The potato salad recipe to getting more clients

About imposter syndrome

You know those recipe sites where you have to suffer through a long story about someone’s lineage of how a simple potato salad - with 4.3 stars - came to existence?

Yeah, this is like that.

So if you’re a coach looking for the recipe on which stage of the Buyer Journey your prospects are - and which content to write for them, go ahead and scroll all the way down to the horizontal line.

The Imposter in the Coffee Shop.

A coffee shop conversation yesterday with my partner Eva. I was sharing my insecurities around getting new clients in for Ethos.

See I don’t talk about my work publicly very often. Partly because there is a sense of not wanting to sound like a car salesman ‘…but wait there’s more!’. And partly because I’m my own worst critic.

I don’t believe in objective truth (unless tied to physics and the laws of the universe and even those are subject to change). I’m always curious to challenge my own knowledge and beliefs.

So what might be a great marketing strategy for someone yesterday, will not work again tomorrow.

But content lingers on the Wayback Machine and so I’d rather apply a fit-for-purpose strategy in the moment, with the client sitting directly in front of me, than derail some soul’s business out there because they read a 3-year-old post and applied AIDA.

It’s like looking at your old High School pictures; “was I wearing that?”.

Let’s call it compassionate embarrassment.

But Roel, how are people to know about what you do, if you don’t talk about it?
Touché.

When I zoom out I see the value I bring - heck, I hear it from the people I work with all the time - yet my self-criticism has the manoeuvres to take pole position.

How do we befriend our self-judgment?
How to not just overcome it but dance with it?
How to greet it like a friend?

It’s that sage-old advice: Just Do It.

And in a bit more nuanced fashion, a current client I work with, Kévin Fornier (a truly remarkable CEO coach) - said something to me along the lines of:

”Don’t write what you can conjure up. Write what you think. The questions and knowledge you ponder on every day.”

So this is me dancing with the imposter syndrome.

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I help coaches and solopreneurs reposition and launch their services with a language that is unique to them so they stand out in the marketplace and get more aligned clients.

I’ve seen enough cookie-cutter-marketing to cut through the BS in the coaching industry. And there’s a lot of it.

But I have compassion for it. If you’re a coach or a solopreneur or small business owner with human-centred services that is your core focus. Not having to wrestle with marketing funnels and sales pages and email drips. Screw that.

Marketing also becomes increasingly more complex. And let me tell you, that AI-generated post is doing you more harm than good.

Thus, I guide coaches and solopreneurs to create something unique. Something better than what is already out there. You know the value you bring to your clients - you’ve done the work - but now you need help with getting prospects from being unaware a solution is out there - to taking action on yours.

If that is you,

And to end this potato salad story with the actual recipe:

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THE BUYER JOURNEY CONTENT STRATEGY

There are 4 key stages to the buyer journey of your prospects. And here’s a harsh truth: only 3% of your potential target audience is ready to fix their problem. 97% is not ready for you or your services - yet.

This is how you approach your target audience in every stage:

1. Unaware (60%) > Provide Educational Content
Roughly 60% of your market is unaware they have a challenge or that there’s even a useful solution out there. What do you do? You educate.

The audience:
- Unaware there is a better way.
- Don’t know there is something that can shift their pain point to a dream outcome.
- They are not actively seeking. They are simply accepting - it is what it is.

The strategy:
Provide educational content. Talk about pain points and pose questions to your audience that allow them to dig deeper.

2. Symptom Aware (20%) > Provide Educational Content
A little further in the buyer journey, you find the prospects who are Symptom Aware. They don’t have labels for their challenge but they are aware that there is a pain / problem and it doesn’t feel great.

The audience:
- Not aware of the high-level concepts / names.
- Aware of the pain / problem and doesn’t feel great.
- Need to be shown the symptom correlates to the problem.
- “The reason why you’re not getting what you want”-type content.

The strategy:
Provide content on key things that blew you away when you discovered where the symptoms come from.

3. Problem Aware (17%) > Provide a mix of educational / Direct Response Copy
This is a sweet spot zone. Prospects here are educated. It’s the people who know that it’s stress that’s at the root cause of their skin outbreaks and they are now researching solutions and correlations.

The audience:
- They can categorize themselves / label their problems
- Content here needs to educate, deliver lightbulb insights
- Now that I have the insight, I want to fix it / leave it for what it is.

The strategy:
Provide a mix of educational and call-to-action content. Like what I’m doing here.

If you’ve made it this far and are a coach then you know that you don’t want to sound like everyone else in the marketplace and that getting help with the repositioning of your services will connect you deeper with your audience - and deliver higher value.

4. Taking Action (3%) > Provide Direct Response Copy
Take any run-of-the-mill sales page for a coaching service. It won’t take long to bump into words like ‘magnetic, transformational, now, imagine, activate’ - the vocabulary is focused on the dream outcome and it’s right within reach (just behind that colourful button). And for good reason. In general, this audience is ready for a change.

The audience:
- They see there is a solution, and connect it to their desire to change
- Wanting a result sooner rather than later

The strategy:
Direct Response Copy focuses on the alleviation of the pains or challenges. Here is the moment where you focus on ‘the benefits’ in your content and not ‘the features’ of the solution.

Those are the 4 stages of the Buyer Journey and the types of content that help you connect better to your audience.

If this provided some value to you, please let me know in the comments.
If there’s a particular topic you’d love to learn more about, please let me know in the comments too.


If this entire post spoke directly to your business needs, check out Ethos

Thank you for sipping this rather peculiar Tea for the Curious.

With love,
Roel

Because a picture with a whiteboard and me in teaching mode seemed fitting.