What does it mean by being personable in your marketing? Does it mean that you become your potential customer’s best friend?

Yes actually, this is actually what I’m proposing, you want to personable in the sense that you ARE like their best friend. You understand their hopes, dreams, fears and desires, because once you can write to your customer like you are their best friend, is the time you will be able to influence them to open up their wallets to you. There are many stages to being personable in your marketing but it goes back to the principle of KLT. “Know Like Trust”, does your customer know you, like you and trust you.

Know You – This level of awareness is created through good content. When a lot of people know you, that’s the first step but knowing about you is not enough.

Like you – Would you give $3,000 to someone you hate? And have them mock you for it? No right? So that’s why you want to make people like you first. Don’t worry about how good your business is or how good your product is, your second goal after people know you is to get them to like you. The Liking Bias in Robert Cialdini’s book: “Influence” states that people tend to like people that are similar to them, that’s why you want to position yourself in a way that you are creating content that people can relate to.

Trust you – This is the final part of the personable puzzle. When you get people to trust you, that’s when people will start to buy from you. Once people like you, you get people to trust you by genuinely adding value to their life. What value you may ask? It’s not about just randomly giving people things, but finding out what they need and give it to them in the form of content or advice or a physical product. Once you get people to trust you, then you have a customer.

First Step is To Understand the Customer

What are their goals, dreams, hopes, fears. Once you understand this then can you move forward. I recommend building something called a Customer Avatar, I learnt this from an online marketer called: Jason Capital, and his mentor Taki Moore. These guys run multi-million-dollar companies and has also helped their students generate a millions of dollars.

Let’s go through the customer avatar, on the pictures you see. My examples I made was for MindValley and my future potential clients.

On the top left are the basic information, like location, family, dating, gender, age, etc.

Bottom left are what media does your customer consume: books, heroes, weekend routine.

The left side of the customer prototype gives you the basic information of the customer.

On the top right is something called the four forces, in which everyone in this world has things they are moving away from and towards. Imagined and immediate. Let’s go through the Four Forces Matrix together.

Frustrations – What are your customers frustrated about in their day-to-day life?

Wants – What do the customers immediately want in their life?

Fears – What your customer’s biggest fears in life?

Aspirations – What do your customers they aspire to become?

Finally on the bottom left is the “Objection to the sale” – what are five questions in your customer’s head that may prevent them for making the sale.

This information is crucial because with it, you can make decisions on how to position yourself and the sort of content to post on your marketing channels.

To conclude this section, you cannot really relate to other people if you yourself don’t understand them and also if you don’t have the same life experience as them. This is not something you can bulls*** others in as you will want to embody the same characteristics and traits in your marketing to the people that you are targeting. So that you are more relatable.

Writing the Way You Talk

I give this advice to a lot of my clients that are corporate clients. People are lazy, they don’t have time to go through professional lingo unless they absolutely NEED it. So, what you want to do is to make your content easy to consume by writing the way you talk.

When you write the way you talk, the words that you write are easy to digest and people will simply WANT to read what you are writing. When you are writing the way you talk, you are also writing to one person.

When you talk to people, I hope you’re usually not addressing multiple people, meaning you’re just talking to one person. So why not do the same in your writing? Write to one single person, just like how you’re having a conversation with just one person.

How do you write the way you talk? I believe it takes practice, even what you see on this blog did not happen overnight. I wasn’t a natural in writing, in fact when I first started my copywriting agency, my writing was extremely sloppy and incohesive. However, through practice I developed better writing habits and just a more personable touch to what I do. I made an Instagram post recently on some tips on how to get better on copywriting actually.

Every time you take out your word document to write copy, you want to write in a way like you are sending text messages to a friend rather than a corporate entity, this is how you make things personable. When you are writing the way you talk, people WANT to hear what you are saying, instead of just listening to a nameless, faceless brand.

I also want you to be funny.

Don’t make things so serious! Lighten things up, life is supposed to be fun. Copywriting is supposed to be fun. When you are fun, playful – people can sense that and want to be a part of that energy. Most people’s lives are boring, mundane and dull – so why make it even more boring with the copy you write. Make their lives better by injecting some life, creativity into it.

Some ideas to make things fun? Tell jokes, share stories, tell people to wake the f*** up, use memes, puns, gimmicks – anything to make them open their hearts. When you are able to win people’s hearts, you are able to win their business as well.

The Importance of Personal Branding

I actually wrote a blog post on personal branding recently, which goes into much detail onto this topic. If you haven’t check it out already, click here to see my blog post. But I just want to use this time to emphasize the importance of personal branding, a personal brand is a brand that’s unique to your personality and your business. It’s something that no one can replicate ever.  This goes back to Gary Vaynerchuk’s concept of: “Document, don’t create” – you don’t want to create things out of your head, instead look for content ideas through your day-to-day life.

To sum up the blog post, there are four traits I believe a personal brand should have:

• Values
• Philosophy
• Vision
• Dreams

Values – Talk about what you believe about, what does your brand stand for, and what it does not stand for.

Philosophy – What is your business philosophy, what is your life philosophy? How do you operate your day-to-day life.

Vision – What is your long-term plan for your company, announce it.

Dreams – What are your dreams unrelated to your business, why are you working towards your dreams. What is your purpose?

This makes you much more relatable because your content is based on things that are actually happening in the here and now. I want to also further emphasize the importance of vulnerability. In this TED Talk, where Brene Brown talks about the power of vulnerability in which our human capabilities of empathy, love and bonding was what allowed us to strive as a species. It’s true. We as people are flawed, that’s why we need each other so much.

Don’t be afraid to highlight your flaws of your business or yourself and what you are working on. This is much more realistic and trustworthy instead of telling people how awesome you are.

Telling people how vulnerable you are is much more believable than telling people how awesome you are. No one is awesome 24/7 of the time, no company is fully functioning all the time, there are challenges to overcome, failures to deal with and things to fix. Of course, don’t go overboard into oversharing but don’t be afraid to sprinkle bits and pieces of the challenges you are facing into your business. This is how you build a personal brand, through personality and vulnerability.

Don’t Neglect Business Development and your Network

I think if you are a business owner you know the importance of business development and networking. It is important to reach out to people to build partnerships and a mutually beneficial relationship. Your business does not exist in a bubble but in an ecosystem, which means that it’s impossible to succeed without other people.

I made this costly mistake early in my career thinking that I can do everything myself, but that’s not true, you need other people and you also need other people to know about who you are. That’s where the power of business development and your network come in.

When you are putting yourself out there on groups of people like say in a networking event or group forum, don’t just randomly announce about your company. No one really gives a s*** about you, instead you want to add value. See how you can give people an introduction, a connection or something useful. These are all purely people skills, and they take time to develop but they can be developed.

I always have this moto with people I work with and people I don’t work with to make their life better than before they met you. It could be being a listening hand, doing a favor or just adding value to their lives. This by no means you have to be a doormat to others in order to grow your business, but you still have to put yourself out there and serve others first before you can earn anything. 

People don’t care about what you do until they realize how much you care about them. All business is a people’s business, so you have to care about what other people do.

After adding value, for a period of time. Then you can ask for the sale. But don’t ask for the sale immediately, it’s through adding value without expecting anything in return. This goes the same for your product, your product wants to be the one that’s the most useful and adds the most value to other people’s lives.

But also at the same time, don’t beat yourself up for not being perfect – people after all are selfish creatures including yourself. But what I’m saying is that if you want to be a successful business developer and seek opportunities to increase your sales, you need to be someone that’s a giving and personable person.

A person that’s a giving person and adds the most value is the one that’s going to win in the end of the day. By the way, another mistake I see people make is that they add value in things that people don’t want. VALUE, the word by itself is subjective, people want different things in life.

What you THINK they need may not be what they need. So, you want to give people what THEY want NOT what you want. Being a personable person is about adding value, why are you personable to people because you become a person that others can rely on rather than the other way around.

The conclusion I would like to make from this article is to be personable, you have to understand people and give people what they want in the form of value. But people are very different and complicated creatures, what works in what end of the world may be very different from what people want in another end. This is from my personal experience working with people from over 20 countries now and personally having lived in 3: Malaysia, Thailand and Japan.

But there are certain things where everyone relates to no matter where you live on this planet. These are love, a place to stay, friends, a home to go back to, a full life. These are universal traits where everybody can relate to – as long as you display them, people will eventually learn to trust you. This is what we need more off in this world, trust and this is how you increase your profits, through creating trust by being personable.

Don’t see people as a number on the screen to “add profit” to, counterintuitively how you increase your profits would be to serve more people at a bigger scale. Your marketing should be human and relatable.

We hope this article has added value in some shape or form so if it did be sure to share it with your friends on social media. Talk soon!