Have you really figured out who your ideal customer is and what they need from you? Truly understanding your ideal customer will help your SEO efforts because you'll know you're creating the right type of content for your audience. The way your audience interacts with your website is really important to your online marketing, conversion, email list building, and SEO. If you're creating content they aren't interested in, they're not going to stay, sign up for your freebies, become leads, or purchase from you.
Do you know who your ideal customer really is? How well do you know them? Listen to this episode and find out what to check and how to make your online marketing work better.
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Podcast recording and editing - Descript
Episode Transcript
Hi.
Welcome back to the podcast.
I am your host, RachelLindteigen.
I'm so glad that you're herewith me today.
I want to talk about somethingthat I've seen pop up more and
more, and that is how to really,truly identify your ideal
customer and why it matters forSEO.
Because I have new students askme regularly, why does this
(00:25):
matter?
So who your ideal customer is,is critical to the success of
your SEO program because youneed to be creating content for
them.
And if it's not created forthem, if you don't really know
who they are, it's going to bemuch harder for you to create
the right content.
And the right content for you isgoing to be so dependent upon
(00:49):
your niche, your customer, whoare you trying to connect with?
What questions do they have?
What information do they need?
And what I find is.
Most entrepreneurs think theyknow their ideal customer, but
then when you start askingquestions, they realize, oh my
gosh, I don't think I know themas well as I thought I did.
And so what I wanna walk youthrough is kind of what I work
(01:11):
with my students on to help themunderstand like, who are you
trying to reach?
So let's say you're juststarting out.
You're one of my newerlisteners.
You're newer entrepreneur, maybeyou're building your website,
maybe you have it already.
Maybe you have your products andservices, or you know what
you're offering, but you haven'treally sold to anyone yet.
(01:34):
So you're still trying to figureout.
Who you're helping.
So let's just say that that'swhere you are, and that's okay.
You are going to need to buildan audience in order to build
this business of yours,especially if it's an online
business.
So think about if your businessis tied to something that you've
done in the past, or it's basedupon something that you've
(01:56):
learned how to do for yourself,then your ideal customer could
easily be an earlier version ofyourself.
Or it could be somebody that youworked with one-on-one that you
helped, even if it was free, itdoesn't necessarily have to be
that you were paid by thisperson, but you were able to
help them.
You guided them, you answeredtheir questions, because that's
(02:19):
gonna be really important tounderstand.
What are your ideal customersquestions?
What are they concerned about?
What do they need to know?
What do they wish they knew?
What keeps them up at night?
All of that.
It's going to be very important.
Maybe you've been around for awhile, but you are not, you're
(02:40):
starting to realize as you thinkabout this, you know, I'm not
sure what keeps my idealcustomer up at night.
I don't know what theirobjections are, like, I want to
sell X, but.
I don't know how to anticipatethe objections because you do
have to address people'sobjections before they're going
to buy from you.
(03:00):
So if you're in a situation likethat where you're like, huh, I
know'em, but maybe I don't know'em as well as I thought I did,
I.
Then I want you to really thinkabout it.
If you already are established,you have some customers, you
have an advantage because youcan ask if anybody would be
willing to chat with you for 10or 15 minutes, maybe 20 minutes
at the most, to get a feel forit.
Ask how you can help them, whatquestions they have, what
(03:24):
information they would want fromsomebody, what they would have
to make, what decisions they'dhave to make.
Before purchasing, why theymaybe wouldn't wanna purchase
your offer, et cetera.
Now you wanna be careful here.
Ideally, you wanna work withpeople who are already in your
ecosystem, but are not friendsor relatives because your
friends and relatives are goingto be less likely to tell you
(03:45):
the truth if they think whatyou're doing is stupid or they
think it doesn't make sense orthey don't understand.
Stand, whereas somebody who isnot so closely tied to you will
generally give you betterfeedback and you can learn more
from them.
So because we're so cautioussometimes of our friends and
relatives and their feelings, wedon't wanna hurt their feelings.
(04:08):
Sometimes the information we getfrom them is not as helpful as
if it came from someone else.
So if you.
Let's say you are here, you'vebeen around for a while.
You have a website, you havesocial pages.
You can also look at theinformation in your analytics,
so look at Google Analytics andget a feel for which of my blog
(04:28):
posts do they like.
Which pages do they engage onfor the longest amount of time?
Which pages do they basicallycome and leave immediately?
Because that tells you theydidn't really like that topic,
it's not really helping them.
You can also find analyticsinformation to find out like
where are they from.
Sometimes you can.
See age range, stuff like thatin your accounts.
Also on social, you're gonna geta feel for which posts work
(04:50):
well, which posts don't workwell.
Um, you'll learn gender, you'lllearn age, all of that in your
analytics, on your socialdashboards.
If you have a podcast, this is agreat one a lot of people don't
realize, but if you have apodcast and you go to your Apple
Podcast, connect.
You can actually see yourconsumption information for your
(05:10):
podcast episodes.
That can quickly tell you whichcontent topics are the most
interesting to your audience.
So I looked at this with aclient recently.
She was trying to figure out hercontent strategy.
She knew something wasn'tworking quite right, but she
couldn't put her finger on it.
She needed some help.
And so we took a look at herpodcast just to see, and her
(05:30):
podcast is fantastic.
She's a top 5% podcaster.
She gets tons of downloads.
It nurtures people, does greatfor her, but she couldn't put
her finger on why something.
It just felt off.
It just seemed like somethingwas wrong.
And so we went into her ApplePodcast Connect and we were able
to see her follower.
Growth is good, her listenersare good.
Her engaged listeners were notas great as we would like,
(05:53):
meaning not as many peopleengaged completely with her
episodes.
And an engaged listener listensto, I believe it's 40% of the
episode, and or 10 minutes ofthe episode in one sitting.
So her engaged listeners was alittle lower than we would've
liked, and it was like, hmm.
Ding, ding, ding.
We have something wrong.
So then we went and we looked atthe consumption rate, the
(06:15):
consumption percentage, and shereleases a post, a podcast
episode each week, and severalof those had a consumption
percentage of about 40%, whichtells me her audience did not
like those episodes.
They did not finish them.
They moved on to something else.
We want our consumptioninformation to be, our
consumption rate to be like 80to 90% even better, because that
(06:36):
tells us people are reallyinterested in what we're
creating.
So in that situation, she wasable to figure out that her
ideal customer does not likethat topic.
It is not engaging to them.
She needs to create less contenton that topic, whereas we saw.
Other podcast episodes that hadconsumption rates above a
hundred percent.
So people were listening to itmore than once.
(06:57):
That told us, this is a reallyhot topic for my audience.
This is something I shoulddefinitely be talking about more
often.
So when you are creatingcontent, you are trying to
figure out who your idealcustomer is.
You're trying to grow abusiness, it's gonna be really
important that you look beyondjust the demographic.
My ideal customer is Jessica andshe's.
(07:20):
40 years old and she has twokids and she used to work in
corporate and now she works forherself out of her house.
Great.
But that doesn't really tell memuch about Jessica other than
she's 40 and she's got two kidsand she's got a house.
What I wanna know is more aboutthe psychographic information.
What is Jessica reallyinterested in?
What does she like?
(07:40):
How does she spend her time?
How does she commute?
What questions does she have?
I don't want you just to stop atmy ideal customer is this
person.
I want you to really create agood narrative around them.
You should know your idealcustomer as well as you know
your best friend.
You should be able to describethem as well as you describe
your best friend.
You should know how many yearsthey've been in business, or how
(08:01):
many years they've been tryingto learn the thing that you
teach, or how long they've beenstruggling with what they're
struggling with.
You should know what keeps themup at night.
What questions do they have?
How do they feel their lifewould change?
If they were able to do whateverit is that you help with or sell
or take care of that likewhatever it is that you do, how
(08:22):
would their life change?
You need to know why they'reafraid to take that leap, and
then you use all of thatinformation to help you build
out your content strategy sothat you are providing the
content that they need.
You're then optimizing it tomake sure that they're able to
find it, and you're using thatto help you really determine
(08:44):
what your offers are, yourproducts, your solutions, et
cetera, so that you're truly,truly, truly serving them.
You don't wanna just create whatyou think they want.
You want to understand them sothat you can connect with them,
because you also, especiallyfrom an SEO standpoint, if you
don't understand them.
You don't know the words thatthey use, and if you don't know
(09:05):
the words that they use, you'renot going to have the right
words in your cop or in yourblog post or on your podcast
episode.
Whether you are optimizing for apodcast search engine, an AI
search engine.
Or a traditional search engine,you need to know what words your
ideal customer is using in allthree situations in order to
(09:27):
succeed in today's world.
If you wanna grow a businessonline, it's really important
that you understand this and youreally focus on it because this
is going to be.
The core of everything that youdo is creating the great content
that helps them.
And if you don't know them wellenough, you won't know what
content to create and you may ormay not create what they're
(09:49):
looking for and what they needhelp with.
So that's why I want you toreally focus on that.
If you're one of my students,you know, you now have a custom
GPT that helps you and guidesyou through the process of
really truly identifying andoutlining.
Who your ideal customer isbecause of how important this
is.
If you're not yet one of mystudents, why not?
(10:09):
Come on, join me in class.
Let me help you with this.
Let me guide you through thisthe same way that I'm helping
everyone else.
I would love to be able to workon this with you.
And then you get access to thecustom GPT that helps you to
figure out all of this.
Who are you connecting with,what words do you need to use,
what information do they needfrom you?
And then it also will help youfigure out what content topics
(10:31):
to write about.
And then we have another onethat helps you.
Work through the, both thetraditional SEO and the AI SEO
to make sure the content you'recreating is designed to be
visible online because thatvisibility is key to growth.
Alright, that's it for today.
I want to challenge you to takea look at your ideal customer
(10:54):
narrative and determine if youreally truly know your ideal
customer.
As well as you know, your bestfriend, or if it's time to do
some revisions and refinementand get to know him or her, or
they, depending on who yourideal customer is, better.
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