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Bye-bye to broad-spectrum content. It's time to tap into your audience's deepest desires and create meaningful connections.
As a business owner, you are not just a manager but a co-creator of your brand's ecosystem. Building a community starts with being a good listener, and your role is crucial in this process.
In life before the internet, the ears of shopkeepers absorbed hundreds of customer stories and secrets that played out in front of them while they kept watch over their stores. They knew all their customers inside out, and, just as importantly, they knew who wasn’t their ideal customer. They knew Sam’s hopes and fears, what Marianne kept at the back of her kitchen cupboards, Dexter’s dreams of moving on and up in life, and the small details like the most significant hurdle wide-footed Mike faced when trying to find a pair of shoes that fit him.
Whatever you put out into the world, people always respond if you make them feel seen and heard. To be a keeper of hopes, dreams, and fears means to have immense power because our desire to be understood is universal.
So when you sell online, shopkeeper mode begins with listening, hearing and seeing.
Businesses that are good at listening bring more people into their world. They understand how to connect with people, and when you know exactly who you’re talking to, you come across as confident—especially when you’ve created a tone of voice and are committed to creating content that matters to your customers. These are the brands that build a loyal community.
One problem with marketing is that it’s too easy to be broad. You sell yoga wear, OK, but a bit broad.
Meet Martin and Elena
Martin in Southend, who’s been overweight his whole life but feels compelled to try yoga as part of his new healthy and healing lifestyle and wants to buy some kit that won’t make him feel out of place or stupid, is a world away from Elena the lifelong yoga practitioner who drinks Yogi teas, lives for outdoor gatherings and moonlight swims.
Martin wants to fit in and feel included; he’s still hurting over the years; he was fat-shamed and feels embarrassed and out of place in this new environment. He’s loyal to that brand when he buys and will go all in.
Elena cares about not wearing synthetic fibres because of her connection to nature and the realisation that she needs to be more activist to secure a better world for her kids. If she finds a brand committed to their impact journey, even if they’re not yet perfect, she’ll go all in.
We must know more about what matters to your 'hell yes' people. Sorry to break it to you, but not everyone who shops at Waitrose will want to buy your new yoga wear (you might be amazed at how many people say they want to attract men and women over 40 who live in the UK).
If you’re struggling with being more specific, work on your values. Remember, people on your wavelength always stop and read if you write something that they empathise with. The wrong people will float on by, and that’s good, too!
It’s not bad to lose friends and alienate people in the world of marketing. It's a sign that you're connecting with the right audience.
Get obsessed with your customers' fears, hopes, and dreams, and you can find the universals that will shape your content and every touchpoint your brand has in the world.
A breakdown of desires
If you can break down 5-7 types of customers and understand what they care about, that can be conveyed in your content. Another yoga company might use typical marketing copy. “5 things to know before your first ever yoga class”
But you can do better!
Let’s think about Martin; that won’t get his heart racing and nodding as he scrolls through his feed. How about sharing an interview with someone who was also overweight or shamed in some way and found that yoga helped their lifestyle transformation and was a part of their healing journey? Martin will love that story and feel inspired to take action. People love stories about people.
For Elena, sharing your journey to be kinder to the planet is important. What have you learned along the way? How are you examining your supply chain and manufacturing processes to make kinder choices? Maybe kindness is a core value that you talk about. Maybe inclusivity is a core part of your product and messaging.
It’s your responsibility to create a world your people want to be part of.
Our manifesto
A manifesto we use here to govern how we understand our client’s customers:
You have to meet people where they’re at and talk to them in their language so you sound like one of their trusted friends, not like a marketing copywriter putting out the same glib statements or article titles. Give your people credit!
If you sell online, you are connecting with audiences, not selling to consumers, at every single stage of their journey with you. You have to know their hopes, aspirations, and barriers to buying from you and bring them along for the wild ride of your brand journey.
Every product, article, post, email, customer service follow-up, and phone interaction has to be on the same page and come from the same place of understanding.
Your themes and stories can be told in hundreds of ways, which is where you connect with the many people within a single demographic.
Lost for something to say? You can never go wrong by sharing your why and values. Why did you create this business? What change do you want to see in the world? Where are you on the path
Connection first, commerce second. Treat every post and interaction as an opportunity to create a connection. The ask for a sale is always secondary.
Get an ‘ideal’ customer vision board together; it helps you focus on the feelings, emotions and colours you associate with them, not just the demographics. Neuroscience tells us that we’re more likely to achieve something if we’ve laid it down in a visual way that we can look over or post right in front of our desks or on our phones for a daily dream to tell the universe it's what we want.
Listen like a CEO - Like the CEO who walks the shop floor to see and hear what employees and customers say, review sites are hugely underrated as a listening service. Who else are the reviews talking about? What seems to matter most to them?
Surveys - We send surveys to learn more about people's wants. Simple - are you interested in X Y or Z more? Which stories get shared the most? Where is engagement coming from? Email and social are brilliant platforms for listening when used correctly. With Cimmermann, we have warmed our audience up with a lot of great emails so that when we posted a survey about what made a house a home, over 65% of subscribers filled it in with loads of extra comments and insight that informed us so much of what we do going forward.
Up close and personal—Google reports are useful for understanding broad patterns, but you need to get up close and personal to get a feeling. Ask people to give feedback on your content, read comments, and pick out core themes that crop up every month. Make the changes. Ask the people commenting to review those changes.
What sells and doesn’t sell? An obvious one, but where are the purchase patterns? Can we ask why people are abandoning carts? I found something better, cheaper, etc.
Who’s doing it well?
Successful online retailers invest in knowing their customers and giving them what they want, even if they don’t know it yet. This is about creating a world and a feeling and speaking directly to people’s desires.
Lick does this well with its online magazine, In Good Taste. They know that even if people aren’t ready to decorate a room, they can be there to inspire them. They tap into people’s desire to be more creative and express themselves by showing off the decorating projects of super-creative celebs like Lily Allen and Mary Charteris. Even if we’re not ready, we read this and want to paint our kitchens ASAP.
Our client, Cimmermann sells beautiful design-led furniture from sought-after brands like Vitra, Carl Hansen, and SCP. When we were brainstorming ideas for their newsletters, it felt apparent to interview people about what makes a house a home. Their audience all follow The Modern House, and if you love home design, what’s better than looking inside people’s homes and seeing their pictures? It’s the next best thing to being invited around for tea.
However, many people have different hopes and fears within their customer groups. And each of them will find something different in our stories. Some are a sucker for stories about collectables, some people connect with the rollercoaster of the renovation story, and others want to know where people go for inspiration. That’s where you can take a topic and open it up to connect with a broader range of people and meet their desires.
The online wine retailer, Parched knows how to talk to its wine-loving audiences. The wine-buying population is, of course, vast. But Parched us a mix of really informal language (hey, Wino, they say at the start of all their newsletters) and writing emails that feel like your half-drunk best mate is texting you from her job at a wine company). They know their audience.
How do we get in the head of Penelope from Portsmouth or Nora from Brighton?
Write a customer book for your brand. What brands don’t they buy and why? Where do they stand in the brand loyalty world? Are they socially ambitious, or are they driven by planet-friendly options? What are their deepest desires? What do they say they want, but what do they want? Do they want their friends to come around and introduce something new to them, or are they keeping up with the trends? Do they want to push boundaries as a person? Are they driven by social responsibility?
Next step: get in touch to talk more about how we can partner to build your main characters and write to build deeper connections.
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