Hello Successful Creatives,
Your target audience lives in that crosshair where the solution you offer intersects perfectly with your ideal client’s hunger. If you, as a creative, can understand what your ideal client really struggles with, what keeps them up at night, what frustrates the hell out of them, and you understand what really drives them, how they really want to live in the world, what they really hunger for, and you can convince them that you understand, that you’ve seen it before, and you know how to solve their problems and provide them with something they truly, deeply want, you’ve begun to lay the groundwork for everything:
Your business name, your tagline, your “heighten the hunger statement” (which we’ll get into later,) and your signature talk. Your clarity about the crosshair will clarify and define your offer, all of your marketing materials, and create a metric for you to make decisions about who you go after and who you say no to.
“If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it,” Albert Einstein said.
You may think you have a great service to offer, but unless you spend some real time understanding and defining your target market, and thinking about the world from their perspective, you will never succeed in reaching people. You must think carefully about who your target market is, how they think about the world, what books they read, how old they are, where they are in their lives. You can have conversations with your existing clients and try to understand the things they really struggle with, and what it is they really want. The answers you find may surprise you, and you may find that this investigation will change the kinds of products and services you offer, and how you present these products and services to the world. It will definitely inform how you speak to people in sales conversations. You will absolutely find that once you understand and clearly define what problems your ideal client has and what it is they really want in their hearts that problems such as their financial constraints start to melt away.
And they should! If you can offer someone something they really want, it is worth it to them to pay you for it. This is what we want. We want our clients happily paying us because they feel like the financial outlay is well worth it. And the offer will be worth a lot of money if you have considered the crosshair carefully while you are building it. If you have put everything they absolutely need into your offer, and you have left everything they don’t need out of the offer, it will sell itself.
Place yourself at the crosshair of commerce. Be the one and only solution to your client’s problems. Be the one and only person that can provide them with something they really, truly want.
Stay tuned for more (and we’ll talk about the “heighten the hunger statement” soon!)
To your success,
Melissa McFarlane
Creative Successful Entrepreneurs
