How to Create the Perfect Offer (it has nothing to do with copy)

As a conversion copywriter a big part of my job is…writing.

But I get the most valuable copy from (and spend most of my time)…LISTENING.

I’ve you’ve ever heard me teach before, I’m usually on some sort of market research soap box.

Because here’s the thing…you are the key to building the solution your audience needs, but you AREN’T the decision maker when it comes to what solution is needed.

Your audience is the starting point for every marketing process in your business.

Your genius, your solution, is always second.

In the marketing hierarchy:

AUDIENCE >OFFER>COPY

Copy is always last.

‘Cause no matter how brilliant your copy is, it can’t fix the wrong offer.

YOUR OFFER IS ANY SOLUTION YOU HAVE CREATED FOR YOUR AUDIENCE.

It could be a course, a group program, a done-for-you-service, a workshop, a podcast, a training series, a download, a physical product…

It is always a solution to a specific problem.

So to create an offer that sells, you need to start with your audience. Like almost everything else in marketing, you’ve gotta reverse engineer your path to success.

“You don’t find customers for your products. You find products for your customers.” -Seth Godin

YOUR AUDIENCE

Before you’re ready to create your solution, your offer, launch a new service, launch a new course, launch a product, whatever…you’ve gotta look at your audience.

If you have an email list or even a few followers, you have an existing audience.

If you don’t – start building one. Get your business on social media, it’s free and the learning curve is small!

Start teaching, do Instagram stories, make posts, and see who is connecting with you and what they are connecting with.

  • Are they engaging with certain types of posts?
  • Are they responding to certain topics you’re teaching?
  • What are they getting excited about?
  • If you have an email list, what are they replying to?

Keep your antennas tuned for the questions that they ask.

The words that you hear come up often, for the thing, the common threads, the problems that they have, anxieties, the stressors, what specifically is popping up for them that they struggle with that they come to you to solve?

This stuff is GOLD. (Tuck it all away, because you can use it!)

If you can become a good listener for your audience…really hearing them and finding the message in between the lines–then you are going to be able to serve them in a way that gets them excited to buy from you.

Okay, so we’ve been a really good listener, we figured out what they want, what they need, what they come to us for.

Now what?

You’re going to find your gap in the market.

YOUR SOLUTIONS

Once you’ve studied your audience like a Stage 5 clinger, you’ll be WAY more informed and ready to create an offer that actually converts (instead of one that sits in your GSuite for 2 years collecting dust.)

If you’ve gathered some good intel but still don’t know where to start…look at the other people in your industry.

Study influencers in your niche as well as your peers. Take a pulse on your market.

→ What isn’t being talked about, what soapbox isn’t being said, what is not being addressed?

→ Is there a part of your audience’s journey that they’re really struggling with because it’s not being addressed?

Maybe everyone’s teaching the beginning stage of that journey in your niche. And maybe a lot of people are teaching that end stage, like that big mastermind level. But there isn’t anybody hitting that middle area. That’s a gap!

Where’s the gap that you fit in?

Think about what people respond and resonate with.

You’re going to go back and you’re going to refer to the data that you’ve gathered. What did people tell you? What did they like? What did they tell you they were able to take and digest and act on and get a win from?

Just LISTEN! Listen to your people.

VALIDATING YOUR OFFER

This is something that I do in some way, shape or form with every single client that I have.

If you’re new, you might not be doing this yet. But if you aren’t, go put a notification in your calendar quarterly to check in and do this.

I want you to study your audience and ask really specific questions of them to start figuring out what the offer they want looks like.

You can create it and sell it because you are creating an offer for your customers for your audience.

You can do this a couple different ways. You can use an Instagram poll, on a Facebook post, in an email list… wherever your audience is, you’re going to start to ask questions and survey.

LAUNCH YOUR OFFER

One you’ve done some detective-level listening, and enough research to know you have a validated offer….

IT’S TIME TO LAUNCH!

Launching isn’t this scary, big deal process reserved for the industry elite.

It’s just putting your offer out there, testing, looking at the data, analyzing and repeating.

(Yeah. That’s pretty much it.)

The most important thing is that you’re creating an offer for your existing audience.

Then, ya just launch it…get it out there, get creative, look at what worked, what didn’t work, keep interviewing/asking people and tweak as needed.

So that, my friends, is how you’re going to create the perfect offer that sells – by creating one for your audience (not the other way around) validating it, and launching it followed by your test, analyze, rinse, repeat cycle.


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(promise, no incessant emails, mostly ’cos it’s annoying… but mostly because I have no time for that.)