Imagine Your Reality

In the previous two posts, I focused on identifying your audience and your business model. After you’ve done these two steps, your next step is to focus on learning what your audience needs. Ideally, you already know this since you have clients you are taking care of, but it doesn’t hurt to spend some time checking in on what they need.

First spend sometime writing down key words and phrases that you believe sum up the need that your business meets. You can also include words that you believe people would use to search for your business. You want to think about this in term of need, because what you’re doing is solving a problem of some form or another for the people who are your clients. They may like your service, but what they love is that a problem is being solved.

Next, ask some existing clients what need it is that your service or product fulfills for them. See if what they say matches up to the words you’ve already used to describe the need your business fulfills.  You might also ask them at the time, how well you fulfill their needs and/or what complaints they have. Your reason for asking that question is to learn how to be more proactive with your customer service, a must for using social media for marketing your business.

Finally, compare what you wrote with what your clients told you and determine if there is a trend toward using certain phrases or words to describe what your business does. You’ll then want to get on Twitter or Facebook and search for those same words to see if people on social media sites are using them in context to the problem your business solves. If they are then you can use those phrases for your SEO, and also for finding people on social media sites who need your services (and don’t know it yet).