Creating No-Brainer Offers (Email 2 of 4)

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This is the second email in a series on learning and building the systems you need to grow your creative business. You can read email 1 here.

Hey hey! Welcome back!

(If you missed the first email in this series you can read that here. Go do that first!)

When you start connecting with your ideal customer at a greater frequency, something magical happens.

You show them that you have expertise, you gain their trust, and they tell you what they need.

So, what is your audience telling you?

As you gather awareness for your business, what needs keep showing up? What feedback to you get as you talk to people, or when they reply to your email, or comment on your social media posts?

If you’re just now setting up your awareness system (from yesterday’s email), then your goal from today’s email is to pay attention to what your audience tells you.

They’ll tell you what they are struggling with, frustrations they’ve had working with other companies in the past, and what they desire most.

You’re looking for three things:

their “pains”
their “gains”
their “jobs to be done”

You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.
~Zig Ziglar

Your Customer’s Pains

This is what you typically hear from marketers: find your customer’s pain point, then agitate, exacerbate or expose it, then present them with an offer that solves the pain you just agitated.

Problem > Agitate > Solve.

That feels a little…messed up, doesn’t it?

Would you go to your kid who has just scratched his knee and then smack in with your hand in order to convince them they need a band-aid?

No, that’s super messed up!

Instead, we want to listen to the pains and frustrations the members of our audience have so that we can learn how to better serve them, not so we can agitate their pain to the point where our offer is better than nothing.

The old way leads to a bunch of unhappy customers.

We want to align our offers with their needs, not try to convince people to buy what we have.

Your Customer’s Gains

The customers “gains” are the things that they ultimately want.

If we can help the marketing team or lead at a big firm look good because we delivered amazing work, that is a “gain”, and they’ll happily come back to you for the next project.

As you interact with your ideal customers, listen for what they’re really after. They may not just be after more money through sales or increased ROI, they may have personal things to gain from working with you. They may be on the verge of insolvency, or getting fired, or in the middle of corporate restructuring.

How many other companies are paying attention to those messages? Not many. Most companies go into a sales conversation to get a sale, not to understand their prospect at a deeper level.

What else could they want besides the obvious? That’s what you’re listening for, and capturing so that you can tailor your offer to those gains.

Their Jobs To Be Done

After a presentation I gave at a conference in 2022, three separate people came up to me and said that they had never heard anyone in my position speak to their unique struggles.

In this case, they were looking to grow their audience, but everyone else at the conference had hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers. There was such a huge gap between where those other presenters were and where the audience was that it caused a massive disconnect.

Those other presenters had what's known as "the curse of knowledge".

Here's what I did! It worked for me, so it must work for you too!

Not necessarily. The playbook that worked five or ten years ago doesn't work today. They needed someone who was in the trenches now show them what's working and what isn't. They all asked where they could learn more about what I was doing to grow my business.

That insight - and the fact that it was repeated three times in a short period of time - led me to create the 10k Creator podcast, which easily brought on a producing and distribution partner, three sponsors, and $45,000 in revenue.

Where did that idea and those opportunities come from? My audience.

I was speaking at an event full of my ideal customers, and they told me their jobs to be done. At that point it was easy to create new products to serve them.

Now, let’s put all of this together.

You have listened to your new email subscribers, or those you’re interacting with through your new awareness efforts.

You have a clear picture of their pains, gains, and jobs to be done.

First, ask yourself:

Does my product or service meet all of those needs that my prospect has?

If yes, then congrats! That’s huge, and you’ll have a ton of success building the next part of the system, which we’ll talk about tomorrow.

If not, then secondly:

What product or service can I create that meets my ideal customers’ needs better than anyone else in the market?

That’s a massive question. I’m gonna give you the rest of the day to think about that one.

Something that might help is to free-write on that prompt. Take out a sheet of paper or a notebook - it’s best to do this freehand - and just write, without stopping or thinking or editing, anything that comes to mind.

The book Accidental Genius is a good resource here, and I like using Brain.fm for some nice background music to focus to during these free-writing sessions.

Once you’ve done a solid bit of free-writing, go through what you wrote and capture any ideas that are worth expanding on. Take those to your team, think of new ways that you can better meet your ideal customer’s needs, and then come back here tomorrow for the next part of the system.

See you then…

Daren

PS - I'd love to know: what is your biggest insight for your business from this email series so far? Shoot me an email and let me know!