When I was in my 20’s, I worked at a yoga studio in exchange for free yoga.
It was a great deal. After a year or two, I was able to touch my toes for the first time since I was 6.
The manager invited me to her birthday party. It was basically me and a room full of yoga teachers.
At one point I looked around realized, “Hmm, nobody’s drinking but me.” I had a beer and everyone else was drinking kombucha or whatever.
Then things got weird.
Some of the women started doing yoga poses together. Stuff like “Oh hey, look, I’ve been practicing putting my leg around my head while on my hands”. Then someone else would be like “Oh hey that’s cool let me try.”
Then some dude started doing poses and a woman started doing poses off of him. He would crouch down into Weeping Spider (I made that up) and she would stand on his hip, “lengthen her spine” (or do whatever yoga people do) and dangle off him.
They did stuff like this.
The party continued like that for quite some time.
A bunch of people in a room doing yoga poses. For fun.
I remember looking at this and realizing:
“OOOOOHHHH! I don’t belong here.”
They were nice enough people. But they weren’t my people.
I had a similar experience in college.
At first, I went out for the lacrosse team. But I didn’t really vibe with the private-school frat-guy vibe there.
Then I tried soccer. And things didn’t click.
Then I joined rugby. I was instantly friends with a lot of the team and stuck with it for years. (Turned out people who spent Saturday night belting rugby songs in the middle of the field was exactly where I belonged.)
Anyway, in business, it’s just as important to find “your people.”
A lot of times I see people THINK they’ve done that.
After all, they’ve got a big audience of people they can help.
And they ask that big audience about their pain and struggles and then come up with offers to help them solve those problems.
But then they launch the offer and hardly anyone buys.
Usually, when that happens, they blame the copy.
But the issue may actually be the audience (or the offer. Copy is about 20% of the game, audience, and offer is the other 80%.)
These people may seem like you’re ideal customers. But if you look close, you may find they are missing one key quality: They’re not buyers.
They may just be freebie seekers. Or people who say they’d spend money to solve a problem until it’s time to take out their wallet… Then they realize “Eh, I’m good“.
So a big question to ask with your audience is:
Have they actually put down money to solve the exact problem you are trying to solve?
If so, they are a great potential customer.
If not, there’s still hope, but it’s much less likely.
The next question then is how do you attract BUYERS?
Again, this is why surveying your audience isn’t always the best. You’re mixing up data of non-buyers and buyers.
It’s better to go straight to the source.
Do a case study interview with some of your happy customers. (You can use my book for what questions to ask and how to write a high-converting case study)
You’ll get a badass case study out of it that you can use in launches, cold traffic funnels, welcome sequences, and other autoresponders…
PLUS… you’ll get stories, quotes, pain points, objections, and other copy for your emails, sales pages, webinars, ads, and more.
I’ve got a whole system on how to organize case study interviews to give you just about all the copy you need to turn skeptics into buyers. You can learn about that here.
It can help you write A-level copy even if you’re in a pinch. And it makes it so any copywriter you hire does a great job for you (even the ones that only cost $30/hour) because all the copy they need to connect with your audience and move them to buy is right there. They’ve just got to copy and paste it.