I’ve just spent 15 minutes trying to work out which song from the Taylor Swift Eras tour Erica wanted to listen to this morning.
She kept repeating a line from it (but it was her 6-year-old version of the line that she’d heard). She tried to describe the outfit Taylor was wearing during the song (but again that wasn’t very clear). And she did the dance moves (again, her 6-year-old version of the dance moves).
15 minutes of frustration later, I finally opened Spotify on my phone, and got her to scroll through the songs…
Turned out she wanted Dua Lipa’s Dance The Night…
Yeah.
So that was fun.
The challenge of understanding your audience in business
I was absolutely convinced that she wanted one particular thing – based on what she was saying (and dancing).
But I was wrong.
I needed to look a little deeper to discover what would actually solve her problem (and give me 5 minutes of peace and quiet!)
Your future clients are doing exactly the same thing.
They’re searching desperately for someone who understands them, who speaks their language, understands their struggles, and takes into account their background, experience, barriers, visions, hopes, and dreams.
But it can be pretty hard to work out what they’re on about sometimes.
Why your client feedback isn’t telling you much
And then, when we launch our new course, service, or product (in response to what we think they want) and we’re not bowled over by a stampede towards the sales page…
Well, it can be a little frustrating.
We read the comments! We chatted with people about their struggles! We looked at the SEO! We turned our testimonials into Canva graphics for goodness sake!
But what people say, isn’t always what they mean.
Which is where all that lovely feedback you’ve already collected comes in. It’s sitting in a folder somewhere being polite at you, when it could be telling you exactly what your audience needs and exactly how they’d describe it themselves.
Three ways to work out what your audience actually means
So, as I bop along to Dua Lipa (it’s a tune, don’t get me wrong!), here are some tips to really finding out what your audience wants:
Ask better questions when you offboard
When people finish your programmes, or you offboard them at the end of an engagement, don’t just ask them how it went. Testimonials that say “You were fab!” are lovely for your ego and useless to future you, sitting down to write a sales page for something new.
Ask why they came looking for you in the first place. Ask what they’d already tried before they found you. Ask what they were worried about before they said yes (that one is worth its weight in gold, because it hands you every objection you’ll ever need to answer). And ask for a specific example of how the work changed something, then push for the detail. What they did differently on a specific occasion, rather than how they felt about it in general.
That’s the bit that turns feedback into research you can write from.
I’ve put the whole process into a free guide: the framing that makes people open up, the questions themselves, and the follow-ups that get them to say more. Squeeze More From Your Social Proof is here. If you’ve got a folder of “she was great” and no idea what to do with it, start there.
Look for patterns
It’s time to get out the murder board. Understanding your audience means looking for those red threads. Pull together all your feedback, and look for patterns. What changes keep coming up? What problems pop up all over the place? What language are they using to describe both of these things? These are golden nuggets that you can use to shape your offers, write your copy, and connect more effectively with your ideal client.
And pay attention to when they said it. Feedback from eighteen months ago was written by someone living in a different economy, with a different set of things keeping them awake at 3 am. If your messaging is still built on what they told you back then, it’s answering a question they’ve stopped asking.
(More on why the story structure you’ve been told to use makes all of this harder than it needs to be.)
Get an outsider’s perspective
Your programme, service, whatever, is your baby. You are inclined to think it’s the most beautiful thing that’s ever existed (when everyone else might think its nose is a little weird). So, when it comes to developing a new thing, grab someone you respect, tell them about your audience, show them that spreadsheet full of feedback, and ask them what they think. I can guarantee they’ll see something you don’t. Or have a perspective that sparks ideas in your brain.
If you’d like me to be the objective baby viewer (weird?), then Get My Brain On Your Business is the quick-hit version. You bring the spreadsheet, I bring another frontal lobe.
Understanding your audience means business growth
Once you’ve gathered all that, it’s time to put it to work.
Use the patterns to refine your offers, and to speak to the problems your audience is actually sitting with. Don’t be afraid to pivot. If you’ve been talking non-stop about self-belief, and it turns out your clients really value the supportive community you’ve built, take a breath and talk about that instead.
When you’re working from what they actually said, you end up with offers that feel tailor-made (because they are).
When to call in the experts
Yes, this all sounds like a lot of work. Because it is.
But we all only have so many hours in the day, and very different skillsets. Which is why some people run the process themselves, and some people bring me in to do it for them.
If you’d rather do it yourself, Squeeze More From Your Social Proof is free and gives you framing, questions, follow-ups, the lot.
If you’d rather notwade through it alone, then here are your options:
- Get My Brain On Your Business ($249) for one specific snag, sorted in an hour.
- The Messaging Reset ($795) for when selling has got harder, and you want to know which bits of your messaging are still working (and which bits your audience has outgrown).
- A Brand Messaging Guide (from $1,350) for the root-and-branch version, where I run the interviews and the research and hand you everything you need to make a success of this business thing.
Or you can just tell me what you’re working on, and I’ll tell you the most useful way I can help.
Tuning into your audience’s real song
Like finally working out which song your 6-year-old wants, understanding your audience takes patience and a willingness to be wrong about what you thought they were asking for.
Most of the people who can tell you have already worked with you. You just need to ask better questions.
Grab Squeeze More From Your Social Proof here. It’s free.
Your audience is singing their song – it’s up to you to learn the lyrics.