Your ideal client needs to work with you – you know this because you see how much you can help them in your work. Whether you’re coaching someone through a difficult choice in their life, teaching them how to navigate physical limitations, guiding them to a healthier lifestyle, or something else, you have a deep understanding of how it helps them. That deep understanding fuels why you do this type of work, and often fuels why you continue to do your important work. 

Are you sharing that deep understanding when you talk about your work? How about when you write a blog post or an email to your list? When you create a sales page for your new offer? 

If you’ve answered “No” to any of the above questions, it is time to revisit what you share so it can inspire your ideal clients to reach their goals by working with you. 

From “Meh” to “Yes, That’s Me!”

Copy without details can be so general that it might be the least memorable item your ideal client reads that day. If you’ve found yourself skimming through a website, you’ve experienced this feeling of “meh”. It is the messaging that feels half-hearted or too general, like it is written for everyone so it truly appeals to no one. And we all know that half-hearted, general messages do not inspire a “Yes!”. 

Have you experienced this feeling? Is your copy landing as a “Meh”? What if you could turn your ideal client’s “Meh” into “Yes, that’s me!”? You can and you can start right now by identifying what you know is accurate about them from your experience working with them. 

Your thorough understanding of your ideal clients will guide you to copy that truly speaks to your ideal clients. Based on what you’ve learned from working with them, this can become the solid foundation you’ll use to build your copy, your marketing, your sales pages, your 1:1 pitches, and more. 

Want to dig into the details of what truly matters about your ideal clients? Check out this post that cuts through the unnecessary busy-work of the traditional ideal client avatar (ICA) exercise touted by most marketing gurus. 

All in the Details

Your ideal clients have specific problems that you help them solve. Their problems also show up for them in a specific way including how it feels to them, how it impacts their life, and how it impacts those around them. Whether their problems are small and simple or complex and far-reaching, you know the details of their problems better than anyone because you are the expert on your ideal clients. You work with them as often as you can, after all! 

To get to the details for each area, do your best to put yourself in the mindset of your ideal clients. Then, pinpoint their experience in the time between when they realize they need help and when they’re ready to begin the work with an expert. That is the place you’ll want to truly dig down into what they experience. 

Then find the answers for your ideal clients to the following questions. 

• What do they think about their problem? 
• How do they feel while stuck in their problem?
• How does the problem impact others around them?
• How difficult has the problem become since they realized it was a problem? 

Then use the same questions to answer how your ideal client imagines their life will be different when they have solved this specific problem. 

• What do they think will be different from the way it is now? 
• How will they feel when they’re past this problem or the problem is resolved?
• How does this new/resolved situation impact others around them?
• How must better has the situation become since they resolved it or moved past it? 

Pull from the answers for both sets of questions when you talk about who you help, and when you begin to appeal to them about the work that you do. By sharing the details that matter to them about what they’re currently experiencing AND about how their life will be different without this problem, you’re speaking directly to them. 

This technique eliminates the need to use tricky marketing tactics by instead speaking directly to your ideal clients and to their network who have heard them talk about their situation. (For more examples of how this method of marketing isn’t good for your business, check out this post.) 

Start Now

The best part of this approach to writing copy and marketing your business is that you don’t need to wait to start making it work for you! Once you have the words of your ideal clients in the answers to the questions above you can begin to work them into how you talk about your business. Then, when you see results from sharing the answers you can integrate the same language into more of the way you market your business. 

Whether your copy changes to use different words to describe your ideal clients such as switching from “teacher” to “educator” or entirely changing how you share the results you get for your clients, you’ll soon begin to see if the changes help your chances of meeting new prospects. One of the best ways I’ve learned to test this is to see how often someone needs to ask you qualifying questions about your work or your ideal clients. If you get more questions about your work and fewer questions about the results you get for them, you might need to revisit the details you share. 

Ready to take your copy, and your marketing, to the next level? Check out The Copy Guide for pages of copy formulas that work for entrepreneurs on how to create copy that supports their businesses.