If you’ve watched the film Inception you’ll understand the concept of planting ideas in other people’s minds and make them feel they had the idea themselves.
It’s one of my favourite films and I highly recommend you watch it, but why should you care?
What if you could have this effect on your ideal customer?
The copy and content you create which your ideal customer consumes, resonates with them in such a compelling way that they feel you know them better than they know themselves.
Being able to create marketing messages which make your ideal customer feel as if you’re pointing directly at them through a crowd of people. As if the president of the USA held eye contact with just you throughout his entire speech.
Most business owners just build their marketing campaign and fire it out to as many people as possible. You’re smarter than them though.
You’ve been marketing to the ideal customer right?
Terrible marketing is aimed at anyone who will look. Mediocre marketing is usually aimed at a group of people, but your marketing is going to be so much more effective because you’ll be communicating with one specific person.
I want to walk you through an exercise which in the beginning will feel really annoying, but the end result is being able to speak to your ideal customer in such a way that your competition won’t know where to start copying you.
It’s called Effortless Transformation. Literally this is Ideal Customer Profiling v3.0
Frank Kern is an internet marketing consultant who sells products online about how to sell products online.
It sounds really cheesy and probably an easy way to make money, but it’s not.
The internet marketing and online business opportunity market are constantly chasing the next silver bullet or shiny object. They are a tough crowd to please as they won’t spend a lot of money on just anything.
So how is it that Frank Kern has managed to extract over $2,000,000 out of this frugal bunch over the last half decade and still maintain a following of rabid fans?
What I outline below is how Frank has taught people like my clients and myself to create such compelling marketing for our ideal customer and how you can do the same.
Effortless Transformation – Who Are You?
The first half of this exercise is the easy part. Once you’ve completed it you’ll understand why you need to do it first.
I want you to open a text editor or take out a pen and paper to answer the following questions.
If your finances and geographic location knew no bounds, what would your perfect average day look like?
As your mind creates scenes of your perfect day, think about each minute detail.
Regular stuff:
Where would you live?
What would your house look like?
What time would you wake up?
What would you do in the morning?
What would you eat for breakfast?
What would you spend the first half of your day doing?
What would you eat for lunch and who with?
What would your friends be like? What do you talk about?
Bigger Stuff
What is your relationship like with spouse / family?
Why do you family and kids appreciate you?
What would you have for dinner?
Where would you eat?
Winding Down
What would you do at night?
Who would you share it with?
What would your thoughts be as you went to sleep?
Read back through your answers.
For clients who will share it with me, I strive to help them achieve that life.
This is the person you’re working towards being. This is the person you want to be and as a business owner, in charge of your own life, is the fastest way to get you to that end result.
The next step is the regular style of ideal customer persona building.
Build Your Ideal Customer
If you could create a single person who would be the typical embodiment of your ideal customer? What would they be like?
Be vivid about your ideal customer and even give this person a name. For example, my ideal customer is “Doug.”
Name –
Age –
Gender –
Marital Status –
Kids –
What is their spouse like?
What does their spouse think of them?
What is their relationship with their children like?
What would they be wearing?
What do they do for a living?
What is their biggest frustration?
What is their biggest SURFACE desire?
Become Your Ideal Customer!
This is where all the Q&A pays off.
I need you to look at your ideal customer’s current life and become that person in your mind.
Think about their frustrations and annoyances and empathise with them.
Now do the Effortless Transformation AS YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMER.
Go back through all the questions you answered about your life, but this time do it as your ideal customer.
Be your ideal customer and imagine their perfect average day.
Now you’re not going to be right 100% of the time. Nobody ever is, but if you know your best customers on a personal level, this exercise will be much easier for you.
Once you have your ideal customer’s dream life mapped out, you now know how to speak to them on a core to core basis.
All of your marketing needs to reinforce and validate their ideal lifestyle and move them closer to that goal.
It wasn’t until I did this that I realised that my best clients all had similar traits, goals and ambitions.
Many were looking to relocate after systemising a lot of their business.
Most of their time was taken up trying to generate ideal customers. By removing that particular stress from their lives I managed to help them move closer to their goal.
I stopped marketing to just anyone and instead focused on the personality types of my ideal customer.
I began to build marketing which would speak directly to them and I used that moving forwards.
From then on my lead generation became so much more fruitful. I began to “attract” my ideal customers almost effortlessly. Our first conversations on the phone were as if we already knew each other.
Since doing this with my clients, their ability to write compelling ads and copy to their own ideal customers has sky rocketed and it’s simply been due to this exercise.