Struggling to sell to your audience? Here are some places you might be going wrong (Part 2)

Most business owners assume that if they're not selling enough then it must be a marketing issue and that they just need to get in front of more people. But most of the time, this isn't the case. In part two on this topic, I'm sharing three more key areas that will impact how well you're able to sell—your messaging, marketing and mindset.

– When your messaging is too broad (or too narrow) and it misses the mark with your ideal client audience.
– The mistakes you may be making with your marketing that are actually making it harder for you to sell.
– How subtle mindset blocks can affect your thoughts, feelings and actions around selling.

 

 
Today, I'm sharing part two of the reasons why you might be struggling to sell to your audience. Some of the areas that you might be going wrong. Now, last episode, I talked about the five key areas that impact how well you are able to sell your offers suite, your sales process, your messaging, your marketing, and your mindset. Now, in part one of this episode, we looked at the first two, the offers suite and the sales process. 

We're going to look at messaging, marketing, and mindset today, and the key mistakes that you might be making with your messaging that are making it harder to sell. 

 

Mistakes in messaging:

 

#1: Your messaging probably lacks clarity.

And that might be clarity at the offer level. So messaging around this particular offer you are trying to sell or messaging around your brand in general. 

Now, some symptoms that there might be a little bit of lack of clarity is if somebody is asking you, what do you actually do?

They've come into contact with your brand or they might've looked at your website and then they're like, how do I work with you? What do you do? Or they're asking you, is this for me? Who is this for? Those are all symptoms that you haven't communicated what you do well enough. If it's for an offer, if somebody's asking, what is the actual outcome of this offer? Or is this right for me? Will this work for me? 

Those are some symptoms that you might not have communicated clearly. And if your ideal client is confused, they're not going to buy. So we need to make sure that whatever we are communicating, we're doing it really clearly. 

Now, I know there can be a lot of a misconception or there can be a bit of a misconception around how your messaging and your copy needs to be really clever and catchy and unique, but let me tell you, clear beats clever any day.

 

#2: You don't have one ideal client in mind with your messaging. 

Your messaging is just way too broad and I know you want to help everyone and I know that it seems like if you talk to as many people as possible. You're going to sell more because it's a bigger audience.

But unfortunately, if you try to talk to everybody, you end up talking to nobody. You end up resonating with nobody in particular. And instead of resonating with a really small, narrow market, who they're having this response where they're like, yeah, this is perfect. This is exactly what I need. This was made for me. Suddenly now you're trying to talk to this broader market where you're competing against a lot more people who might have a similar offer to you. So it's a lot more competitive. 

 

#3: Your messaging doesn't resonate with your ideal client. 

Something that is really powerful when you are communicating what you do and what your offer is, is speaking to the ideal client's identity.

So if I'm saying this is for online business owners, if that's something that you identify with, you're going to be like, Okay, cool. This is for me. You're going to listen but what I see happening is people will use really vague or really fluffy language that doesn't necessarily resonate with the people that they are trying to resonate with.

The other mistake we can make that stops us from resonating is talking in expert language. So when we are familiar with the problem our ideal client is experiencing, when we are the experts in the problem they're experiencing, and we know why they're experiencing it, we know what's caused it, we know what the solution is, it's very easy for us to talk from this place of, hey, we're the expert, we know this.

And we might forget that the way that they are experiencing the problem is actually different from how we know the problem. 

 

Mistakes with your marketing:

 

#1: You're confusing marketing with sales or you are lumping them together and just calling it promoting my offer.

This might look like you are posting about your offer or you are emailing your list about it. This isn't really marketing and most of the time it's not really sales either, and this will make sense in a second when I talk about selling and marketing, a bit of a difference there.

But you can't just talk about your offer and hope that that's going to reach the right people and the right people are just going to want it, right? You can't just hope that that's going to be enough to sell it. You actually need some kind of journey from when somebody first becomes aware of your brand to when they buy from you.

This is what is commonly called a funnel or a sales process. I prefer sales process because funnels can get a little bit of a bad rap and they can seem really complicated and they don't really have to be. 

 

#2: You don't know what your marketing and sales funnel looks like.

Now, if we think of it as a little upside-down pyramid and upside-down triangle, at the top, the widest part is the people who are aware of your brand. And then they move through, they move down this pyramid slowly. Some people will drop off at each stage. That's normal. But they are moving down this little journey and it's your job as a brand to move them down this pyramid.

Marketing is reaching more people. So filling that top of the funnel but then sales is what you do with the people who are already in that funnel, how you move them down through to the pointy little end of the funnel, where is when they are taking action. 

 

#3: You are relying on social media alone to grow your audience. 

Social media, whatever platform, for most of you, it's going to be more of a nurturing tool than an audience-building tool. Okay? It's going to be a place to nurture the people who are following you rather than a place of discovering new people and making more people aware of your brand.

If you want to keep posting on there and nurturing your audience, do that. I love doing that, but you also need to think about how are you intentionally getting in front of new audiences and that's going to involve doing the things that feel a little bit uncomfortable, a little bit scary, speaking on stages, whether that's virtual or in person, doing interviews on other people's podcasts, pitching the media, reaching out and doing collaborations with people who have a similar audience.

All of these things are going to put you in front of new people, but they're a little bit more work than just posting to Instagram. 

 

Mistakes in mindset:

The final part of today's blog is the mindset stuff, the mindset areas that are making it harder to sell. 

So this mindset can be a little bit fluffy, but bear with me. I used to be like that if you're somebody who's really tangible, logical strategy-wise. And now I realised just how much of an impact mindset has on not only creating success in your business but actually maintaining that success once you are there without self-sabotaging at all. 

I guess the simplest explanation for this, this is what really convinced me that mindset was worthwhile.

So when you think about it, your thoughts create your feelings. 

So when you think something bad is happening, you're going to feel probably a little bit anxious. Your feelings then create your actions. So if you're feeling a little bit anxious, you're going to take a very different action to if you are feeling inspired or motivated. And then your actions create your habits and your habits create your life. 

At a business level, even if it's not creating a habit, your actions are going to create what happens in your business. There's only so much that is within your control and the only things that are within your control are really your thoughts and your actions.

Everything else, the economy, your competitors, your customers, you can't really control them. You can just take action that affects how you show up and that's where it all comes back to your thoughts. 

So when it comes to selling thoughts like, Oh, I don't want to annoy them. I don't want them to unsubscribe and unfollow me. What if my offer isn't good enough? Do I know enough? Is this too expensive? All of those kinds of thoughts are going to make you feel a little bit, probably not inspired if you're saying I don't want to annoy them, you're going to then put up a post selling your offer where you're like, you're not really selling it to the best of its ability, or you're going to not talk about your offer enough.

You're not going to put in place a good sales process because you're afraid that they're going to unsubscribe and unfollow, you're going to show up in this place of like, this is not good enough, like buy from me, but I don't even believe in it myself.

So all of those thoughts create those feelings which then create your actions which then affect how you sell and it also might be that you have mindset blocks around receiving money. I know a lot of people do. This is quite common where we actually feel a little bit guilty when somebody pays us for something, or you might have some blocks around your value.

 

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