Seeing Your Writing Business Through Your Clients’ Eyes
A version of this article originally appeared on 1099.com.
If businesses viewed their marketing campaigns through their prospective clients’ eyes, we wouldn’t have telemarketers, door-to-door salesmen, and slogans like “Lucky Supermarkets: We’re Lower than Low.” Maybe big companies with money bursting out their wazoos can spend their way past client myopia, but if we freelance writers fail to see what we’re doing through our prospects’ eyes, we’re dead in the water.
Can you see life through a wombat’s eyes? No. You have no idea what a wombat thinks or feels or dreams about. You can’t appreciate the tangled sexual desires running through its mind as it licks down an unruly piece of fur before a hot date. Admit it, you don’t even know what a wombat is. That’s why, no matter how hard you try, you will fail utterly in your wombat-marketing efforts.
In the same way, in order to see life through your clients’ or prospects’ eyes, you need to learn as much about them as possible–from what they wear to work to their wants and needs as they lick down unruly pieces of fur. But how will you really see things through their eyes without risking your life on chancy and unproven cloning techniques in dirty, underground MIT labs?
Well, how about asking them? Open up a first meeting with a client by asking questions like, “What do you want to accomplish with this project?” “What do you like and dislike about your image?” “How much is it costing your business not to have the image you want?” In addition to giving the impression that you care what the answers are, you’ll learn how to target your services more effectively in the future for both this client and others.
Try reading about your client’s business. If, for instance, you write for printing companies, then you might consider popping a couple of No-Doz and taking a look at Modern Reprographics, In-Plant Graphics, Printing Manager and other gripping publications that detail the ins and outs of the printing industry. You can find trade magazines for just about any industry at TradePub.
If all else fails, turn your inquisitive gaze inward. Perhaps you already know the answers to the following important questions, but you have suppressed them or misplaced them behind your gall bladder. Look deep inside yourself, with a lantern if necessary, and when you find the answers, they will reveal how your clients and prospects see your business.
- Who are your clients? Things look a lot different through the eyes of a 20-year-old male stock trader than they do through the eyes of a 50-year-old female emu herder. (Trust me — I lived both those lives, and countless others, before maturing into the 94-year-old marketing whiz I am today.)
- What do they want from you? How would a company that wants to attract new clients view your own marketing efforts? What would a business that wants to work faster think of the three month lag time before you return their phone calls?
- How do they work? Do they work the usual wage slave nine-to-five? Are they busiest on Monday afternoons? Do they break for lunch at 1:00 p.m. sharp every day? Does their cafeteria check IDs, or could you slip in unnoticed and get a free lunch? How would they feel about the timing of your cold calls, e-mails and sales letters?
By now, you feel so much at one with your clients and prospects that you have to write your own name on the back of your hand so you don’t forget it. Now turn these sympathetic powers to looking at your marketing and operations as a womba–er, client would.
If you liked that post, you might also like:
Feb 11, 2009 Writing
