When if comes to creating content – any item of content at all – it’s important to know who you’re creating it for.
There’s a lot being said about doing market research and developing a client avatar, all super smart stuff for sure.
There is an interesting way of thinking about where a person stands in term of ‘being ready’ to become your client that I heard shared close to twenty years ago from Lorrie Morgan-Ferroro.
In this episode, I’m going to tell you about what I’ve come to think of as The Four Roses of Client Readiness.
- Green/Unrevealed Rose : Needs Evangelism
- Tight Rose Bud: Needs Curiosity Satisfied
- Open Rose: Needs How To & Encouragement
- Full Bloom: Wants To Maximize Everything
It has served me well to know who I’m creating content for and better still, to know what stage of readiness I’m focused on. It helps me design content with the most relevant and likely to be successful call to action.
Use example:
You’re a Health Coach with a specialty in working with women after 50. You might think all women over the age of 50 are your market, but of course that’s not true. If you get the chance to speak to large group of 50+ women in the ‘Unrevealed Rose Stage’, you wouldn’t do well to offer content that assumes they’re aware of and willing to spend to address their health issues. They may tune you out entirely and won’t be likely to respond to any offer you make.
If on the other hand you treat the opportunity as a chance to Evangelize, you’ll focus on education and inspiring stories. You’ll address issues they can relate to and make simple offers to learn more that they can say yes to with ease.
The same Health Coach may get an opportunity to speaker to a group of 50+ women who paid to attend a health retreat. Now in this case, they would’t waste time with basics – they’d dive straight into some actionable how to information and make an offer to walk them through it. Because the potential clients present are in that ‘Open Rose’ stage, they are ready to jump right in.
See how this makes sense and helps you choose what to share and what to offer?
It gets clearer the more you play with it.
Keeping The Four Roses of Client Readiness in mind will help you tailor content and offers to the right people.
Think about how this fits your business model. Does it serve you to design at least some content for each phase? Not all at once, but eventually?
It’s entirely possible that you only want to serve clients who are in Full Bloom. Many high end coaches specialize in this, so they’ll waste no time publishing content intended to evangelize a newbie. They’ll focus ideas and seek platforms that put them in contact with Full Blooms.
Let The Four Roses of Client Readiness support you as you continue to develop your Offer Funnel and build out the content that grows your business. If you’d like some help working through how it applies to you, reach out about coaching with me 💕