Build Your Audience

By Rene Hjetting

Let the clients come to you

 

Unlike the overbearing 'super-selling' techniques of traditional marketing, this book is about attracting clients without being a nuisance—and to feel good while you're doing it.

 

Build Your Audience is a guide to marketing for the self-employed. Armed with the knowledge of what you want to work with and who you want to sell to, this book will teach you how to attract the clients who'll come back to buy from you time and time again.

 

This book isn't a panacea. It's about building a foundation to allow your business to be durable and viable. In other words, it's an investment in your dream.

Build Your Audience is a catalogue of ideas, chockful with tips, tricks, and help for different stages of your marketing so that you can pick and choose the areas where you need help.

 

This book is also an introduction to the world of trust-based marketing. You'll learn to build the right audience without being intrusive and how to create consistency in your marketing.

 

One step at a time, you'll learn how to attract your dream clients and forge long-lasting relationships to the mutual benefit of you and your clients.

 

You'll learn:

 

●    to follow your niche, which is unique because it has to do with you.
●    to clearly define your target audience.
●    to set up a marketing plan and create high-quality content.
●    to maintain and strengthen your audience's trust in you.
●    to sell based on trust—and to sell again.
●    to evaluate your marketing to create the best results possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Galibier
• Release date: Apr 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9788797203538

Book preview

Preface

Do you like to sell?

I’ll assume the answer is no. That you associate the act of selling with traditional push marketing. The idea of calling up clients and selling yourself and your products or services that way makes you break out in a cold sweat.

I haven’t called up clients in many years. I don’t want to do it, and that kind of selling technique doesn’t go well with the services that I provide. I speak to a lot of other self-employed individuals and often hear the same thing. A lot of them do talk to clients on the phone but not until there’s a relationship there.

You don’t need to rely on cold canvassing to sell your products and services either. There are many other – and better – possibilities. In this book, I’m going to tell you about them.

Marketing yourself means bringing your products and services to the market to sell them. Imagine a world in which marketing is about establishing contact between businesses and clients by determining the client’s actual needs and the ability of different companies to meet those needs.

Imagine a world where marketing isn’t about making money but about creating a perfect match between clients and businesses. We fulfil our clients’ needs, and companies get to do what they do best by delivering unique products and services.

Imagine a world where you don’t spend much time on sales. You focus on clients; on feedback and demands, the things you have to say, and what you have to offer.

With this book, I hope to contribute to the creation of this world of genuine and credible marketing where spamming and manipulative sales techniques are a thing of the past.

In a way, it’s simple. It’s all about finding out what you want to help with, whom you want to help, and how you want to help them. You build your audience, serve your clients, maintain your relationships, sell to your market, and follow up on your sales based on this information. You keep this information in mind, so the what, who, and how are consolidated as you go along. The answers to these questions are the very foundation of your marketing.

When we, as businesses, start focusing more on understanding and describing what our intentions are, the unique qualities of each company will become more apparent, and marketing will become a far more beautiful and rewarding discipline.

If we get rid of the idea that the louder we are, the more we sell, a lot of the noise will disappear and human beings will have more time and space to figure out what they need and how to meet those needs best. To put it briefly: more information and less hot air! Stop shouting and sending me 27 emails about the same product.

To me, it seems like something is changing in the marketing world. The internet comes in, and manipulative marketing based on push and platitude goes out. In large part, we have subscriptions services, social media, and more to thank for this change.

That’s a good thing in itself, and it’s positive because the arrogance that most traditional marketing is rooted in makes it unworthy of sales reps and buyers alike. A great deal of conventional marketing expresses a view of other people that, in my opinion, lacks respect.

I see people as independent, intelligent individuals who, with the right guidance, are fully capable of making good purchasing decisions. And I believe that there are enough clients and sales for everyone who has something to share. There are clients for everyone motivated to do what they do and authentically express this.

I also believe that, at their core, businesses driven exclusively by profit are doomed from the start. Egotistical motivations aren’t sustainable. But products and services with a real purpose are; all they need is a little bit of help with their marketing – and that exact help is what this book is here to provide.

I’m going to describe an approach to marketing that focuses on understanding needs and expressing the intent behind products and services uniquely and authentically to create the best possible client-business match. This book is written specifically for sole traders and owners of companies with few employees – but everyone is welcome to read along.

In the introduction, I’ll go over the theoretical foundation and the philosophy behind the trust-based marketing of which I’m an advocate. One step at a time, I’ll describe how to approach your marketing in an accessible way, complete with exercises.

Workbook

This book comes with a workbook.

Workbook

Download it here:

https://www.renehjetting.com/buildyouraudience/

The workbook includes all the exercises outlined in the book and a few extra resources. You’ll also get access to the checklists from the end of each chapter and larger sections to establish a better overview. Feel free to download the workbook right away, so you’re ready to get stuck in as and when the exercises pop up.

Thanks

I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the creation of this book. Thank you to Sandra Buchhardt, who has proofread and edited the book and been an invaluable sounding board throughout the process. Thank you to Ingrid Lill for the inspirational illustrations, help with diagrams, and everything else.

A massive thank you to the beta readers for your observant, relevant feedback. It’s helped shape this book more than you know. Thank you to everyone who has read my newsletter and followed the process. Thanks to all the clients and course participants who have shared their experiences with me over the years. You’re the foundation of this book and have been an imperative source of inspiration for me.

Introduction

I’m an advocate of this type of marketing because I consider it integral to be trustworthy in the way you run your business and market yourself. It’s a bit of a stretch to call it a method because it’s more of an attitude towards marketing and people as a whole. And a lot of the things that fall under this method are common sense when you have this attitude.

To be trustworthy means that you’re honest about yourself and open to the world around you. Your business becomes trustworthy as you come to understand what you want to help people with and learn how to express this desire clearly – and remain open to the feedback you receive from people with ties to your business, whether solicited or not.

Your unique selling point becomes evident at the intersection between the response you receive for your work and your understanding of what you want to do. As you honestly communicate this selling point to the world, your audience gradually begins to trust you, and your marketing starts to express your trust in yourself, your clients, and the world.

Trusting yourself is imperative. You have to believe that what you want to do has value and that the way you want to help will be appreciated. What you offer and how you offer it adjusts as you continue to help people, but the first step is to come to terms with your goals and yourself to understand the value of your solution – and to stand by it.

In other words, trust-based marketing is about credibility and communication that establishes trust between a business and a clearly defined target audience. In this book, I’m going to break down the method into a format that’s easy to follow. But first, I’m going to outline the theoretical basis for the technique for the sake of housekeeping and to help you tune in to this new take on marketing. If you think you’ll be fine without this refresher, feel free to skip to the section Your target audience has feelings and needs – or to the reading guide at the end of the introduction.

A New Take on Marketing

Part of the basis for the method described in this book is content marketing. The core principle of this marketing discipline is that creating valuable content for a specific target audience creates credibility and attracts clients. This principle has been around for years and originated in the 1700s. The term content marketing arose in the United States. With the advent of social media, this type of marketing has grown exponentially – if there’s one thing social media platforms want, it’s quality content.

But content marketing is only part of the method I’m going to outline in this book. I’ve also drawn on people like Paul Jarvis, who is at the forefront of the trust-based marketing trend, for inspiration. The theory behind trust-based marketing is that marketing has to be built around client relations using credible dialogue and objective information. Trust-based marketing aims to help potential clients make well-informed decisions based on consultation and information.

Trust-based marketing theory points to honesty and openness as the best tools for inspiring trust in potential clients and creating a loyal clientele. These days, clients – whether B2C or B2B – have practically unlimited access to information about products, services, and more through the internet. The internet allows them to compare prices and, to some degree, quality.

Because of this, companies can no longer rely on traditional forms of marketing, like push marketing. It’s no longer enough to highlight the positive aspects of a product and, as a result, potentially gloss over other elements that might make the product less-than-ideal for some clients. The concept of trust-based marketing is to guide potential clients to a place where they can make an informed purchasing decision for themselves.

Implicit in this view of other people, which accepts the consequences of our clients’ newfound power, is a recognition and respect of our clients. We must consider them equals in all our correspondence – in my opinion, that’s the most important thing.

It’s possible to maintain the conventional view of clients as people to manipulate and shepherd to the till, but that’s not what modern reality calls for. And an egalitarian and respectful perception of clients, which acknowledges their power, makes it more delightful and fun to do marketing. At the same time, the theory behind trust-based marketing predicts that this view of our clients pays off in the form of lasting client relations, more stable income, increased sales, and fewer marketing expenses – and it looks like this prediction is coming true.

Of course, this updated view of clients has inevitable consequences in terms of our approach to marketing. Paul Jarvis has come up with a list of defining characteristics for this new and different approach to marketing. To me, the most important of these are:

1) Marketing is a process

- and selling is only one of the steps in this process. The marketing process is a living, changing thing, and it always will be. I’m going to touch on this a lot in this book.

2) Marketing is simple

- although it tends to get complex in practice, it never becomes complicated. At its core, marketing is about listening to what people want from you and giving it to them, i.e.:

Find your target audience.

Give your target audience what it wants.

3) Marketing is about attraction (pull)

- and not about manipulation (push).

4) The marketing style is up to you

There is no one way to communicate but rather as many ways as there are businesses. The important thing is that you try to be authentic in your format, tone, and content, so your marketing accurately reflects who you are and what you stand for.

5) Marketing takes courage

Your clients aren’t the only ones who need to trust you. You need to believe that the world needs you and what you can do – and to find the courage to stay true to the heart of your business. To do this, you have to take the leap and limit your target audience.

Jarvis sums up the essence of trust-based marketing as follows:

"Marketing really comes down to four things (…): Building trust and empathy with a specific group of people by communicating with them consistently."

(quoted in Jane Portman’s UI Breakfast Podcast Episode 53: Trust Marketing with Paul Jarvis).

These four things – trust, empathy, a specific target audience, and consistent communication – are the very foundation of trust-based marketing:

1) Build trust

Trust comes before the sale: if people don’t trust you, they won’t buy from you. You need to weave trust into your brand and your communication into every last bit of contact that people have with your business.

2) Listen

Being empathetic is to listen and to put yourself in your (current and potential) clients’ shoes so you can feel what they feel, understand their needs, and help them find the right solutions. Jarvis claims that we underestimate the art of listening in the marketing field, and I couldn’t agree more. For this reason, I’ve dedicated all of Chapter 2 to listening to your clients. When you know the struggles facing the members of your target audience, helping them and marketing your help to them is a lot easier.

3) Have a specific target audience

You can’t and shouldn’t have everyone as a client. You need to define your target audience – and that depends on who you are and what you can do. More on this very soon.

4) Be consistent

Marketing requires consistent communication. Your audience’s trust in you and desire to buy from your business is a response to your openness and honesty. It grows with time. A vital component of this trust-building process is consistency. Trust requires consistency, such as in the form of a regular, weekly newsletter but also in everything else that you do. Marketing isn’t something you do once or twice but an on-going process that doesn’t end unless you close down as a business. Marketing is – or should be – an integrated part of running a business.

And now, to the people, it’s all about: your target audience.

Your Target Audience Has Feelings and Needs

An essential part of my approach to trust-based marketing is to identify your target audience. And in the evolving process of marketing, this isn’t something that you do once and then never again but rather something you have to address regularly. I’ll touch more on this in the upcoming chapters. First of all, I’m going to walk through what a target audience is and how to find out what kind of target audience you have.

Wikipedia defines a ‘target audience’ as: … the intended audience or readership of a publication, advertisement, or other message. The term target audience has been criticised as too broad because it has often been used to describe a large demographic. These days, people have started using it to describe a smaller group of people at whom they target their marketing. I prefer to work with the term your ideal client.

In this book, I’m going to use the term target audience to describe large as well as small groups of people. The first chapters are about understanding what your specific target audience needs and finding out what you have to share. Through this process, you’ll discover your ideal client, i.e. a concrete personification of your target audience. Once we’ve gone over your ideal client, I’ll use the terms target audience and your ideal client interchangeably – depending on the context.

In trust-based marketing, it’s imperative to specify your target audience. You need to be able to target your communication to the people who are experiencing the problem to which you have the perfect solution – and you can only do that if you’ve established a clear idea of who your specific target audience is.

Your definition of your target audience can be demographic (e.g. ‘pregnant women’) and geographic (e.g. ‘living in the Glasgow area’) if, for example, you run antenatal classes for physical attendees in Glasgow. But you have to specify your target audience further if you want your marketing to reach the right people.

The definition of your target audience truly comes together once you’ve identified the feelings and needs of its members. In the example above, the target audience is more than just pregnant women in Glasgow. It could be pregnant Glasgow natives who feel insecure because they’re first-time parents or fear the pain because they’ve heard of or had a particularly painful experience. They might be people who want to feel calm and prepared or just give themselves the best chance of having a good birthing experience.

So, they need things like support, guidance, breathing techniques, information about the pain, tools for numbing it, etc. And as you might be able to tell, tuning in to the feelings and needs of your target audience makes it easier to understand what to communicate and how to do it.

So, even a relatively small target audience (pregnant women in the Glasgow area), can be narrowed down even further to gain clarity and identify the ideal client. Of course, the same is true for businesses with a broader general target audience.

An accountant might do the accounts for many different types of companies from a range of industries. Still, they would also benefit from narrowing down their target audience to create a more definite profile in their marketing. Examples could be providing courses for entrepreneurs and owners of start-ups who have never had to do VAT accounting before – or to carve out a niche as an accountant catering to farmers because they have good insight into the particular challenges and needs facing this demographic. And when highlighting how they can be of assistance, it’s advantageous to know whether they want to connect with entrepreneurs from London or farmers from the South West

Or consider a mason who could technically do all kinds of work but who knows from experience that their most well-received work has been doing up bathrooms – and it just so happens that that’s the kind of work they love the most. In this case, the obvious thing to do would be to target homeowners in the local area who have older bathrooms that could use a makeover.

A fourth example is a private therapist who has the educational background to work with a wide range of people of all ages and across the gender spectrum but who particularly wants to work with mature women with low self-esteem. Again, it would be an oversight to not focus their marketing on this particular target audience – in terms of language, tone, content, choice of marketing channels, images, and the list goes on.

Another example is a bridal retailer. You might think that the target audience is already clearly defined when your business is selling wedding dresses, but it’s not – because there are many different kinds of brides with vastly different wants and needs.

A potential target audience could be the brides who want to feel like a princess and live out their dream of a large, romantic church wedding. In this case, the business’ website, the shop itself, and the service should target this exact audience. The shop should be a castle with gold furniture, mirrors, and crystal chandeliers where the princesses have someone on hand to dress them. They should receive nothing less than sublime customer service worthy of a princess.

A final example could be Phillip, who sells road bikes and cycling gear for avid cyclists. Once he’s connected with a cycling club, he heads out to the club sometime in the autumn season to show the latest collection. All the cyclists get a chance to try on the clothes and find the best size and model. But not only does Phillip deliver excellent service: Once in a while, he comes out for club rides. This way, he stays in touch with the club and its cyclists who perceive him to be one of them and part of the club.

The Target Audience For This Book

As you might have gathered from the examples above, the target audience for this book about trust-based marketing is you: the self-employed business owner and/or the person responsible for the marketing of a small business. You know a little bit about marketing but are in no way an expert, and you feel the need to learn more and perhaps receive help with your business’ marketing without having to hand over the reins.

You want to feel like you’re able to determine what’s worth doing yourself and what you would benefit from leaving to other people so you can make the right decisions. You like doing your marketing, but there are some points where you feel like you need help – in terms of where you can get involved and how to go about it all.

Neither your gender nor your age is essential, and it doesn’t matter whether you work with B2B or B2C. But the size of your business is clearly defined. You’re either a sole trader or a company with few employees. Your products and services cost £10 and up, and your clients tend to come back for repeat purchases (and if not, you would like them to). And you have at least a few years of experience, so you aren’t entirely green.

The size and, to some extent, the age of your business are the factors that determine whether you fall under my target audience – and not factors like your industry. You could be a therapist, health specialist, artisan, or event planner, but you could just easily be an author, speaker, construction consultant, webinar host, or owner of a SaaS business.

There are numerous reasons why my target audience looks like this. The most important of these is that this is the group of business owners I’m passionate about helping – and the group that I know from experience that I can help. Another reason is that I think we need a holistic approach to assisting small businesses to tackle their marketing. Sure, you can sign up for a series of webinars that cover all sorts of marketing techniques and receive many freebies like checklists, tips, and tricks, and more, but that won’t necessarily bring all your marketing efforts together.

The more cohesive marketing strategies are often reserved for larger businesses. An example of this is inbound marketing. My approach to trust-based marketing has many overlaps with inbound marketing. Both methods are holistic, centred on content marketing, and agree that the push marketing or outbound marketing era is over and that you have to clearly define your target audience, picking and choosing its members.

Aside from content marketing, some of the critical elements of inbound marketing are lead generation, search engine optimisation (SEO), strategic marketing on social media, email marketing, contextual marketing, and marketing automation.

That’s all good and well, but when it comes to the final element of marketing automation, it all falls apart for the small businesses that don’t have the necessary budget to invest in an extensive marketing system. That said, small companies can still do lead generation, SEO, and email flows, and make plans for using social media.

This is where the next challenge comes in: Where and on what do you focus your efforts? Because there are only 24 hours in a day and you have to spend a lot of that time doing whatever it is that you do within your business. You don’t have all the time in the world to dedicate to marketing, so you must make a decision. I hope this book will help you do that.

Reading Guide: You Know Best

In this book, I attempt to provide both a holistic method and a series of suggestions for using the technique in practice – and the idea is that you pick and choose the recommendations you need in the different stages of your marketing process.

This method is partly based on the purchase funnel as described, amongst others, by HubSpot. You can read about this in the chapters titled Attract Your Audience, Stay in Touch With Your Audience, Sell, and Follow Up. Trust-based marketing is about more than just your audience’s journey towards purchasing your business. The method starts with you and the synergetic process that allows you to learn more about what your clients want and what you want to offer them.

I hope that this book and the method behind trust-based marketing ends up giving you the exact kind of guidance that you need. The holistic approach creates cohesion in your marketing, but it also connects your marketing to the heart of your business. Through this process, marketing becomes an integrated part of your business rather than just something you set aside a few hours for once in a while.

There are many concrete ideas in this book. The concept is that you can pick and choose the areas that you want to focus on based on an overall understanding of your business and target audience. You don’t have to do everything mentioned in every chapter to pull together a good marketing campaign! You don’t even have to read the whole book. Feel free to skip around and read about what you’re doing to find answers to your questions. I’m going to refer to different sections as I go along, so no matter where you start, you’ll be taken on a journey guided by your curiosity. Consider this book a catalogue of ideas and incorporate the ones that are of use to you.

If you feel up to it, I recommend reading the book all the way through. It’s written to give you a fundamental understanding of the method both generally and in the more concrete sense. Each chapter or section wraps up with a short exercise to help you incorporate what you’ve just read about in your marketing. Reading the book from one end to the other allows you to incorporate these methods one step at a time, following the different stages that make up a cohesive marketing strategy. In the end, you can go back to have a closer look at the phases that you feel need the most work.

You can find all the exercises in this book and a few extra resources in the accompanying workbook, which you can download here to get stuck in straight away:

https://www.renehjetting.com/buildyouraudience/

Read along and let yourself be inspired – there is a difference between marketing yourself as a local masseur or a webinar host, and your marketing depends on whether you work nationally or internationally. If you speak to your clients regularly, you might not need to send them a questionnaire – and at the same time, it might be an advantage to let the clients who know you from around town answer an anonymous survey. You know best – and if you don’t know yet, you’ll figure it out as you read.

I haven’t come up with all the information in this book by myself. I’ve been inspired by many different people who are just as interested in marketing as I am. You’ll find the articles I’ve referred to and/or found relevant to the theme of this book in the bibliography. I’ve arranged the sources according to their associated chapters. So, if you find your curiosity piqued and want to read more on your own, these are good suggestions for where to start your journey.

Trust-based marketing implies that you know best when it comes to marketing your business. My method aims to help you find the right way of doing things by understanding your own uniqueness and figuring out what marketing