Step 1 – Identify and Target the Right Customer

I talk to a lot of business owners looking to build their first online course. Many times I see them starting off fully focused on the technology.

BIG MISTAKE.

Even if you are really technical and love tinkering with tech, avoid the temptation. The last three steps in this mini-course are all technical. That’s important too, but your first priority before anything else is to get your online course selling. If your course won’t sell, nothing else matters.

In order to get it selling, you need to understand the following:

what is it your customer wants,
what do they believe they need (even if they are mistaken), and
how is it you are going to to get them to notice you.

I want to remind you that your ideal customer is out there looking for someone exactly like you. They have a problem they want to solve badly and they are searching for a way to solve it. They could be frustrated that they haven’t found a solution they think is going to work.

Like all of us, they are bombarded by hundreds and thousands of marketing messages. That’s just a part of life. Most of the ads and messages they get are poorly targeted. Think of solutions for balding men that are blasted at women or at men with a full head of hair. This is the noise of every day life.

You may be thinking that the way to get noticed is to:

yell louder,
post bigger ad banners,
publish more articles and videos,
run more social media campaigns or
broadcast more and more email messages.

Those aren’t a bad thing, but the most important thing is to understand how your ideal customer thinks about the problem they want to solve.

You need into get into your buyers head to understand exactly how they feel about their problem. This is not easy. It’s made even more difficult because you, the expert, knows your topic so well. It’s been a very long time since you were a newbie in the areas where you practice. You have forgotten how it FEELS. You no longer feel the challenges, frustrations and fears newbies face when thinking about their problem.

Your ideal customer is NOT shopping based on how your solutions fixes their problem. They are shopping driven by the anxiety, worry and concern caused by their problem. We have to connect with that state of mind to get your ideal client to notice you.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to spend the time, effort and resources required to get this step done right. This is the proverbial silver bullet. You need to uncover this and it’s what will get you in front of your ideal customers.

This is all easy to say, but how do we go about doing this?

Here is what I have found works best:

Schedule a call with your best current or past customers. You need someone that has gone through the process of looking for you and found you. It can also be people familiar with what you do and could be potential clients.
Ask them three questions:
1. When it comes to (Your Topic), what is your biggest challenge?
2. When it comes to (Your Topic), what is your biggest frustration?
3. When it comes to (Your Topic), what is your biggest fear?
Record or write down exactly what they say to you. It would be great if you could get 8 to 12 of these.

What this gets you is honest feedback on how people perceive what it is your sell. it gets you into THEIR perspective. It forces you to step out of your expert mode and see your topic, the stuff you do, through the eyes of the people that do NOT know your topic.

You are facing a problem that all experts face. You have been doing this for a long time. It’s naturally difficult to put yourself in the newbie’s shoes (or the head). Avoid thinking like the expert that solves the problem and avoid assuming you know what a newbie needs.

You must forget all that you know, suck up your pride and admit you do NOT know your customers. Then listen intensely to what someone who knows very little about what you do and learn to “feel like they feel.”

If you can get an firm understanding of what you customer feels as they search for what it is you can do for them, you drastically up your chances of getting noticed. You will stand out because you will connect in a way that gets your ideal customer thinking, “They get me.”

The next step is to review your sales model and how you sell your course(s).