people and you can also just call them up and have a conversation and see how they respond as well, but in-person it’s always nice to be able to read their body language, etc.

Okay, great, so the second way to develop your messaging by talking with actual human beings is to pay very close attention to the clients you do have. This only works if you have some clients. I’m a big fan of bringing in your first six clients and studying the heck out of them, noticing how much you love working with them and the ones you really love. Pay a lot of attention to the transformation that they’re creating in their work with you, document it. I’m a fan of putting it on sticky notes and up on the wall so I can really visually see the process clients take with me

When you’re talking with actual clients, write down the words that they actually say. This is your very best research or your very best way to develop marketing copy. I did this, I actually used some language on my website, my last website, that I used for several years that made me over a million dollars, and I brought in over a million dollars with that website live, and here’s where it came from.

Over the course of a week, I was talking with clients, just my regular coaching calls, and I noticed something that they kept saying. I actually had four different conversations with this. Usually it just takes three; I had four, where people said things like, “Oh gosh, I just feel like I’m flip-flopping all over the place.” “I just feel like I’m ping-ponging all over the place, just flopping around here.” They used that kind of language really, really specifically, and I started to think about that and journaled on it, and I came up with this phrase. I called it The Great Entrepreneurial Flip-Flop, and that was what my whole home page was about on my website that worked beautifully for my brand, Align and Profit, the last iteration of my brand that worked for me for three years.

I just want you to know that there is gold in those normal conversations you’re having with your clients, but you’ve got to pay attention. Don’t think that the answer to what you’re supposed to say in your marketing is out there somewhere outside of yourself, waiting for some other expert to give you a fill-in-the-blank formula to figure it out. You have the ability to do your testing by talking with people and by listening to the people you’re already talking with.

Once you get that down and once you’ve got all your systems in place, it is awesome to use that techie stuff to test your different titles, but quite honestly most of the time I skip it because I know that connecting with actual people is my very best test ever.

This is Darla LeDoux with Aligned Entrepreneurs. Go out and have those conversations, and we’ll see you again soon. Bye, everyone.