The #1 Reason Your Message Isn't Attracting Your Ideal Client

Do you find yourself wondering if what you're putting out online is working? Are you constantly searching for the next course or swipe to figure out the right phrasing to click with your ideal customer, but are starting to feel frustrated. You know your messaging is off, but not entirely sure why or how to fix it.

Today we’re going to dive into one of the top messaging mistakes that I see so many entrepreneurs making and more importantly, how to correct it. This is a topic I'm deeply passionate about and I hope the insights and strategies you'll learn in this episode will empower you to start doing more thinking for yourself and your business.

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Transcript

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Don't just go through the motions. Set yourself in motion by asking better questions. If you want to improve your message, if you want to deeply connect and pull your ideal audience to you like a magnet, you have to start thinking critically in your business.

Well, hey friend, welcome to another episode of The Heather Sager show. It's me, Heather Sager and I'm honored to be your speaking coach here today in this episode. I've spent the last 15 years studying and building my communication skills to inspire and teach business owners and their teams from stages around the world. I've had the honor of speaking on more than a thousand stages on topics of leadership, premium brand positioning, sales, and of course communication. And now my focus is helping fellow online entrepreneurs become magnetic speakers, so they can make a bigger impact in the world while growing their income. This show right here was designed to give you a dedicated space each and every week to grow your skills, and keep your big goals front and center. And if you like today's episode, be sure to grab a screenshot and share it on Instagram and tag me at the Heather Sager so I can give you a shout out and celebrate the work you're doing. All right, let's dive in, friend, it's gonna be a good one. 

Hey, friends, welcome back to another episode of The Heather Sager show. Today we're digging into a topic that I have been wanting to talk about for months. We're talking about your messaging. We're talking about how to better connect, not just with any audience, but your ideal audience. So if you've been feeling a little off around your message not landing, whether you're confused when you show up to a Facebook Live, and you wonder what should I be talking about, or maybe you're feeling frustrated because you're doing a lot of content on video or not, but you're showing up and what you're talking about doesn't seem to be paying off. It doesn't drive leads, you're not booking clients from it. Something is off, but you can't quite figure out exactly what that is, and it's forcing you to continually search for another swipe file, or another template, or another course, or another something, to help you figure out how to make it click. You know, a lot of people I see in Facebook groups, they start searching for working one on one with a coach or everyone's looking for the answer to unlock the offness with their messaging. And today, we're going to talk about what I think is fundamentally the miss that most business owners are making when their message is off, and surprisingly, it's pretty obvious. But as one of my favorite quotes of all time by Will Rogers, "just because it's common sense doesn't mean it's common practice." 

So I want you to stick with me today because we're going to talk through the number one thing that I do with every single one of my private clients and with every single member inside my community, Speak up to Level up, nothing moves until we lock this one thing in and it becomes the root to the tree that you'll grow which is your business and your messaging. So let's dive right in to the number one reason your messaging isn't attracting your ideal clients, you ready for it? Yeah, we're going straight into today. This is like a mini training, so let's jump into it. 

The number one reason that I see that creates the miss for people in their messaging is a lack of strategy. No clarity equals no strategy. Let me explain. So what I often see with entrepreneurs, especially those within their first few years of getting things online, so creating courses or digital programs or products for the online audience, I see a lot of people have confusion with themselves around what is it that they are bringing to the world? So there's confusion around what exactly should I talk about? I know a lot of different things, but I don't necessarily know like what specific angle to focus on. So it becomes a little bit of a word stew or a copy party that's not really well organized, it's kind of crazy. I don't know. I'm trying to help analogy here, but it's we just keep throwing things out there hoping that something will stick, and when that something sticks, we'll get feedback.

 And you know, we hear this so often, right? Find the things that your audience wants, find the message that resonates and then create that. But what do you do in the meantime, we just start talking about a lot of different things, sharing our expertise, wondering, what's the thing that's going to work. And friend, this isn't going to get you any results. Let me give you an example here, I was recently working with a client who came to me because she really wanted to get her messaging down and show up with a lot more confidence to promote a group program. In our first session, we sat down and we talked about getting clear on your number one goal or objective. I was like, tell me about your services, tell me what you do and what you're hoping to grow. She shared with me she was a service provider and she was expanding into wanting to do a group coaching programs. And I said, okay, pause. When you think about one year from now, what do you want to spend your time working on? And she loved her one on one work, she loved it. But we uncovered that the one on one work was taking an incredibly long time, clients would drag on for weeks and months, and they would go forever and she was working 60 to 70 hours a week with no end in sight. But she loved the one on one work and had this vision that she could create it by doing something more, have you guys probably heard of this before, doing VIP days, where instead of dragging a project over for months, the clients book you for a full day and you put your head down and tackle and collaborate with that client for one full intensive focus session? So she had this idea to start switching that model, but she also wanted to scale her business and she's thinking okay, group programs, what should I do? So when I asked the question, where do you want to focus, what it came down to was, she loved the one on one work, but she just wanted to work less and make that VIP offer worked for her. So her ultimate end goal was to cut her hours in half well making more money. Ensure the group program could allow for that, but if what she was passionate about what she was getting results was a one on one, why not focus there? So the first thing we did was drill down exactly what the client's goal was. 

Now hear me when I say this, when most people when they come to me, they want help from messaging. What do I say, to get people to sign up for my webinar? What do I say on my Instagram stories or Facebook Lives? What should be in my signature talk? What story should I share? And all of these are great and valid questions, I'm sure you have many of them. But none of those questions matter, if we don't understand what all this is pointing back to. Do you hear me? Are we promoting your one on one services? Are we promoting a freebie? Are we focused on driving traffic to a low ticket offer? Are we focused on promoting a new mastermind you have coming up? What are the strategic goals you have in your business? of serious you got to answer that for yourself, and you might be rolling your eyes around going, Heather, I know all my offers. But question, are you clear of which specific offers you are promoting to your audience? Or is this like a Target situation where you're hoping new moms will come in with their red car, grab a frappuccino, put the baby in the little slingy thing that like fits into a shopping cart now these days, and you're hoping they'll just browse around the store and hit up all the sections and buy all the things that they may or may not need, ie., just gobble up all your offers because they feel like it. 

Newsflash, you're not Target. People aren't just gallivanting around your social media hoping to buy things from you. In fact, most of us approach social media these days with this skepticism where we are so sick of people overtly in our face, alluding to a thing but not actually directly talking about the thing. You know what I'm talking about, right? It's all of like, the shady around about very clearly being sold to without the gall to say I'm actually talking about my program. Do you feel that, maybe that's just me? I don't know. I'm sick of the sneakiness. Talk about your programs, talk about your services, be clear on what you do. Allow people to buy from you, but you have to make some decisions around, what exactly are you pointing people to? 

So coming back the message, what I want you to think about is, let's pretend that you are a chef and you ultimately have your like go-to dish you want people to buy. It's the thing you love making, it's the thing that you're best at and the thing you know, you can get results for other people. Let me just do a Sager side tangent right here, a little side note. Those three things I just listed are also based off of, if you've read Jim Collins book, Great by Choice. He talks about this thing called the hedgehog concept which all great businesses, they have to find their sweet spot. He calls it the one x. What is that thing? It's the thing that you are that you could be the best at in the world. It's something that you're deeply passionate about, and then third is something that can drive your economic engine, so think about those three things. Venn diagram, those three overlapping circles. So what did I say is, if you're a chef, you have a dish that you will love making, deeply passionate about. You have a dish that you're damn good at, like you're really, really good at it, ie., you can be the best in the world at it. And three, something that drives your economic engine, so translation, something that people actually want and will pay money for. That's the trifecta that we're looking for in a Venn diagram. 

Now coming back, what happens so often is people have this idea of, oh, I love to cook. I can cook French cuisine. Oh, I love to cook breakfast. Oh, I love to cook Indian food. And there's all these loves of cooking so we want to talk about all these things and so maybe we show up on our social media. Again, we're pretending you're a chef here. This is a weird analogy but just go with it. If you're hanging out with me, you know, we'd like to go for analogies. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, but I'm deeply committed to them. But let's say here, if you're going to start talking about different kinds of cuisines and maybe you get on this kick, where you want to talk about Spanish food and Tapas, and now I'm really freaking hungry. But you're talking about these things and then you wonder, why is no one buying my signature dish? Why is nobody? People are interacting, people are responding, people love the Tapas' post, but nobody is signing up to my lead magnet for my signature dish? Well, it's because we lost sight of our strategy. If your goal is to sell your signature dish and you're dang good at your signature dish and you've got proven results for yourself and other people with your signature dish, that strategy of selling that dish needs to be at the heart of your message. 

So let me clarify something that you might be thinking right now. Heather, are you thinking, are you saying that I have to always be talking about my signature dish? Do I always have to be selling by my dish? No, you should not be overtly all the time screaming buy now, buy now, buy now. However, you should probably be saying buy now far more often than you are, so just permission to be a little bit more gutsy with asking for sales. Permission. If you want to talk about selling stuff, shoot me a note on Instagram and if selling is a conversation you want me to talk more about, something I'm deeply passionate about. But I think we all need to be more confident, being able to say, hey, my programs is awesome, by the way, we're enrolling, like, talk about it directly. 

But what I'm saying here is when it comes to messaging, when you're clear on the roots, we're going to go the other analogy now. The roots of the tree, if your business is a tree, we got to make sure our roots are planted strong. What is the core offer that you're actually leading people back to? Let's go here. When you come up with ideas for social media, when you come up with topics to talk about on podcast, when you start exploring these different ways you could talk about your business, you're smart, you can ask yourself, how does this connect back to my main objective?

You're smart, you can answer that question. And you can determine does it one for one directly correlate like, Oh yeah, if they do this, then they'll love my free program or my free opt in and my program. Or it might be a couple like Kevin Bacon situation like a six degrees of separation. It's not a bad thing, but you have any awareness to know how close is what you're talking about tied back directly to what you ultimately love doing, are deeply passionate about, are really good and actually drives your economic engine in your business. That's when you can start self assessing and asking better questions to improve your message. Now I know a lot of people teach hey, here's the secret sauce for how to have a message infusing psychology and thinking about the way people feel and think, and we could talk about identities and pain points and desires, and future pacing and creating story gaps and all these things. I teach all of these things inside my program. But what I can tell you is none of the tactics and strategies matter if you one aren't clear of what your strategy is like what are you leveraging these tactics for, and then two, something I'm deeply passionate about, you only use these strategies and tactics in alignment with strong ethics. I think there's a lot of people leveraging psychology to manipulate people to buy things that they don't actually need. I stand very strongly in, and this is my clients. They have incredible programs, incredible experiences, incredible ways of helping people become better versions of themselves, help them, manage anxiety, help people create websites, help people navigate personal finance and budgeting. There's so many examples of incredible business owners inside my program. And I know the through line with all of them is they have a heart centered businesses where they want to make a significant impact, but there's some kind of block between what they do and how they communicate it to other people. One of those big blocks we unlock is get your strategy tight, know exactly why you're doing what you're doing. But then beyond that is we have to understand how to connect with people in an effective way to put it in, for lack of a better term, put it in their language because we're used to speaking our language. I'm gonna go off on another tangent here, because I think this is relevant. You may have heard me talk about this before on the show, but prior to starting my business, I worked in the hearing care industry for 10 years. Hearing Care, I'm talking about ears. Specifically, I worked with audiologists and my team and I, we developed this program where it was a set of best practices that the top audiologists in the hearing care industry were using to help patients accept treatment for hearing aids. 

Now something that you might not realize, which was shocking to me at the time is hearing is not a common benefit that people have on their medical insurance here in the US. Getting hearing aids is typically not covered or it's covered very sparsely with most insurance. And so what this means is you have medical professionals who went to school, who have to become sales people, and sell these tiny computers, that people were in their ears so that they can hear their grandchildren, or finally be able to answer the phone which they had been avoiding for 10 years, or actually hear their pastor at church. These people who have socially distanced themselves way before it was pandemically cool. Because they couldn't communicate and effectively talk to other people. Side note, if you're new around here, you should know this about me. I'm one of those people. So I've had a hearing loss for, Oh gosh, 16 years, I think that's maybe longer than that, 20 years, we're going on 20 years. I have a significant hearing loss. I cannot function without my hearing aids, and actually, at the time of this recording, my hearing aids broke last week. Luckily, I have a backup pair because of my background in this space. Side notes, like Devil Wears Prada, since I worked in a hearing care industry, manufacturers wanted me to wear their hearing aids and it was like what she wearing when I was up on stage. Audiologist want to know and kind of geeky nerd moment, which means nothing to anyone except for me and those who work in the hearing care industry. But shout out if you're listening, I miss y'all. But coming back to it, what I was saying? Oh, so me hearing, it goes okay, so get this, get this.

Y'all think about it would be so logical of someone who can't hear that, of course, they would want help. That seems logical, right? And now, you know, I'm back into the corner because you know I'm gonna say something different here, right? Someone would come, me included, would sit down with an audiologist and see the actual hearing test facts in front of me that would show I have a hearing loss, and still yet resist buying the solution because the solution costs money, and the perception of what the solution would do could be lacking. So follow me here for a moment, we think people make decisions based off logic, and logic is a piece of them. We make purchasing decisions based off emotion. So a lot of what my team and I did was working with hearing care providers, how do you have the conversation with someone who Oh, we're talking about the ethics piece. We're circling back around that, but how do you have a conversation with someone who, medically speaking has a hearing loss, needs helps, know they need help, but they don't actually get what they're missing. And let me tell you this. Imagine for a moment, so you listening, you most likely have, you can see in your eyesight. Most likely you have your eyesight. If you have any struggles with your eyes, you probably wear glasses, but you know what it means to like, see clearly and not see clearly. Imagine for a moment that you're standing in the corner of a room and I'm standing there with a dimmer and I start turning the lights down. Over time, you're gradually going to notice, oh, it's getting darker. It's getting darker. And maybe you start straining to see the details across the room, and it gets darker and darker. And at some point, you are actively squinting, trying to see the details in the room, but you you're aware of it's getting darker. That's the thing about vision is you have an awareness of what you're seeing versus what you're not seeing. When it comes to hearing, you can't tell things are being dimmed. It's not like you hear or you don't. it's not like a volume thing like, Oh, I just don't hear. With hearing, there's an element of understanding. So the awareness of someone having a hearing loss, it's like a check the box, yeah, I know, I'm struggling. But it's not like looking at a light like a room of seeing like, Oh, it's really dark in here, and you can see that you can't see. I know how funny does that sound. Hearing is intangible and you don't have the awareness for how much you're hearing. So for me personally, when I sat down with an audiologist for the first time, they had asked me some very specific questions, so I can start understanding just how much my hearing was impacting me. 

So for example, I didn't realize that my hearing loss was drastically impacting my husband. We had just gotten married, I never thought about the effect of my stuff on his. The reason why I tell you this is a lot of us have a hang up when it comes to selling. A lot of us have a hang up when we think like oh, the end of our strategy is to sell our signature dish, back to the chef thing. We get caught up being like, oh, we're going to be so pushy, like people need to be able to make their own decisions. I hear this argument. I've heard it from so many incredible leaders in the space right now. They're outwardly talking about, it's our job as marketers just to provide the facts and trust that people are smart and make the decisions. Hear me loud and clear when I say this. I do not care who I make mad. But if someone would have just provided me the facts of my hearing loss and allowed me to determine my best course of action, I would not be sitting here today. I am so frickin grateful that an audiologist had the balls to sell me hearing aids. Yeah, I just said that. Because if they wouldn't have sold me, if they wouldn't have asked me questions, if they wouldn't have helped me see just how big my struggle was, I would not be able to hear right now which means I would not have had the last 15 years of my life, developing my speaking skills, connecting with people all over the country, speaking on stages, learning how to communicate and read body language, and then be here to teach you if someone would have just provided me the information. 

So if you are listening to other people online right now saying, be ethical, just provide the information to people and trust that they're smart. I'm sorry, no, no, that's not going to work. Because if your program requires people to see themselves in their world and the reality in a different way, it is your responsibility to help them see it another way. That's not manipulation, that's being of service. If you're a marketer, and you teach something that helps other people, you have a duty and responsibility to develop your persuasion skills, to develop your communication skills to develop your smarts to do ethical base marketing that isn't sneaky and schmucky or whatever else. Again, we don't need to convince people to buy something they don't need. But if your program or your product is helpful to people and you've created incredible results for others, you have a duty to learn how to talk about it in a compelling way. I am so freaking lit up and passionate about this, nd I hope you can hear it in my voice and you're not like Oh God, Heather, Heather is on fire. I'm on fire today. I hope you think that, but I hope you understand why? Because I think this language that is out there right now is very dangerous, giving you an out to say all you have to do is put the information out there and leave it on other people. I'm sorry, Your business is not going to grow that way. And I don't think ethically speaking that is the right solution because again going back, if somebody would have done that for me and I see the thousands of hearing care providers that I worked with over the last 10, well now it's been longer than that, but decade, decade and a half. If we would have just had the approach of just educate so many mothers, and fathers, and grandmothers, grandfathers, parents, like so many people would have been missing out on life and that weighs heavily on me. 

So this for me going back to all of this, when it comes to your message you have to understand your strategy, which is more than just your offer. it is your compelling why. What is the big why at stake for why what you're doing is so powerful? Why is it powerful for you? Why is it powerful for your ideal clients? Why is it powerful for if you're a guest, for example, on someone's podcast, why is this powerful for them? There's somebody that I teach inside of Speak up to Level up that I want to teach you today in in kind of wrapping up this episode, that I want you to start asking yourself. We call it our purposeful speaking triangle. Imagine for a moment you draw a triangle on paper, there's three sides. Side one is you and your business, side two is your audience. I had to think about that for a second. And then side three is the client, and let me explain each of these. 

Every time you step up to a microphone or a video, or you say yes to a speaking opportunity, or you go after a speaking opportunity, I want you to ask yourself, the question is, what is the purpose for me? What is the purpose for the host or client, the situation? So if it's a virtual summit, whoever is hosting that. If it's podcast, whoever' is the host of the podcast. If that's not applicable, if it's your platform, you can skip that one. But then what's the purpose and objective for your ideal audience, not just any audience, but your ideal audience?

By taking a moment to ask these questions, this is where I get to tell you, you are wicked smart, you can figure it out. This is where we honor our audience where we allow our audience to fill in the blanks. So me sitting here today, right? Instead of me just telling you the facts around messaging, instead of me just telling you specifically why you need to get your message dialed in and allow you to just be smart and figure it out. Instead, what I'm doing today is providing you perspective. I'm speaking to your heart, I'm sharing my experiences, I'm connecting with you on values. If you value ethical marketing, but you also still struggle with how can you just provide people information without actually selling where you actually do feel that there is room to sell and serve in the space. If you've been like praise to Heather on this episode, we aligned on that. I've connected with you on that. And where I'm empowering you as my listener today, where I'm empowering you to make choices is how you apply it, right? So I'm giving you the opportunity to say okay, now how do I self coach here? When I have an opportunity?, how do I make sure that I'm clear on what my goal is? How do I make sure I'm clear on how I add value to the client as a host, and I'm clear around how I add value to the audience? Who is that ideal audience? 

If you start asking yourself some questions, what I really want to encourage you today is, so often I see business owners just focus on being reactive. There's this constant flood of a to-do list online where we're chasing the next thing on our Monday board, or our ClickUp, or Asana board, whatever it is you use, or maybe it's your your planner. There's this constant tidal wave of tasks and activities you have to get done. We race from task to task to task and we do not create any space in between to think. What I want you to consider today is what if you took a moment and actually ask yourself some questions about the tasks you're about to do, so that you can do them at a higher level. Don't just go through the motions, set yourself in motion by asking better questions. If you want to improve your message, if you want to deeply connect and pull your ideal audience to you like a magnet, you have to start thinking critically in your business. This is something I am deeply passionate about. You're going to hear me talk a lot more about. But there's no secret sauce in terms of finding the right phrasing to use, to hook people in for the right call to action. There is not a secret template, arguably said, other people will sell you this. There is a secret swipe file that you can use to sell from the stage. I don't subscribe to that. What I subscribe to is the new age entrepreneur that the person who's going to connect and stay standing through all the marketing I've been, through all the other things, the person who's going to have longevity in their brand because they're serving and are bold enough to sell, the person who does that they start asking quality questions of themselves of the processes and they understand the fundamentals of communication, they understand persuasion and influence is a powerful thing and when used appropriately it can change your freacking world and the world for those around you. I'm deeply passionate about that. 

If you're on board for that kind of stuff, if you're like, yes, Heather, I've been waiting for this episode, be sure to shoot me a note on Instagram and tell me what really resonated with you today. Your feedback really means the world. I like to think that we're having coffee right now as I'm chatting, but I know I'm just, I'm know I'm talking to you. I know I'm in your earbuds somewhere in the world, and it means the world to me that you've keep coming back. I know you got a lot of people that you could have in your earbuds right now, and the fact that you keep coming back to my weird, quirky stories and analogies. I mean, I hope we're having fun here. But today's episode, I just wanted to get your brains thinking to empower you to start doing more thinking for yourself. And if you haven't asked the question of yourself, what is my strategy in my business for my messaging? What is all of this coming back to? If you like what we talked about today, and you'd like some of the things on earth and I know you're going to love my free training that I have out right now. It's on demand, where I talk about how you nail your message when you're on podcast, when you're on live video, and other kinds of virtual stages without that constant second guessing, Oh, am I doing this right? Is it on? Is it off? Is it aligned? I want to teach you how to do that. And I also want to teach you some of the other mistakes in addition to what we covered today. The mistakes I see people making in their journey as they start getting their message out there. 

So if you would love to take that training, it's an hour, I'm going to give you a lot of things. And yeah, we're going to talk about my program, Speak up to Level up which doors are open, I would love to welcome you inside of our members where each month we are practicing together how to develop our messaging in a more compelling way. We're having conversations around selling and ethical marketing and how you can level up by putting yourself on bigger level stages to ultimately attract the right people to have community with and growing your online business. So if you want to check out that free training, no strings attached, don't worry, it's not one of those like schmucky sales pitches. It's an actual training. Y'all I do this for a living, so you're going to come and have a fun time with me. Head on over to heathersager.com/speak. You can grab that free training now or you can grab the link in the show notes. And I hope you found a lot of value in today's episode, and I will see you next week, where we're going to continue the conversation where I have a special guest. I'll see you then.