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Breaking Through the Noise: 3 Reasons Your Offer Isn't Selling and How to Fix It
1. Blending in With the Noise
Standing Out in a Saturated Market
In today's fast-paced, digital-first world, social media can be both a blessing and a curse. While it offers invaluable opportunities to connect with your audience, it's also a crowded space filled with endless noise. Too often, entrepreneurs fall into the trap of prioritizing quantity over quality—chasing more followers, likes, and engagement metrics that don't necessarily translate into sales.
Holding a massive, yet inactive, follower count may serve as an ego boost, but it does little to support your bottom line. Instead, focus on cultivating a smaller, more engaged audience. It's all about intentionality. Regularly sweep through your follower list to weed out bots and inactive accounts. This practice may seem drastic, but it provides you with cleaner data and a more accurate picture of your audience's engagement and interests.
The key takeaway here is to get off the trend train. Avoid the temptation of jumping on every viral trend and stick to what makes your brand unique. By doing so, you ensure your voice isn't lost in the cacophony, allowing you to connect more authentically with potential clients.
2. Unclear Value Proposition
Articulating Your Unique Value
Another critical barrier to selling is failing to clearly communicate the value of your offer. With so many competitors out there, clearly defining your value proposition is paramount. What makes your offer different? Why should someone choose your product or service over another?
Think about the posts on social media that make you stop scrolling. What about them catches your eye and resonates with you? Use these insights to refine your messaging. Your objective should be to understand your ideal client’s needs and challenges more deeply than they do themselves. This in-depth understanding allows you to position yourself as the obvious solution to their problems.
Refrain from drowning your offer in unnecessary bonuses or discounts to make it more appealing. Such tactics often backfire, making your offer look like those cheesy 90s infomercials that everyone tunes out. Instead, focus on articulating the transformative value your offer provides. Whether it's a coaching session, an online course, or a physical product, make it clear why your offer is worth the investment.
3. Unqualified Leads
Targeting the Right Audience
The third common pitfall is targeting the wrong audience. Your goal should be to present your offer in front of qualified leads who are more likely to convert into paying clients. While there is an overwhelming amount of information available online on building your email list and social media following, not all strategies will attract your ideal client.
Take freebies and bundles, for example. While they can be great for attracting DIYers looking for quick solutions, they may not appeal to more advanced clients prepared to invest in higher-value services. This is where being strategic in your marketing approach becomes crucial.
Consider Amy's example from the podcast: Instead of investing heavily in Amazon ads for her book, she chose to market herself at conferences where her ideal clients were likely to be. She created postcards with QR codes for free book downloads and sent physical copies to event hosts, ensuring her book reached her target audience in VIP swag bags. This kind of laser-focused marketing can be far more effective than a broad, scattergun approach.
Conclusion
By taking the time to refine your strategy around these three areas—standing out in a noisy market, clearly conveying your unique value, and targeting the right audience—you can significantly improve your sales outcomes. Remember, it's not about having more followers or offering the lowest price. It's about being intentional, understanding your audience, and leveraging data smartly to drive your business decisions.
By following these principles, you'll not only see an increase in sales but also create a more sustainable, impactful business. Keep pushing forward, and remember, I'm cheering for you every step of the way. Cheers to making the money you want so you can create the impact you desire!
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Transcript for Episode 377. 3 Reasons Your Offer Isn’t Selling… And It’s Not Your Price
Amy [00:00:03]:
One of the most frustrating things as a solopreneur is what do you do when your offer's not selling, when it just seems like you're putting in all of this work, yet no one seems to know that you exist. Well, friend, I have totally got you, because let me tell you, you are not alone. And in today's episode, I'm going to share three reasons that your offer isn't selling. And spoiler alert, nine times out of 10, it typically has nothing to do with your price. So the first reason is that you're blending in with the noise. And this is something we've talked about before. Social media, right? It can be such a beautiful tool to nurture relationships, to humanize our brands, to build that know, like and trust. But what happens is we get wrapped up in the quest for more.
Amy [00:00:59]:
More followers, more likes, more engagement, all of the things, yes, those are good. They're not bad necessarily. But we're putting so much emphasis on this endless quest for more because it's a great boost to our ego. Every time we get a, like, we get that little hit of dopamine. But I know you've heard this before, that followers don't pay the bills, likes don't pay the bills. What you need are clients, clients that are buying your amazing offer. So what is the key to this? The key is really standing out in a world that's noisy. And a great way to do this is by getting off of the trend train.
Amy [00:01:46]:
It's been drilled into our minds as entrepreneurs that we need more. We need more to be successful. And that, oh, only if we go viral and I had the 10k followers, that will be the magical thing that makes me successful. But I question that, is it, is having more followers going to make you more successful? And I'm here to tell you that in most situations, the answer is no. Even in my own business, if you go and look at my social media following, it is very small. But what I do is I'm very intentional. I go in and I remove subscribers and followers all of the time from my social media, from my email list. And I do this very strategically because I want to have better data.
Amy [00:02:40]:
Your data is only good as the quality of the data that's being produced. So if you have a social media account that has 10,000 followers, but of that 8000 are bots, 8000 are inactive and dead accounts, 8000 are people that don't care about what you do, suddenly you've skewed your metrics. So that's why it is very Very important that you take the time to remove people and get clear as to what do you bring to the table. How are you standing out in this noisy world? And most of the time, I will tell you, it's not through trends. So reason number one, your offer isn't selling is you're blending in with the noise. Reason number two is all about value. The value of what you do is not clear. And this is where the messaging piece is very, very key.
Amy [00:03:42]:
And we actually discussed this on the last episode of the podcast with Katherine Thompson, and she really broke down that messaging piece. And so often we see others discounting their services, make it look like more of a value or adding bonuses. That's my one kryptonite that makes me cringe when you start to see all of these extra bonuses that are added. That, ok, if you buy now, you get this, that and the other. What ends up happening is you sound like one of those 90s infomercials. But wait, there's more. You know what I'm talking about, right? Because this is what happens. And then we just end up sounding cheesy and corny and we lose our credibility, we lose that value.
Amy [00:04:30]:
So it's very important that you know what differentiates you from everyone else that's doing the same thing. And when you take the time, this is really key here. When you take the time to really understand exactly who you are serving, that's where you can really position yourself. Because your job is to understand their needs and challenges better than anyone else. The better you understand what they're going through right now, the easier it is to begin to position yourself as the solution. Think of it this way. When we're scrolling on social media, there's those posts that make us stop, right? Get curious, use this as an opportunity to go, what about this post made me stop scrolling? Why am I not scrolling? What is it about this post that makes me feel like, wow, she or he really gets me. They really understand exactly what my challenges are.
Amy [00:05:31]:
And because they understand it so well, oh, my gosh, absolutely. They're the obvious solution to this problem that I have. Because when we are discounting ourselves, when we are adding so much in terms of bonuses and extras, we're devaluing the amazing transformation that we provide. And before you go, wait a minute. No, I can't do that. Yes, you can. Because we can go to Walmart and buy a purse for $15, or we can go buy a coach purse for a couple hundred dollars, or we can go buy the Louis Vuitton purse. For a couple thousand dollars.
Amy [00:06:13]:
It's all about how we're positioning our brand, how we're articulating that value of the transformation. And when we're dealing with something that's not necessarily a physical product, we have to be a little bit more creative. And the way you do that is by understanding your ideal client, your target client, better than anyone else. That is key. That is crucial. So number two, your value proposition is unclear. And the number three reason that nobody is buying what you're selling is that the leads in your world aren't qualified. You are not strategically positioning yourself in front of your ideal client.
Amy [00:07:07]:
And there's a lot of information online. There's so much information, you can literally Google everything. Everything you wanted to know to grow your business is out there. And that's a problem with a lot of these tactics that we see fellow entrepreneurs doing. You know, take the bundle, for example. It's a great way to quickly build your email list. But if your target client is someone that's more advanced in business, typically they're not going to be the one downloading all of these freebies. Bundles are great for the person that has been trying to build their business, trying to DIY it themselves, trying to piece things together.
Amy [00:07:52]:
Can they work? Sure. But it's important that, you know, okay, is my target client the one that's going to be opting in to this same thing with ads? I'm very, very intentional with how I market my business and how I spend my advertising dollars. This past year, I wrote a book back in March. It released and if you want a free copy, just make sure you go to amytrad.com free book and grab a copy of my best selling Amazon book. And after I released the book, it was about June and sales had started to slow down. So I took the opportunity to zoom out. I said, okay, now how can I use this? I can do one of two things that really were at the top of my list. I can invest in paid ads on Amazon to get my book out.
Amy [00:08:45]:
More visibility for the book. Okay, I can do that, or I can use the money that I was going to add, allocate for those paid ads, and use it strategically to market myself at conferences where my ideal client would be attending. So what did I do? I opted for the clients at the conferences. And what I would do is I would create these postcards and they had a QR code on it, download a free copy of the book, and then I would send the event host physical copies of the book so that they could Distribute them in their VIP swag bags. So what we're doing now is we're strategically getting visibility and positioning myself in front of my target audience. I didn't want to be everywhere. I wanted to be in front of people that I know I can serve, that I know. Need my help learning how to leverage their data to drive their decisions and grow their business and shatter their sales plateau? Yes.
Amy [00:09:53]:
Maybe they'll be scrolling on Amazon one day, I don't know. But I'd rather be so much more precision laser focused in my marketing efforts versus being everywhere. Because I'll tell you, book royalties are not very good. If you've written a book, you know, it's like literally on the ebook, it's pennies. So it all comes down to leveraging what you have in a strategic manner. So Those are our three reasons that 99% of the time, if it's not the price, it is not the price. That's the issue. It comes down to your blending in with your noise with all the noise in the online space that we don't understand the value of what you do.
Amy [00:10:43]:
The value proposition is not clear. And number three, your leads coming into your world aren't qualified. So once you take the time to be intentional, to get curious, to look at these as opportunities for improvement, you will see more sales in your business. And it doesn't have to be an uphill battle. I am here cheering for you. And until next time, cheers to making the money you want so you can create the impact you desire.
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