How to Use Buyer Biology to Get More Clients
Coaches who don’t understand these 3 things will struggle to build their businesses
If you’d like to know how I help coaches flood their businesses with new clients, then you’re going to like what I’m sharing with you today!
This is particularly important if you are…
Trying to market yourself online to get clients
Want to scale your business
Today I’m going to tell you about the 3 most important things you need to know about marketing. When you understand these 3 things, you’ll make decisions that will make your marketing much more effective at getting you new clients.
How Temperature Affects Your Marketing
The first thing you need to know about marketing is that the people in your audience have a temperature.
I’m not talking about them being sick with a fever. I’m talking about a buying temperature. They will be either hot, warm, or cold.
If you work in a clinic, the people walking in the door are hot. They know they want the kind of help you provide, which is why they made the appointment to see you.
But in most cases, an online audience is stone cold. They have no idea who you are or why they should pay any attention to you.
That’s why using a “direct” advertising approach rarely works well.
By direct I mean ads that are about who you are and what you do. For example, ads that promote your expertise, such as nutritionist, chiropractor, or hypnotherapist. The only people who will respond to ads like that are people who’ve already decided they want that specific kind of help. In copywriting lingo, we call them “solution aware.”
Here’s why taking a solution aware approach is a problem for you.
Most people are only aware of mainstream solutions. And if you’re a natural health practitioner, you most likely have solutions that fall outside of mainstream medicine.
So people with low back pain who’ve tried to get help from chiropractors, for example, may feel they’re destined to have back pain the rest of their life because it keeps coming back. They don’t know that there could be other things that will work better.
The reality is, most people are “problem aware.” They are very aware of the problem they have, but not necessarily aware of the different kinds of solutions available to them to get rid of it for good.
If you use a solution aware approach to a problem aware audience, you and your audience will pass each other by like 2 ships in the night. Your audience will stay cold. And a cold audience won’t buy.
Your online marketing must be designed to attract a cold audience and warm them up. (That’s why a webinar or “masterclass” funnel is so effective. It’s my favorite way to bring in a cold audience because when it’s done right, it warms them up fast!)
It all starts with attracting a cold audience. That’s the #1 goal of your online marketing. And here’s how to do it…
Use “Buyer Biology” to Get People to Pay Attention to You
There are SO MANY things trying to grab our attention today. So you have to stack the odds in your favor.
The only way you'll have a fighting chance of doing this is by using buyer biology.
To understand buyer biology, we have to take a quick peek inside the brain. (This won’t hurt a bit – I promise.)
As you may know, our brains are wired to solve problems. At the core, these problems are all about basic survival – staying safe, finding food, and sex (for survival of the species, of course).
Of course the world and our brains have evolved a lot over time. The newer parts of the brain (the mammalian brain and the prefrontal cortex) are more developed.
And there are a lot more choices available to us that affect the quality of our survival, like the kind of shelter we live in, the type of food we eat, and the type of mates we choose (even how we find and attract them).
But our brain hardware hasn’t changed.
So as we go about our daily lives, our brain is looking for solutions to problems that affect our survival, both physically and emotionally.
The brain filters out and completely ignores most of the 4,000 to 10,000 messages we’re bombarded with every day. It has to because it’s impossible for it to process them all.
But when our brain registers a message that’s related to one of our problems, it pays attention.
I remember when I was shopping for my first 4-door car. For years, I’d only driven Jeep Wranglers (my spirit car). But once I had my son, I thought I should buy something more practical. That was before Jeep came out with their 4-door Wrangler. So my husband suggested a Subaru Legacy.
All of a sudden, I saw Subaru Legacys everywhere. Did half the population of Connecticut suddenly decide to buy a Legacy?
Of course not. But since my husband had suggested a Subaru Legacy might solve my problem of what car to buy, my brain was trying to help me out. So it noticed every Legacy on the road.
For many health coaches who feel like they’re spinning their wheels with their marketing, it’s often because their messaging doesn’t make it past people’s brain filter. It’s too generic. Or it doesn’t focus on a problem the person is aware they have.
So the best way to get people to notice you is with marketing that focuses on a specific problem they want solved
I often get resistance from health coaches and practitioners when I tell them that. They say they can solve many problems. They may even say they have 1 solution that can stop anything from joint pain to brain fog.
It doesn’t matter. If you want to build a successful online business, you need to have an offer that focuses on ONE problem because that’s how you get a cold audience to pay attention. (I talked about how to pick the best problem to focus on in this article.)
That doesn’t mean that’s the only thing you’ll ever do. This isn’t about “picking a niche” that you’ll be stuck in forever.
Once you’ve reached a certain point of success with one offer, you can expand into others. (I’ll cover that topic in a future article.)
So the first 2 things you need to know about marketing to get more clients is:
Your marketing needs to attract a cold audience and then warm them up
Your marketing needs to focus on one problem people are aware they have
Now let’s get to the last thing…
Some Like It Fast
The last thing you need to know about marketing to get new health coaching clients is “buying speed.” Because there are fast buyers and slow buyers.
With the right kind of marketing assets in place, you’ll get some people to jump on board right away. They get warmed up quickly.
But there’s a larger percentage of people who need more time to decide if they want to work with you. Maybe the time isn’t right or they need to get to know you a bit better.
Let me show you how this breaks down in terms of percentages. (This is based on some research that was done on buyer behavior, but I don’t remember which study it was.)
Research shows that 50% of people you reach will never buy from you. So you can forget about them.
Of the 50% left, about 15% of people will buy from you within 90 days (some of them immediately). And 85% will buy sometime between 90 days and 180 days.
So your biggest new client opportunity is with the 90-180 day group. That’s why one of the most important things your marketing needs to do is help you build your email list.
Because if you take good care of your email list, it can become the best source of new clients for you.
Here’s a nice data point I got from a company called Brevet, who helps companies build their sales teams:
Email is almost 40 times better at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter
So while social media (including ads on social media) is a great way to first engage with people, over time most of your new clients will come from your email list. The key here is to nurture them (which I’ll cover in another article).
So to recap, if you want your marketing to be more effective in helping you get more clients…
Your marketing needs to attract a cold audience and then warm them up
Your marketing needs to focus on one problem people are aware they have
Marketing to your email list is an important part of your marketing strategy
I’ll be covering how to do each of these things in upcoming articles.
If you learned something new reading this article, it would mean a lot to me if you’d give it a like. (And feel free to share it to others who might find it helpful.)
If you want more ways to build your health coaching business, consider upgrading to paid or even becoming a Founding Member. You can get the details on the benefits by clicking below.