“The Truth About Targeting Your Niche Audience”
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The Transcript
Jim: Hey guys, Jim Edwards here and welcome back to another episode of Sales Copywriting and Content Marketing Hacks with Jim Edwards and
Stew: Stew Smith
Jim: And in this episode, and we’re going to stop giving you episode numbers because I can’t remember. I can’t count that high. I think this is six.
Stew: Yes
Stew: It is six…
Jim: So, in this episode kids, we’re going to talk about the truth about how to target your niche audience. It’s amazing. Today Stew and I are going to talk about how you need to niche down your target audience so that you can sell more from your website. Instead of spinning your wheels, wasting your time and ending up having to go put a hairnet on and make your living asking people if they’d like fries with that. So, here’s the scoop. We got three tips for you. My whole goal is to see if I can make Stew crack up.
Stew: Almost got me…
Jim: I almost got him out of his nose yesterday, which was amazing. So, here’s the scoop, and this is going to be kind of a group discussion because Stew does this stuff a lot and he’s great at targeting his audience. So the first tip, even though Stew hates tips, we’re doing tips today, just to piss him off. The tip is why you need to know your audience first. You’re asking yourself, well, Jim, we’re supposed to be talking about sales copy and content. Yep, you do! But you can’t create sales copy that works, and you can’t create content that’s compelling unless you know your audience super, super well, that means you know who they are so that you can speak their language. You know who they are, so that you can speak to them one person at a time. Now what am I talking about with speak to them one person at a time? Here’s the thing, you need to understand this because this is really important and this is where a lot of people get hung up. So I’m doing the karate chop pay attention.
Stew: Knife hands…
Jim: This is what I’m talking about. Okay? I feel like Chris Farley… “Okay, this is important”. The thing you have to understand is that though a million people might read your ad, a million people might read your article, a million people might watch your video sales letter, a million people might read your sales letter. They’re going to do it one person at a time, which means you never ever, ever write or create or talk to the group. In your mind you’re writing to one person, you’re talking to one person. That’s how you do it. And the person that you’re talking to is the Avatar, the person that is the perfect representation of your target audience. That’s a neat little key that can make a huge difference for you. We never ever talk to a group, we talk to an individual in our mind. Say something, Stew.
Stew: That’s a good point. I never really thought of it that way. Do you keep all of your sales copy for that matter in first person?
Jim: Yes. You. You, I’m always addressing you.
Stew: Okay.
Jim: Now, how you can write a book in as little as three hours of total effort, even if you failed high school English class and never want to actually type… I just yanked that out of thin air. That’s in the first person.
Stew: Yeah, sure.
Jim: First person second or whatever.
Stew: It’s first.
Jim: It’s towards a specific person. Who is your target audience? Who is one of your target audiences because you actually have three in an umbrella. So who’s one of them? Who one group?
Stew: I would say young people, maybe late teens or early twenties that are preparing for military law enforcement or firefighter professions.
Jim: Okay. So that’s one group. You also have three groups within that group as well. Three subgroups because military, firefighter, and police… They have slightly different messages. So, you successfully grouped them together, but at some point you do have to break them apart.
Stew: Right.
Jim: Tell me when you’re talking to them, what are some words that you use with them that you wouldn’t use with the guys that are, you know, 50 plus or 40 plus?
Stew: Well, I tend to talk about the military law enforcement firefighter…instead of saying those three words together, now there’s been a new genre created in the last 10 years called tactical fitness
Jim: Right
Stew: Now I just group them all into the tactical fitness professions. Which people understand that, that are in that process of understanding the transfer from what they’re doing now to what they need to be doing.
Jim: Right! You’re speaking their language.
Stew: Yes, yes. Yeah, exactly.
Jim: You’re not talking about getting in shape, I mean…that’s a topic, but the words that you use are not, “hey, you need to get in shape so you can get a job”. No, it’s… “This is how we can get you through and to training, get hired in a tactical profession”. You’re using the language that they use, but typically, and if you go back and look or maybe just think through it in your mind – when you’re addressing people, are you addressing the group or in your mind, are you thinking of one or two people and visualizing them when you’re doing it or what? What are your thoughts on what I’ve said?
Stew: I need to go and look into that because, I agree with you. It should be, one person at a time is reading that sales copy or seeing that video. Yeah, I’ll, double check that. I’m pretty sure I say you and I. Often, I say I or we to make it feel like a Stew Smith fitness team.
Jim: Right
Stew: Right. Which we are, but you know, at the same time those are just two little subtle things that I use in the English language to try to communicate with my audience.
Jim: First person pronouns and what not . So, that’s the big thing though. Tip number one, you gotta know, you gotta know your audience. And the reason why you have got to know your audience is because you want to be able to talk their language. If you’re not talking their language, they’re ignoring you. Okay? That’s bottom line. Tip number two – you need to know where your audience is and how they communicate. Not how they communicate verbally or that kind of stuff, but literally what tools are they using to communicate? You’ve got to know where they are in order to be able to reach them. So an example of this would be Facebook versus Instagram. Now Stew is like Courtney Kardashians as far as Instagram goes, as far as the number of followers he has. And I mean he’s an Instagram stud. Why are you an Instagram Stud?
Stew: Well, I, that is where my audience is. You know, the younger audience prefers Instagram. They also like snapchat, which I haven’t figured out how to use snapchat for business yet. So I’m not there yet. Maybe part of the evolution of this year, we may figure that out. If anybody wants to try to figure that out.
Jim: Dude, if were to even say to my wife, “Oh yeah, Stew and I are on snapchat”, she’d be like, “Excuse me, are you trying to pick up chicks? What are you trying to do? You want to get on Snap Chat… What’s next? Tinder?” No, I mean, doing snapchat, I’m not allowed on Snap Chat…
Stew: I’ll tell you… I remember saying the same thing. I used to just communicate by email with my audience who just happened to be subscribers to that email address. And then Facebook came out and, um, I was like, man, I don’t want to get on Facebook. It’s just waste of time. You know, I’m hiding from old girlfriends anyway, so I don’t want to get on Facebook. Anyway, I figured out a way to make Facebook part of my business.
Jim: And it was actually your daughter who said, “dude, you need to get on Facebook”.
Stew: My wife said that.
Jim: Okay
Stew: But my daughter said I’ve got to get on Instagram.
Jim: Okay
Stew: Facebook, so yesterday, according to my 15 year old daughter at the time. So, but yeah, she was right. Instagram man… I think my Instagram has 10 times the followers on Instagram than I do Facebook.
Jim: Yeah, and they’re rabid for what you’re doing as opposed to me where Facebook is, where all my peeps are. And nobody really pays attention to me on Instagram because I play to the older, you know, 35 plus audience. I mean, I’m starting to see some younger folks, but it’s 35 pluses. My peeps, and I’ll be honest with you, I mean I was a late bloomer on Facebook. It’s only been in the last couple of years, that Facebook has really started to take off from me and, and a lot of it was, I didn’t know how to communicate on Facebook. What it would really take to communicate and honestly, it wasn’t until I did the Unicorn challenge, and we’ll talk about that another time. But basically I decided that I was going to post Unicorn related stuff and that became my little shtick. And anyway, it’s only really been the last couple of years. So that’s a two message thing. One, your audience is on Facebook and it doesn’t matter if you’re doing business related stuff, people are on Facebook. I don’t do anything really with Instagram or not Instagram with Linkedin. Neither of us really do much on Linkedin.
Stew: It’s not a bad idea. I may try to play around with some Linkedin this year with my 40 and over programs because that tends to be where that group and professionals are, and they’re trying to squeeze in exercise whenever they can. So I may play around with some of that. I’ll share with the group on how that is coming around.
Jim: There you go… So, that’s basically the second tip is you need to know where they are and how they’re communicating, so you could know their language, you could speak their language. And if I’m over on Snapchat, I’m gonna lose my business, lose my wife, lose my income because it’s just not the right place for me to be out there doing my thing with the business I have. If I wanted to start another type of business, you know, escort or you know, erotic massage or something. Maybe I need to be on craigslist and snapchat. I don’t know what, how does that work for you Stew?
Stew: I don’t know… (laughing) That’s not my business either.
Jim: Okay. I’m just checking. Anyway. Okay. So tip number three is how do I know if the niche audience, the size of my audience or niching down my audience is too big or is it too small? Am I getting too tightly down in there or is it just right? So you know what’s too big, what’s too small, what’s just right? So an example might be, authors, authors is a really broad group. Now, is it too broad and for me, yes. For what I’m doing, I want to make the distinction between fiction authors and nonfiction authors. We basically don’t do anything for fiction authors. It’s a whole different genre. Now we may do something for them this year, but maybe not. So we’ve got now nonfiction authors. Now within nonfiction authors, there are a couple of groups of nonfiction authors. There are, well there are several groups, but let’s just say people who write how to stuff and people who don’t write how to stuff. I want the people who want to write how to books, information books, mistakes books, step by step books, books that are based around teaching people information they can use. Because then it’s easy to sell. It’s easy to use that as a tool to build your business. It’s easy to target those people. It’s easy to target people like professionals that could use that kind of a book that’s just right for me as opposed to, again, nonfiction, but someone who’s writing historical biographies. Can’t help them. That’s not what I do. So knowing that and finding that group, that’s just right for me. Now, if I wanted to say people who write step by step tutorials for, people in the Philippines between the ages of 15 and 18, that’s probably niched down too far. Now, could I say, I only want to help real estate agents write books to build their real estate practice. Well knowing there’s 800,000 of them in the US as well as estate agents over in Britain. All of a sudden, even though that seems really tight, there’s a big enough audience there to support a business. So you know Stew, if you only focused on kids that wanted to go to buds, could you make the living that you make now?
Stew: No, you have to diversify.
Jim: Okay.
Stew: Absolutely.
Jim: But under the umbrella, so the kids who just want to go to buds, basic underwater demolition seal training, that’s too small. But now we add in anybody that wants to go into the military or special ops or anyone that wants to go to buds, anyone that knows to go special ops, anyone that wants to go in the military, anybody who wants to do police fire and military service. Now we’re getting to a group that’s a nice size group that’s constantly refreshing and refilling.
Stew: Yes.
Jim: We also, have a group that’s already in those professions, so Stew actually segments this way too. It’s the to, through and after. So it’s getting people to those professions once they’re in the profession or in the training, it’s getting through the training. And then finally, once they’re in that job, it’s helping them to stay in that job. So he’s got this group but little groups within that he’s matriculating through the process. And you actually found another group by accident that you kind of knew was there, but you didn’t realize how big they were, which was the tactical fitness athletes over 40 and their specific needs, which has turned into a nice niche.
Stew: Yeah. And once again, that was a demonstration of how to write an ebook and get it posted up on Amazon.
Jim: Right
Stew: Right. And printed out on a Create Space.
Jim: Sure.
Stew: That Jim methods showed us and I was just, I said, you know what? I got an idea for a book, I’ll, I’ll use this one while we show everybody how to do it.
Jim: Right
Stew: And sure enough, that was, I was one of my best sellers ever instill is, you know, in fact, I came up with not only that one, but I came up with a four part series just off of that one. And now it’s, you know, four books in a, in a series that go with the tactical fitness over 40.
Jim: So knowing your audience is critical and key to the process. So the last part of this tip though of is it too big, too small or just right? You need to be able to reach your audience cost effectively. That’s the other thing. You may know where a million people are that, but if you can’t reach them, it’s not going to be any good if you can’t buy an ad. If you can’t post content, if you can’t get value in front of them, if the only way you can do it is to run $1 million worth of infomercials, then that’s probably not the best place for you to be. So the last part of that is, you know, too big, too small, just right and can, I can actually reach them. Now that’s the beauty of social media is that now you can reach pretty much anybody about any topic, which is cool but is also kind of freaky too. But we won’t get into that. So, the big takeaways for you guys, my big takeaways for you, number one, target your audience first and number two, make sure you tailor your message to them. Use their language. Number three, no where they are and how to reach them. And, if you don’t do this, there’s a little penalty and the penalty is, um, you can have the best sales copy in the world. You can have the most compelling content in the world and it won’t matter because if you don’t do all of these things, you’re not going to hit the audience. You’re not going to speak their language and they’re not going to see your message. So before we wrap up with an amazing call to action, Stew, do you have any final thoughts?
Stew: My biggest thing to also remember too is you know, when you know your audience, get to know your audience. Also realize your audience, especially if you’ve been in the business for awhile, is also evolving. But not only are they evolving and getting older. Right? They are the platforms of which you communicate are also evolving. So you have to stay open to all the neat things that Facebook is coming up with, like being able to post videos and go Facebook live and Instagram live and tag products and your posts now and have a Facebook store. So people don’t even have to go to Google anymore to find your products. They find them on Facebook, right? So all of those things require not only knowing your audience, you know, having the products that your audience wants, but also being able to evolve with technology so you can take quick advantage of that type of, of knowledge.
Jim: And keep getting your sales copy and your content in front of people on those new platforms or as those platforms evolve. So that’s a great point. That’s a great add. Good job, Stew.
Stew: Thank you…
Jim: You’re Awesome. Alright guys. Well, here’s your big call to action. If you have not already, you need to go join the Sales Copywriting & Content Marketing Hacks Facebook group because it’s super cool and all the cool kids are in it. How’s that for a compelling benefit? But actually the group is doing awesome and people were able to get critiques in there. Everybody’s getting ideas and we share content that you can’t get anywhere else. Stew and I are always throwing videos in there. You threw one in there the other day to show how we actually made one of the podcasts using a wizard. It was pretty neat. So it’s, it’s a great place to go and get news information and things you can use. So you want to do that at thejimedwardsmethod.com/group. And I’m Jim Edwards and he’s
Stew: Stew Smith. Let’s do…
Jim: We will see you. Sorry I interrupted…
Stew: You’re messing up my tagline.
Jim: I’m Jim Edwards and he’s
Stew: Stew Smith. Let’s do this.
Jim: We’ll see you next time on the Sales, Copywriting and Content Marketing podcast. Bye Bye everybody.
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