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7
Steps for Pinpointing Your Audience and Designing Your Offerings
(Part 1)
by Adele Sommers, Ph.D.
How do you create an irresistible
personal connection with your audience? One thats strong
enough to grab your prospects by the eyeballs, ears, or fingertips
and draw them magnetically into your sphere of influence?
Whether you seek customers,
clients, subscribers, project collaborators, students, or affiliates,
I offer seven recommendations for identifying your audiences, discovering
the most compelling ways to speak to them, and then using the information
you gather to create your book, product, service, Web site, or custom
solution.
The twist in this process is
that you actually reverse the order of what most people
might do to develop an offering. Instead of creating it and then
doing the marketing work, this sequence involves completing certain
marketing exercises first, and then using the results to develop
your offering. This article, Part 1 in a series, describes
the first three of seven steps you might take:
1. Identify one or more potential
audiences
2. Interview your real or imagined prospects
3. Write a mission statement for your offering
4. List the features and benefits of your offering
5. Write hypothetical testimonials for your offering
6. Use all of the above to develop the actual offering
7. Invent a compelling title for your offering
Step
1: Identify One or More Potential Audiences
To start off the process, I
recommend brainstorming the types of general audiences you already
serve, or might want to serve.
Depending
on your industry, you could be aiming for people interested in food,
health, fitness, finance, cars, sports, child care, hobbies, crafts,
gardening, job seeking, library science, marketing, human resources,
process improvement, project management, or whatever your situation
dictates. The more narrowly you can define your domain, the
better.
Many people would stop there,
without drilling deeper. Within each domain, however, lies a range
of specialized sub-audiences, all of whom might be interested
in aspects of what you have to offer. They comprise distinct
and possibly separate slants or perspectives that your offerings
and marketing outreach eventually might address.
For example, in my area of business
achievement, sub-audiences include CEOs and business owners, entrepreneurs,
independent professionals, supervisors, managers, generalists, specialists,
students, academicians, nonprofit groups, and affiliates. One of
my primary audiences is small companies with 10-50 people.
Step
2: Interview Your Real or Imagined Prospects
If you have an existing audience
base, such as a list of newsletter subscribers, clients, or customers,
you can poll them to ask for their burning questions
or problems related to your topic. You can collect responses using
a Web site form or survey service, an e-mail campaign, or during
classes or teleseminars. That way, you can build a list of specific
issues to address in your upcoming material or solution.
Whether or not you already have
an audience base, you can identify one or more fictitious characters
who represent your audience, known as personas. These
characters embody the typical customers or clients for your product,
service, Web site, or custom solution. You might select a few to
develop in depth.
To make them as realistic
as possible, give your personas names, genders, ages, professional
or personal roles, friends and families, hobbies, educational backgrounds,
and major challenges. After identifying a few, I like to interview
them. I let them tell an entire story about their circumstances,
career situations, personal concerns, or whatever else comes
up. I write a detailed story about each person.
For
example, my primary persona's name is Barbara Markey. She's
a multi-talented, 37-year-old software professional with a graphic
design and technical communication background. Barbara and her husband
Ben go on camping trips, hike regularly with their two dogs, and
enjoy gardening and outdoor crafts.
Barbara has earned a stellar
reputation at the company where shes worked for over eleven
years as an interface designer and system developer. Shes
an independent, creative thinker with a witty sense of humor who
dislikes stuffy, aloof, and arrogant people. Although Barbara has
had occasional philosophical differences with her colleagues, shes
been able to produce award-winning software packages, which helps
keep her motivated.
Although Barbara generally enjoys
her job, her greatest challenge is a boss who doesn't manage his
time and projects well. She's thinking about going back for a management
degree so she can advance in the company, but her ultimate goal
is to start her own software interface design business.
The persona method is especially
useful if your project entails developing offerings for mass
consumption where there is no specific client or customer
to please. It can also, however, work extremely well when youre
working with a client, to help pinpoint specific kinds of concerns
and options that would not have been readily apparent.
If your goal entails developing
an online software tutorial, for example, you might conclude
that one typical learner is a teacher with limited exposure to the
subject. In contrast, another typical learner might be a software
engineer who needs exposure only to certain topics. The solution
you design will need to satisfy each personas preferred way
of using the tutorial, without complicating life for the others.
A related idea: You can build case studies around each
persona to illustrate your material.
Step
3: Write a Mission Statement for Your Offering
A
mission statement for your product, service, or solution defines
why it should exist. Different from a business or company mission
statement, it focuses on the specific purpose of your offering.
My original product mission statement reads something like this:
To provide a set of potent,
easy-to-understand techniques to guide business owners, managers,
and independent professionals to boost productivity, enhance customer
and client loyalty, and increase bottom line results, in the areas
of:
- Running highly effective, compelling meetings
- Removing obstacles to productivity
- Assessing and managing project risks
- Boosting product and service value
In conclusion, developing
your offerings need not occur in a vacuum. By identifying and interviewing
your audiences, and then creating a mission statement, you've completed
three of seven key steps that will be continued in Part 2.
~~~~~~~~~~~
About the Author
Adele Sommers, Ph.D. is author of Straight Talk
on Boosting Business Performance: 12 Ways to Profit from Hidden
Potential. To learn more about her book and sign up for more
free tips like these, visit her site at www.LearnShareProsper.com
This article may be distributed freely on your Web
site, as long as this entire article, including the links and full
About the Author section, are unchanged. Please send
a copy of, or link to, your reprint to Adele@LearnShareProsper.com.
Copyright 2006 Business Performance Inc., Adele Sommers, All Rights Reserved.
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