Make this shift to enhance your development efforts

If I had to give one piece of advice to quickly improve your marketing and sales efforts, it’s this: be others-focused. Don’t make it about you; make it about them – your clients, prospects and professional partners – the people who sustain and drive your business.

What fears, challenges and needs do they have that you can solve? Or if you can’t solve it, you can acknowledge and support them as an empathetic partner.

It’s natural to be focused on ourselves. We are wired to think and act in our own best interests. It ensures our survival. Yet, to thrive in life and business, to build rapport, relationships and trust, we need to be more others-focused.

How does this play out in marketing?

Know your audience

It starts by knowing your audience. Move beyond thinking of them by their investable assets. Emphasize with them to understand their concerns and goals. What do they fear? What do they need? What does success look like?

Define them in the ways they define themselves.

To use marketing to grow, be clear on who you are targeting to create content, education and solutions that address what’s most relevant to them.

Be explicit about who you work with so people can easily identify that you understand their needs and that you can help. Don’t stop at simply describing who you work with; become an expert on their industry; identify investment and planning solutions to their unique problems, and use their language and create content on topics that they want to hear. Use marketing to promote these solutions and ideas and become relevant by showing them you are uniquely qualified to help (I said showing them, not telling them).

Check yourself

If you’re doing marketing, ask yourself, “Am I addressing my target audience’s needs?” If the answer is “no,” then there is work to do. If you aren’t sure, look at your engagement as a signal of how you are doing.

Watch open and click-through rates, downloads, response rates, likes, comments, subscribers, etc. Are you getting and growing engagement? From the right people, your ideal customer profile (ICP)? Are those people taking action by reaching out or engaging with you in deeper ways that move them along your sales journey (read more on how to build a sales process to drive results)?

How you package and present your marketing is just as important as what you say. Keep the hook short and simple. Use catchy titles, subject lines, videos and visuals to attract interest.

Be where your audience is. You can’t be everywhere. Focus on the platforms where your ICPs are and are most likely to be open to your content and to engage. I always prefer digital platforms, because it is easier to measure the engagement and quantify the return on investment (ROI).

If your marketing is engaging the right people, great, you’re providing relevant value. If marketing engagement is low or not growing, then check what you’re saying, how you’re saying it and where you’re saying it against your ICP. Work to make it more relevant to that audience.

Dig deeper to uncover needs

If you don’t know your audience as well as you need to or you’ve tried others-focused marketing to limited success, there are a couple of ways to dig deeper to uncover their needs and how to best integrate them into your marketing efforts.

Ask your ICPs, clients or prospects for feedback. Explain that you want to ensure you are providing truly relevant, investment and planning advice, and are looking to add value through solutions that address their needs. Then ask them, “What keeps you up at night? What are the hardest parts of being [fill in the blank]?” What information and people do they value – what do they read, who do they listen to, what groups are they part of, etc.?

Individuals will have individual challenges and preferences. But after talking to a handful of people you should start to hear some common themes. These are the needs to unpack and address.

Quickly and easily test topics, language and formats using social media, subject lines and headlines to validate relevance and engagement before going bigger with your marketing efforts.

Identify other advisors or professionals that target your ICP. What are they doing that works? How are they speaking to this group? What topics are they focused on? What platforms are they using (print, digital, events, podcasts, social, etc.)?

Especially if you aren’t in direct competition, reach out to those professionals to tell them you admire what they are doing and simply ask what’s working and what’s not. If you aren’t comfortable or there’s a conflict of interest, then watch them, follow them on social media, register for their webinars, subscribe to their content and learn through observation.

Keep iterating

I’ve been doing marketing for more than 15 years. Experts are always testing and iterating. There is no “easy button” or perfect plan. So much of marketing is trial and error. The best way to get engagement is to be others-focused and relevant. Even when you do that, sometimes it doesn’t work as well as you expect. Keep watching and learning from your efforts. When something resonates, take note and do more to validate that it’s effective.

Once you’ve found something that works, expand and promote it – on your website with a form to capture names, via webinar or event, write a white paper, author an article in a third-party publication, summarize in a video or share on a podcast.

Share with your clients and tell them that this is your most popular article and make it easy for them to pass along to their friends and colleagues.

Remember, the world revolves around them

Being others focused – providing ideas and solutions to address needs – is one of the best ways to improve your marketing and drive results. View life from your clients’ and prospects’ eyes to build trust and to get the information you need to provide truly exceptional and relevant value.