PLAN your Marketing Messages

For your messages to resonate with your audience, you need to PLAN them first.  This is an acronym for:

• Understanding their Problems
• Using their Language
• Finding the Anecdotes or stories they really relate to
• Knowing their Needs -- or more importantly their wants.

And then, giving them the right message at the right time in their journey with you.  I'll consider that in a separate blog post.

Problems

What is the biggest Problem your ideal customer experiences with respect to your topic or area of expertise?  One of the best ways to find this out is to ASK.

Best done 121. Next best by survey. Here are a few good questions to ask:

• What frustrates you most about [your topic]?
• How long have you had it?
• What's that costing you now? Not just in terms of money, but time, effort, emotional or physical wellbeing
• What have you done about it?

Then, importantly, explore their aspirations with a question like:

• If you had a magic wand and could change anything [related to your topic and their pain/problem], what would it be?

Language

Make a careful note of the language they are using.  Their complaints, their dreams, their words.

What questions are they asking? What exactly are they looking for? You can find those questions in the forums and the FAQs on those influencer sites you've identified.

Your target audience also have complaints.  The best way to find these is through a forum search or Amazon reviews of the products you've identified.

And finally, keywords.  A great place for this, apart from the forums you've identified, is the free site answerthepublic.com. Here, you'll get a full list of all the long keywords people are actually using to find what they want and need.

Anecdotes

Those short, interesting stories that can have a massive impact on your audience.  Find true stories.

The best place is in person.  Capture these stories as accurately as you can.  They are pure gold.

The next best place is to throw the net wider and do yet another forum search. Or listen to podcast interviews.  They often contain amazing stories.

Needs

From your research thus far, you will have identified both needs and wants.  In the stories, in their complaints, they are looking for a solution.

What is it?

Find it and then sell them what they want, and give them what they need.