If you’re like most consultants, you’re looking for new clients…like, all the time. Because even if you have a few steady clients now, you know from experience that those contracts will end at some point.
And it’s like an experienced consultant once told me, “The most important client is always the NEXT one.”
That’s because there’s something called “the consulting roller coaster.” One day you’re riding high with lots of work, then all of a sudden, you’re down in a big dip with no work at all.
Ever been on that roller coaster? I bet you have. I know I sure have!
And if you’re beginning to get a little sick of the ups and downs, I want you to know that there’s a way to level things out so that you’re always sailing smoothly down a level track of work.
How? Read on…
Get Off the Roller Coaster by Getting Inside Your Client’s Head
Back in the first half of the last century, there was a copywriter named Robert Collier. He was a fascinating guy, and maybe I’ll get more into his story in a future post, but today I just want to introduce you to Mr. Collier’s main copywriting principle.
Here it is: “Always enter the conversation already occurring in the prospect’s mind.”
Now, Mr. Collier’s situation was a lot different than ours. He died in 1950, after all. But in the early days of marketing and advertising, when it was done by snail mail and through magazine ads, Robert Collier was possibly the most successful copywriter in the world.
And he was so successful because he didn’t just write up his ads and direct mail copy in a vacuum like most people. He wasn’t focused just on the features and benefits of whatever product or service he was trying to sell. No, he was thinking about the person who would be reading his copy…his prospect.
And more specifically, HE was thinking about what THEY were thinking about.
Collier spent a lot of time looking at what people were reading at the time, what consumer trends were popular, what people were looking for to make their lives better. He thought about the conversation going on inside his prospects’ heads, and then he wrote his copy so that he entered that conversation with his copy.
And, for you to develop a steady stream of consulting work, you need to do the same thing. You need to know your prospects so well that you know exactly what they’re thinking about as they go about living their lives.
Because when you know that, everything else gets so much easier…
You don’t have to worry about what to write about next in your blog because you already know what your prospects are interested in. You don’t have to wrack your brain about what workshop topics you should develop because you already know what your prospects are wanting to learn more about. You don’t have to stress about what products might sell because you already know what products your prospects are looking for.
So, in order to give your prospects exactly what they want so they turn into customers or clients, all you have to do is know them so well that you know what conversation is going on in their heads.
Easy, right? Well, maybe not easy, but it IS do-able.
Here’s how…
Enter Keyword Research
About a month ago, I introduced you to the idea of a customer avatar representing your ideal customer or client and walked you through some brainstorming exercises to get you started on creating your own avatar for your business. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about fleshing out your customer avatar with demographic data, keyword research, and social media lurking.
If you followed the steps I outlined in those previous blog posts, you should have a pretty detailed customer avatar written up by this point.
But I did also promise you that I would circle back to the idea of keyword research and flesh that topic out a little more for those of you who haven’t done much SEO work before. So that’s what I’m doing today.
First, for those who haven’t done the homework I gave you in the previous posts (Bad student! Go to your room! And don’t you dare slam that door!), a quick refresher.
Keyword research is simply the process of using one or more technological tools to get information about what words and phrases people are searching for online.
Why is this important? Well, because one of the main reasons people tend to search for things online is to find solutions to their problems.
So, by knowing what people are searching for online concerning your topic, you’ll gain valuable insight into what their challenges are, what solutions they’re looking for, and what specific language they use to frame those challenges and hoped-for solutions. In Robert Collier’s terms, you’ll be “entering the conversation already occurring in the prospect’s mind.”
Let’s walk through an example in real time so you can see how this works.
How Keyword Research Gives You a Window into Your Prospect’s Mind
For our example, I’m going to take you back to the post where I introduced you to the idea of a customer avatar.
In that post, I used this scenario:
“Let’s say that you’re a language arts consultant who specializes in reading and writing workshop methodology for elementary school students.”
I then gave readers an exercise where they were to make a list of the characteristics of those people who would be in a position to hire them (principals, curriculum directors, department heads, etc.). Next, I asked them to make a list of the characteristics of those people who would be the likely end-users of their products and services (the teachers they would normally work with or sell their products to). Finally, I asked readers to look at all the shared characteristics between those two lists and come up with a description of a single person (a “starter avatar”) who would embody those shared characteristics.
Here’s the starter avatar I gave as an example for this fictional language arts consultant’s ideal customer:
“Ellie Educator loves kids and believes that they can think at a high level and produce amazing work when given the freedom to follow their interests and express their ideas. She believes that great teaching involves as much personalization as possible within a framework that allows all kids to learn needed skills and content knowledge. She also believes that standardized tests and benchmark tests are important (even though she isn’t a real fan of them) because they give parents and district planners useful data. Toward this end, she believes that a reading/writing workshop model is the best approach for her language arts instruction, as it allows freedom of choice (what books to read, what topics to write about), which is motivational for her students, within an instructional framework that allows her to teach needed skills.”
In that post, I then gave suggestions for fleshing out this starter avatar by doing demographic research, keyword research, and social media lurking.
Let’s look now at how this language arts consultant might use keyword research to add detail to the Ellie Educator avatar above.
What We Can Learn through Keyword Research
First, you’ll want to choose your research tool. There are a number of online tools out there. My go-to lately has been Ubersuggest, so that’s what I’ll use for this example.
As you can see from our starter avatar description of Ellie Educator, she is a proponent of the reading and writing workshop model of instruction. So let’s start broadly. Ellie might type “reading workshop” or “writing workshop” into a search engine when looking for more information. Just so we don’t go too far down the rabbit hole, I’ll just focus on reading workshop for this example.
If I type in “reading workshop” into the “Keyword Ideas” search field in Ubersuggest, here are some of the things I find out:
- “Reading workshop,” the broadest term in this search, has the most searches, at 1,900 a month. That’s to be expected. But Ellie Educator, who already knows what reading workshop is, would be unlikely to type this into the search bar on Google.
- “Reading workshop model” is second in searches, at 590. But again, “reading workshop model” isn’t likely to be of much interest to Ellie, as she obviously knows a decent amount about the model since she’s already using it in her class.
- A little farther down the list, we see “reading workshop, Lucy Calkins” at 320 monthly searches. For those of you who don’t know, Lucy Calkins is one of the main thought leaders in the reading workshop field. Ellie might very well search this term if she uses a different version of workshop and wants to see how Lucy Calkins’s approach is similar to or different from what she’s doing.
- The term “reading workshop anchor chart” shows up at 210 searches per month, which is still pretty healthy. The use of anchor charts in a workshop classroom is a specific teaching practice, and if Ellie was interested in learning how to do a better job of using anchor charts in her class, she might very well type this into the search bar.
- Next on the list is “reading workshop kindergarten,” at 170 searches per month. If Ellie is a kindergarten teacher, she might very well type this phrase into the search bar to learn how reading workshop looks different in kindergarten when compared to other grades. If she’s not a kindergarten teacher, then obviously she’s not nearly as likely to type in this phrase.
- Other more specific search terms include “reading workshop mini lessons” (170 searches); “reading workshop schedule” (140); “reading workshop in middle school” (110); and “reading workshop components” (90).
As you can see, some searches, such as “reading workshop,” “reading workshop model,” and “reading workshop components” are the kinds of search phrases someone who is just learning about workshop teaching would type into a search bar.
Other terms, such as “workshop anchor chart,” “reading workshop mini lessons,” and “reading workshop schedule” are much more likely terms for someone like Ellie who might be having a problem with a particular area of her workshop methodology and wants to improve the way she does things.
Now, I could take one of those terms and enter it into the search tool to see what other phrases come up, and if I were the consultant in question, I would certainly do so to see what else I can find. But for now, that’s enough detail for us to discuss the next step.
Next Steps: Adding Search Terms into Your Customer Avatar Narrative
For full disclosure and transparency, I want you to know that I’m skipping a step here.
In my previous post about fleshing out your customer avatar, I gave you an example of an empathy map and told you that, during your keyword research phase, you would want to dump all of the material you found into the proper areas of the empathy map. This is because the map gives you a handy holding place and categorization tool for all the data you find in your research.
Once you feel like you’ve exhausted your research and are ready to add what you found into your customer avatar, you’ll have everything all organized and ready to dump in. I’m not walking you through how to do that with our current example as I think it’s pretty self-explanatory.
OK, with that said, the next step is to take the material you found in your research and add it to your customer avatar narrative.
Here, again, is our “starter avatar” version of Ellie Educator:
“Ellie Educator loves kids and believes that they can think at a high level and produce amazing work when given the freedom to follow their interests and express their ideas. She believes that great teaching involves as much personalization as possible within a framework that allows all kids to learn needed skills and content knowledge. She also believes that standardized tests and benchmark tests are important (even though she isn’t a real fan of them) because they give parents and district planners useful data. Toward this end, she believes that a reading/writing workshop model is the best approach for her language arts instruction, as it allows freedom of choice (what books to read, what topics to write about), which is motivational for her students, within an instructional framework that allows her to teach needed skills.”
Let’s say that our fictional educational consultant feels like her ideal customer, Ellie Educator, is the kind of person who is always looking for ways to improve her teaching craft. Let’s say, further, that our consultant wants her avatar to represent inquisitive educators who are agnostic about specific models (like that of Lucy Calkins) and who just want to identify the best practices, no matter the source, so she can incorporate them into her teaching.
With that in mind, here’s how our consultant might revise the previous paragraph (I’ve indicated the new additions with italics):
“Ellie Educator loves kids and believes that they can think at a high level and produce amazing work when given the freedom to follow their interests and express their ideas. For this reason, she has been spending some time investigating the use of workshop anchor charts so she can do a better job of capturing the amazing thinking her students do.
“She believes that great teaching involves as much personalization as possible within a framework that allows all kids to learn needed skills and content knowledge. She builds the personalization angle into her teaching through self-selected reading and student selection of writing topics, and she builds in the skills and content knowledge instruction through her use of her reading workshop mini lessons.
“She also believes that standardized tests and benchmark tests are important (even though she isn’t a real fan of them) because they give parents and district planners useful data. Toward this end, she believes that a reading/writing workshop model is the best approach for her language arts instruction, as her reading workshop schedule is constructed in such a way that it allows freedom of choice (what books to read, what topics to write about), which is motivational for her students, within an instructional framework that allows her to teach needed skills for her students to score well on the tests.”
Note how I included into this description the exact keyword phrase language I discovered in my keyword research. Using keyword phrases to flesh out your customer avatar has the dual benefit of (1) making your avatar more detailed and specific as you go and (2) incorporating the exact language your ideal clients are using when they search the Internet.
Conclusion
Now, the above example is short and necessarily limited as I can put only so much detail in a single blog post, but I hope you can see the potential of keyword research to give you a clearer picture of your ideal clients. Like I said in my previous post, your customer avatar may be a fictional character, but it’s a fictional character based on facts. And the search terms you’re incorporating into your avatar’s description are actual search terms that real people are using to learn more about your topic. You can’t get more factual than that.
I hope this series of articles about customer avatars has been helpful. My wish for you is that you will be able to create a customer avatar that is so on target that you will, as Mr. Collier would say, “enter the conversation already occurring in your prospect’s mind” and that this will allow you to better serve your prospects’ needs and turn them into paying clients.
Good luck, and if you have comments or questions about anything concerning customer avatars, please leave a comment below and I’ll get right back to you.
