brandUP Your Business Podcast
Hey, I’m Matt Jackson, and I’ve been through the highs and lows of building brands that make an impact. On the BrandUP Your Business Podcast, I take you along on my journey and sit down with other entrepreneurs to share the secret sauce of branding, marketing, and sales that actually works.
In each episode, you’ll hear real stories, fun conversations, and actionable tips to take your business from zero to hero. If you’re ready to level up your brand and learn from the best, this is the place for you!
Let’s turn your business into something unforgettable. Tune in and join the fun!
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brandUP Your Business Podcast
Episode 11: 7 Day Brand Breakthrough Beyond the Generic: How to Find and Attract Your Perfect Customer
Finding your ideal customer changes everything about your business—from how you market to who you attract and ultimately how much you enjoy your work. In this transformative second day of our Seven Day Brand Breakthrough, we tackle one of the most common mistakes business owners make: trying to sell to everyone.
The truth is simple but powerful: not everyone should be your customer. When you try to appeal to everyone, your message gets diluted, you attract price shoppers, and you waste precious time and energy on people who aren't the right fit. Instead, we walk through a step-by-step process to identify and target your dream customers—those who value your expertise, pay without haggling, leave glowing reviews, and refer you to others just like them.
Through practical exercises, we create a detailed customer avatar that goes beyond basic demographics to understand the emotions driving purchase decisions. You'll learn how to shift your messaging from talking about what you do to how you help solve specific problems. We explore the 80/20 rule of customer success—where 80% of your revenue comes from just 20% of your customers—and how to position your brand to attract more of that profitable 20%.
Ready to transform your business by attracting only the right customers? Complete the workbook exercises to craft messaging that speaks directly to your ideal customer's pain points and desires. Remember: specificity builds trust, and trust leads to sales. Tomorrow, we'll build on today's foundation by crafting a magnetic brand message that makes your ideal customers say "I need this!"
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What's up, guys and welcome to an exciting day two of the seven day brand breakthrough. We hope you guys had a great time yesterday when we discovered our brand clarity. We went through our exercises and hopefully we talked to people, kind of mapped out our game plan there. So that was a pivotal foundational exercise and day. So I hope everybody got it off to a great start, got some excitement and as we get into day two of this course, I hope you guys are just as excited as me.
Speaker 1:What we're going to do on day two is work on identifying your ideal customer. Remember, we're talking about riches are in the niches. What we need to do is laser, tight, lock down the customers that we want to be attracted to us. We're going to create our business around the emotion of that ideal customer and this is a cool way of reverse engineering your brand. So this is going to be a really exciting day. So let's kick this thing off. Let me show you.
Speaker 1:Most businesses try to sell to everyone. Now, that's a big mistake. The key to success is attracting the right customers. By the end of the day, you'll know exactly who your dream customer is. Now tell me this would you rather sell to somebody who's going to use you, leave you a Google review, leave you a tip and refer you out to all your friends? Or are you trying to hard sell somebody who's going to compete on price? That's one thing that we want to separate ourselves from the get-go. We're going to create that ideal customer. We're going to be the perfect company to solve the problem of that ideal customer and we're not going to run into any of these issues of having to grind and push and force our way into these wrong customers.
Speaker 1:This is why knowing your ideal customer changes everything. If you don't know who you're speaking to, your message will be ignored. Think about that again. If I'm looking at you in the camera and speaking to you and I don't know who I'm speaking to, you're not going to listen to me. You're not going to care. You bought the brand up course because you obviously care about improving your brand. There may be some pain where you have some confusion in your branding.
Speaker 1:You're probably a new business, or maybe you're an established business and you're looking to refine things. You're looking for improvement. I have laser locked down you guys as my ideal customer. You guys are a representation of myself. You're the same hustle, the same drive, the same quest for knowledge. You wanna be the best version of yourself and you wanna be the best version of your company, so you seek knowledge.
Speaker 1:I'm not speaking to somebody generically, and that's exactly the objective of today. If we speak to this, if we're speaking to an exact version of our customer, it's going to resonate perfectly with them, and that's what we're working on today. So specificity equals more trust and more sales. We're going to be the expert and we're not an expert at everything. There's no way to be an expert at everything. So that's why that generic approach doesn't work. We're going to be the best in our area, the best in our field at this one specific customer and their one specific problem.
Speaker 1:So example why does a pediatric dentist attract more patients than a general dentist? Because everybody knows, hey, my 12-year-old son needs braces. They need to go to the pediatric dentist. General dentists they're everywhere. There's five dentists on the street. But if you're that number one dentist for 12-year-olds serving this small community, you're going to be full of business all the time, and that is the objective of today.
Speaker 1:So here you go the customer trap. Stop wasting time on the wrong people. If you're like me, you run into a customer and they take up your whole day. They may leave a negative review. It costs you time, money and you're not as efficient with your time and your business if you go after these customers. So we want to narrow down the customers we deal with on a daily basis.
Speaker 1:In my business, pressure washing, we do volume, so we're doing 100 plus customers per month. We need to figure out exactly who those ideal customers are that we can make the most amount of money on. We can give them the best service possible with the least amount of hiccups. And that's where I think a lot of new businesses especially get it wrong because they think the customer's always right. How many of you guys have heard that? You hear it all the time oh, the customer's always right. That's just an excuse for a bad customer to try to get their way and take advantage of a business owner. So what we're doing here is going to narrow down those bad customers and make sure we avoid them like the plague. Remember this not everybody is a good customer. Bad customers drain your energy, they drain your money and they drain your time. We wanna focus as much as we possibly can on those ideal customers and choose quality over quantity. So who is your dream customer? What type of customer makes you the most money with the least stress? Here you go the three key factors, budget needs and decision-making speed. Example why I stopped taking low-budget, pressure washing jobs.
Speaker 1:Here's an exercise for you that we can start right off the bat. Let's get the brains firing. Let's get it going. Let's get working on finding the ideal customer. Right now. I want you to fill in the blanks. I want to work with customers who specific trait and value specific outcome Example. I want to work with homeowners who care about curb appeal and value professional service. I want you guys to post the response in the group. If you guys are on the Facebook group, brand up your business, but if not, write it down on your notebook paper.
Speaker 1:We want to really think about who are your best customers. If you're in business for a while, you probably have a good idea who those best customers are. If you're new, just think hey, who's somebody that is going to be really easy to deal with? Leave me a good review, refer me out to their friends, not give me a lot of headache. We don't want customers to slow us down, give us headaches and go behind us on our work, so figure that out. I want to work with specific customers who this is their specific trait and they value this specific outcome the 80-20 rule of customer success 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers. Find that 20% who are the best fit and focus on them. Example how I turn my pressure washing business into a premium service.
Speaker 1:We set minimums in place. We have certain requirements if customers act a certain way, if customers aren't willing to go through this process to fill out a form on our website, there's things that we do to disqualify people. And you may say why would you want to disqualify customers from working with you? Because when you get to the certain level where your brand is laser, tight, lock, solid and you can focus on delivering premium quality service, you need to be selective with who you're working with. So you want to stop attracting those wrong customers.
Speaker 1:Cheap customers are price hagglers, complaints and headaches. Remember, people are either budgetary or people seek value. You don't want to compete with somebody who's just price shopping. That is a commodity. We're not that. We have locked down our clarity in our messaging and then we are working on going after our ideal customers. We're creating a net, we're creating a barrier and then we are working on going after our ideal customers. We're creating a net, we're creating a barrier and there's a lot of stuff going down the river. Our job is to sift this out and filter this out and find where we can excel more than anybody else and those customers who we trap in our bait. They love us and those are the customers we're looking for. So remember high value customers are repeat business referrals and higher profits.
Speaker 1:We want to learn how to position our brands to filter out the bad customers. So what we want to do is how are we going to do that? We're going to speak their language and not yours. If we're speaking our language, we're not going to be heard by somebody, and you've probably heard that a lot. If people are talking over each other, they're saying what they want to hear. They're not speaking the same language of somebody who needs to hear it. You're not speaking for yourself. You're speaking to resonate with your customer. Customers don't care about your business. They care about their problems. You want to shift your messaging from what you do to how you help. Now let me rephrase that shift your messaging from what you do to how you help. Example we use high quality cleaning equipment that doesn't really resonate with anybody. What we want to say is we make your home look brand new again. We're speaking to the feelings, we're speaking to the emotions and we're telling how the emotions and we're telling how we can help them. We're focusing on the benefit of the problem that we're solving to them, not the feature of what we do.
Speaker 1:So here's the customer avatar formula Number one name. Give your ideal customer a name. What we're going to do in this customer avatar we're going to take out our piece of paper and our worksheet and create a customer avatar. Now, if you've never done this before, think of avatar as like an emoji. Think of something where you're creating a character. We want to be very specific here and we will give it a name, give it an age, give it financial background and pretty much break down exactly the demographics and who this customer is. What we're going to be doing is saying this is who we are going to focus on delivering the best results for. So get out that piece of paper. Give your ideal customer a name.
Speaker 1:For example, Hannah, homeowner. So with Hannah, we're going to come up with the demographic. What is her age? Say she's a 45 year old married woman with a couple kids. Her lifestyle stay-at-home mom and she enjoys doing social activities. She enjoys having her kids have her friends over and all that kind of stuff. It's a great. They value a clean home. They value the pride and stuff with their home life. What is their biggest pain point? What problems keep them up at night? For them, their problems are gonna be not having trustworthy contractors, having unprofessional people do shoddy work, having to deal with sketchy people on their home and all that kind of stuff. So here we go.
Speaker 1:The secret to instant customer trust. People buy from brands they relate to. Your messaging should make them feel understood why Apple markets their products as part of a lifestyle, not just technology. Think of how many people buy phones of Apple or Macs. They're not the most techie people. They like to feel techie, but they're not the ones going in looking at all the specs of the laptop Samsung. Other devices can have better hardware technology than Apple. However, there's not as much of a strong emotional brand tie than there is to Apple. So that's why Apple has more of a cult-like following and that's the objective here. We're creating trust with our customers.
Speaker 1:Exercise, Get out that piece of paper again. We are continuing our exercises. We're creating a customer-focused social media post. So write a post that speaks directly to that avatar. Remember the homeowner, Hannah. So whatever you guys wrote down whether you want to put this on your Facebook or whether you want to put this on your notebook paper write that post that speaks directly to Hannah. Use their pain points, desires and emotions. Remember we're communicating directly with them. We're not communicating with everybody else. We're not generic. We're not saying, oh, we can do this, we can do that, communicating with everybody else. We're not generic. We're not saying, oh, we can do this, we can do that. That's how you become invisible To be irresistible. We are writing specifically to that ideal avatar we just created. For example, are you tired of looking at stained driveways? Our services make your home look brand new. We don't say we're pressure washing, we're hyper specific talking about that stained driveway right after the leaves have fallen in the fall season and it's all stained and nasty before they put up their decorations.
Speaker 1:So how to attract high-paying customers? Your brand should scream premium if you want premium customers. Luxury brands don't market to bargain shoppers. Neither should you. Now, if you look on TV, you don't see a lot of commercials for ferrari. You don't see lamborghini commercials. They don't advertise in these areas because they're premium brands and their target audience isn't sitting down watching tv. Their target audience is going to be in luxury areas spending money. They're going to be exclusive. They're not somebody who they're going to be exclusive. They're not somebody who's sitting on their couch eating peanuts watching TV. And look what the luxury brands do you turn on TV. You're watching sitcoms. You're not seeing luxury there, You're seeing generic. We don't want to be generic, we want to be luxury.
Speaker 1:How I started getting higher paying, pressure washing jobs. I got out of the Facebook marketing jobs. I got out of the Facebook marketing groups. I got out of generically posting stuff. I got out of that desperation that comes off when you're on social media, when you're on Yelp, when you're on all these platforms just competing with everybody else. That's lowering your brand. Do you see Ferrari on TV trying to comment on Toyotas? No, you don't, Because they're an exclusive brand and they are luxury, and that is our objective.
Speaker 1:They have identified that ideal customer avatar that we're working on here, that Hannah, and they are going laser-tight into it Because, remember, if you're going after Hannah and then Hannah sees that, you're applying and targeting and marketing to everybody else. You're gonna lose that value that Hannah sees in you, so make sure you don't dilute that. So here's quick win three simple ways to refine your brand messaging. Today we like to keep it simple and today is all about action and narrowing stuff down. Yesterday we talked a lot about the theory. Today we're gonna be hammering stuff out, giving you exercises and really locking down forward action into creating that avatar. I want you to update your website to clearly state who you can help. Remember, once we've identified our avatar, we want to change our social medias. We want to change our website to who we can help.
Speaker 1:Stop using generic words. You want to be specific. Remember, think about how those people speak and speak to them. We don't want to say generic stuff. We're not landscapers. We're not general contractors. We are specific luxury home renovation experts. We are high-end renovators. We are not general contractors. Three we're using testimonials that reflect your dream, customers, struggles and success. One thing that helps us a ton is our google reviews. People love social proof. They love word of mouth. They don't want to hear from you. They want to hear from their next door neighbor, who is also the ideal avatar. So are you guys comfortable with your creation of that ideal avatar. It's a quite.
Speaker 1:This is more of a simple lesson, but it's to the point and precise. We figured out our message. We figured out what we are clear about, we figured out our expertise and today we took that expertise and we figured out what we are clear about. We figured out our expertise and today we took that expertise and we figured out how to speak to that ideal customer. We're weeding out 80% of the noise. We're weeding out 80% of those bad customers. If we want everybody else to fight for scraps, let them fight for scraps. But we are going after that customer avatar with that clarity we created yesterday, driving the emotion, driving the branding, driving the expertise in that one area, driving the emotion, driving the branding, driving the expertise in that one area, targeting today's lesson of that customer avatar. And we're going to make this really dangerous. So in these first two days you guys got jam-packed amount. If you even wanted to quit the course after today, you would have an immense amount of value.
Speaker 1:Implement this work lesson in that workbook today and we will get ready for tomorrow's lesson. So get ready for tomorrow. We're gonna talk about some fun stuff. We're gonna talk about how to craft our magnetic brand message. And remember, like I said, our objective here is to create a brand so magnetic, so delicious, so appetizing that people are just coming to you, we don't have to force ourselves out there. So now that you know who you're speaking to, tomorrow we will create a message that makes those customers say I need this. So get ready to craft your ultimate brand message.
