How To Get Customers - Targeting The Ideal Buyers For Your Brand w/ Max Kerwick

If you're not actively building your brand, you're building Amazon's brand, right? Like they want. They want it to be the situation where someone asks, oh, where'd you get that game? And they're like, oh, I got it on Amazon. They don't even know the name of your company.

Hey, what's up, everybody? This is ryan from capitalism.com and you've probably heard about my buddy Max Kerwick, who. Who co hosts the Brand Builder podcast alongside me. And the way that I met Max was through our mutual friend and business partner, Clement, who actually, you know, Clement and I met. Cause he listened to the podcast, came from our audience. But anyway, Max gave me a shift in my life several years ago, which he asked me a question and we've talked about it several times on the Brand Builder podcast, which he said, how does the product help the buyer become the hero in their own story? And for whatever reason, the way that he put it at that time helped me shift my thinking from product to person. And that braingasm changed everything about how I approach business. And I have, as a result, highlighted Max as much as possible. He's been on stage at some of our events. We obviously have a podcast together. And most people don't meet Max until they're kind of behind a wall somewhere. And a group of people literally came into the walls of my home to go through a workshop, which is called Eight Figure Exits. This is made for brand builders, entrepreneurs and audience leaders who want to build something great and position themselves for a big exit. You can find out more@capitalism.com 8 and I ask Max to go through the process of identifying that person and speaking to that person, because if you know who that person is, it just makes it a lot easier to know what to sell that person, know how to communicate to that person, know how to convert that person. And it just makes it easier to build a scalable, sellable business. So this is a part from Max speaking to that group at the Eight Figure Exits workshop. Enjoy.

When we're talking about building brands, we build brands around the singular person who is gonna be most predictive of our success long term. The temptation when we're on Amazon is that there's a whole world of buyers out there and we don't wanna scare any of them away. So we try to come in kind of as vanilla as possible and just appeal to as many people and hope that we just kind of carve off that little swath of traffic or whatever and we can make money off that.

That just doesn't really work. You don't see very many brands that launch these days that are just designed to appeal to everyone that actually do that. Right. The best brands, the ones that everyone wants to emulate, the ones that command really high margins and are able to sell at a high multiple, are the ones that know exactly who they're selling to. Right. And so I kind of teach a methodology of coming up with the brand strategy and coming up with how you design your brand, but it always starts with, okay, who is the singular human being that we are building this brand around? So, because I know that this can be a little counterintuitive for some people, I think about it in this way. If you think of the entire.

Population of people that you could be appealing to is like a dartboard. You've got the people in the core. You've got that next click out that maybe doesn't look exactly like your people in the core, but they share some. This is still valuable territory on the dartboard. These are people that are interested and inspired, but for some reason, they don't look exactly like that core audience that you're selling to. Right. They're still gonna see themselves in the brand, even if it's only like, 50%.

You know, of your ideal customer. Right. But we're still aiming here, right? And if we land here, it's fine. These people out here who I think of as, like, kind of uninterested and uninspired.

We'Re gonna get some of those people kind of accidentally, they're gonna walk in the door. They're the people who, you know, you're selling stuff for travel, gear, and it just happens to appeal to older people, right? Because they see themselves like, oh, this is, you know, this is a younger brand. It's really aspirational. Like, I see myself like that. I want to. I want to, you know, I want to be that person. I want to travel like that person or whatever. You're not selling directly to those people. You're just getting them. You know, this is the dart. You missing the bullseye and hitting the outer ring. Right? Which is. Okay. So we build brands again around the person who is most predictive of our success long term. That's a lot different than I want to sell to 2535. Right. There's a ton of people in there that are in that thing. They care about vastly different things. They live vastly different lives. They're telling vastly different stories about themselves to other people. So building around things like interests, around motivations, around goals where they want to be and where they're starting from is a much solid. It's a much more solid place to start than, oh.

I'm on a crusade against the busy moms. That's what I always, I don't know how many like 28 year old dudes I've talked to that I ask, okay, who's your ideal customer? And they're like, oh, it's a busy mom. She's like probably 35 to 55 maybe, lives in the Midwest, two to three kids, she's super busy and she has enough money to buy my product. Like, okay, thanks for coming out, that's super helpful. You know, you could be 25 year old homemaker, three kids under five, right? That person's got one life that looks like this. You could be 42, two kids in high school and you travel full time as a corporate consultant. And your big concern is that you don't feel like you have a connection with your kids. Whatever the story that those women are telling about their lives, the needs that they have from a product perspective and a messaging perspective are completely different. But they fall under busy mom, right? So that's why targeting against demographics, that's why targeting against even simple kind of behavioral things doesn't work very well. And that's why even when you look at, from a technical, tactical aspect, marketing on Facebook and things like that, they steer you towards interest. Targeting towards.

More like kind of lifestyle factors and motivation factors because they know that that works better than if you just target a swath of people based on their age.

So what I actually want to do with you guys here is walk through and actually build out your ideal customer for your business, right? Is that, please. Okay, cool.

So one thing I'll say, and this just comes off the conversation that we had over lunch, we build brands around kind of archetypes and avatars, right? So I think of these people as like, again, they're the people who are most predictive of our success long term. These are the people that are going to spend the most money with us. They're going to be repeat customers. They're going to talk about us to other people. They're going to be willing to pay a premium price when people come in and kind of undercut the market or whatever. So we build brands around avatars. That means that that person might not actually exist exactly as you describe them in the real world, right? They, you could find people that look pretty similar to that. Most of your customers are going to look like at least 60 to 80% like that person. But because it's an avatar. I don't want you to think about it like this needs to be a literal person. This is the person that, you know. If all of your customers looked like this, you'd be successful beyond your wildest dreams, right? That's phase one, when you're still starting out, that's who you build around. That's the flag that you plant in the ground, and you build around that person. Phase two, once you've scaled up to a certain point and looking ahead, right, is figuring out, okay, now that I've got enough information, now that I've got enough customers, I can understand what are the different variations that that ideal customer has, right? And that's segment marketing, right? We build brands around avatars. We market to segments. And so I'll use the same example that I used in our conversation, right? I used to work with a really large online grocery delivery company that was my biggest client for a long time when I was in an agency environment based in New York. And they're really big on natural, you know, straight from farm, farm to table.

You know, and their ideal customer archetype, right, was someone who was really into natural and organic, who lived in these deep kind of, you know, urban areas and had a lot of difficulties in terms of finding fresh foods, getting them up to, you know, seventh story, walk up or whatever, and, you know, had a lot of needs around food procurement and food preparation and food availability and all that kind of stuff. That was the person that they built the brand around in terms of how they marketed that. They had a bunch of different people. They had some people who we called Joy of Food, who were more of.

Really took joy in every step of the food preparation process.

They wanted to make things from scratch. They wanted to source whole ingredients and really build dishes on their own. And they entertained a lot and things like that. We had a group of people who were more like feeding the family types. They had a couple kids in the house they were more concerned with, okay, how can I get something on the table fast that's healthy for my kids and that they're going to eat. We had some people that had a very functional relationship with food, and they were more concerned about ingredient quality and macros and things like that. And then we had a group that was more, we call them solution seekers, that maybe they're diabetic, maybe they.

Had gluten intolerance, celiac, whatever, and they had specific needs that they were trying to address. All of those people cared about natural. They had difficulties sourcing the food in These urban environments, they needed help in terms of thinking of things to do, whatever. They were all part of that core customer. But the specific things that that person cared about were different based on which kind of segment they're in. So at that next click, when you're marketing to those segments, right, you lead with different messages, you lead with different creative. For one person, it's putting everything together from scratch. For another person, it's quick and easy meals that you can put on the table for your family. For other people, it's shakes that are gonna hit your macro numbers or whatever. And all under the umbrella of, you know, the natural and organic and the things that they cared about in these urban areas. So that's kind of how this evolves. But when we are starting out, we build around that person that's most predictive of our success. Are you advertising to your actual audience of buyers, or are you advertising to lookalike? Okay, so that. That's a good place to start. Recognize that there's some response bias in that, too.

The same thing, like when you send a survey out, it tends to be. It tends to skew older, tends to skew more female. That's just the way it is, right? Same thing, probably, for some of the ad things. So take it with a grain of salt. But again, any data is better than no data.

I just didn't know how to get it from Alex.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And they don't want to give it to you, right. They want to keep you dependent. And I always say that if you're not building your brand, because a lot of people, they're just kind of chasing sales. They want to build cash flow and everything. That's fine. But if you're not actively building your brand, you're building Amazon's brand, right? Like, they want it to be the situation where someone asks, oh, where'd you get that game? And they're like, oh, I got it on Amazon. They don't even know the name of your company, right? So you have to act like you have to really take extraordinary steps for people to know what your brand actually is even called. So I always start out the question, and like, when I'm having a conversation with customers, I always ask, you know, tell me a little bit about yourself. You know, where do you live? What do you do for work? All that kind of stuff gives me a little context. And I say, okay, walk me through your day. I want to know from the second you wake up to the second you go to bed, what does a normal day look like? Right. So then they walk me through, I've got a better understanding of kind of who they are as a person based on how they describe themselves in the first question and then kind of what they do in their day to day life. I then ask them and I'm just going to use. I have a weighted blanket client right now, so I'll talk about sleep just as an example, right? I want to know, okay, what does your day look like after a really good night's sleep? What does that look like? What does that feel like? Walk me through it. What does it look like after a really terrible night's sleep? You just described your average day, your average sleep cycle to me. You wake up at 3 o' clock every morning contemplating every dumb thing that you've ever done in your life. And you do that every single day. On a good day, where that doesn't happen, right? Day looks a lot different. On a bad day.

You'Re like, it sucks. I don't want to talk to anyone till noon, I want to leave the office by 4. I don't get anything done until 1pm like, you know, I feel irritable, I feel like a worse version of myself, all that kind of stuff. So I already understand, like, okay, this is what I'm selling them, right? This is the vision for like they want more of these and less of these, right? I want to know what their life looks like in 10 years. Not even related to sleep. I just want to know what their goals are. Where do you want to go? Where do you want to be? Right? That's going to be a lot easier to reach, right? If you sleep well, if you kind of consistently can have movement towards those goals instead of feeling like, you know, one in every 10 days, you actually feel good enough to do that. And then I want to know what head trash are they bringing to the table and what can I message directly against, right? So if I'm, you know, people have fucked up relationship with sleep and that's just the way it goes. And so if I can help message around that, if I can help design my products to make sure that they're as equipped as possible to do that, if I can sell a dream of a world where this relationship is really healthy instead of really. And if they come to it with a really healthy relationship with sleep, then that tells me something completely different, right? I need to probably rethink my strategy a little bit, but that's kind of like how I go through that conversation. Anybody else, can you elaborate on soliciting feedback from customers what have you really seen work best? Well, so I mean I think people really, if someone likes you enough to give you their contact information, right, if you've created enough value for them to like opt into being an audience member, to being on your email list, to joining ManyChat, to, you know, you know, agreeing to a phone call or whatever.

You would be stunned at how honored and how interested people are in giving feedback. Right? People want to be a part of that process. It's not seen as transactional necessarily. Now you should still reward them for that. You should still, you know, I almost always do a drawing like for, you know, one of five hundred dollar Amazon gift cards if I'm sending out to, you know, a list of 5,000 people, right. And that's just as a thank you. That's like a, hey, you know, this is going to take six minutes of your time and in return you'll have an opportunity to win one of these gift cards. Really thank you. Some of my clients will then send out five 10% gift discounts to everyone who does it. But a lot of people won't.

Then from there a lot of people will just sign up for interviews that are not even incentivized. If you just allow them to check a box at the end and say, hey, I'm doing some follow up interviews as well. If you'd like to hop on the phone, you know, just give your some times and availability there. And those are the people you want to build around anyways. The people that are that interested in talking to you, that are that invested in the brand, those are the people who are your ideal customers, right? They're willing to take extra steps for you. They're the people who are going to go leave reviews when you ask them. They're people who, if you need to scale up another sales channel and you want to direct people to retail at some point they're going to go take the step to go buy from you in retail and things like that. So that's really what I tell people is like you should honor their time, you should offer some sort of incentive or whatever, but you shouldn't feel like you have to pay every single person that comes through. And you would be surprised at how willing and excited people are to give feedback. Does that make sense?

Sam?