Skip to main content

Observe to Offer

Lesson 2 from: $200M Storytelling Formula to Build Belief and Convert More Customers

Christian McLeod

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

2. Observe to Offer

Focuses on the importance of deeply understanding the market by observing consumer behaviors, identifying their core needs, wants, fears, and barriers, and using this insight to create compelling offers.
Next Lesson: Your Environment

Lesson Info

Observe to Offer

Have you ever wondered how the best brands craft offers that just feel like they're reading our minds? Well, it's not magic, it's methodical and in this deep dive, we're going to unravel this method by first immersing ourselves in our markets world, feeling their dreams and fears. And then we're gonna play detective, studying our competitors and plotting our unique position. Then once we're armed with this knowledge, we're going to employ our secret weapon, the offer equation. So if you're ready to design an offer that doesn't just fit, but actually resonates and converts, let's go turn that observation into opportunity. Mhm. Now, I want you to know no matter what business we're talking about, whether it's cal food, roofing, Lords and ladies titles. If you've ever seen those earrings or mattresses or chiropractic services or coffee wigs literally anything you can think about, right? There's so many offers. It doesn't matter. Doesn't I get the same questions every single time? Why is my...

row as so low? Why aren't my ads converting? Why are my emails not getting clicks or why is my conversion rate? Terrible, right? And the truth is your offer sucks. That's it. Uh I'm not, I'm not gonna be like some fancy like, let's, we gotta figure out the bid strategy on these ads or we gotta figure out, you know, uh oh this little technical hack or this app you gotta implement. No, it's, it's like almost all the time. It's that your offer sucks and, or the way that you're connecting with your market with that offer and relating it to that offer sucks. And it's basically meaning that your offer just isn't sharp, it's not cutting through and then you can't get the copy correct. And then obviously you can't get things like traffic correct. So how do we sharpen the offer? Well, first we want to listen to the market and in voya the, the course that we're leading on ecommerce side, uh which is this, we go over this and it's, we call it dating device, right? Like you wouldn't go on a date and not listen to the other person. You know, if you just, if you've ever had a date where someone doesn't listen to you and they're just chatting, they don't stop chatting and you're just like, uh like I just want to go like this isn't relevant to me. I'm not interested in or whatever brands do that all the time. We want to be the, the good date. We want to go on many days. We don't want to ask for marriage. That's like asking to buy right away. Um You know, asking for marriage, asking to go back whatever it is. We really want to listen to this market and we need to observe an offer so we can find out exactly who we're speaking to. You know, what they want, what they need, what they don't want, what their pains, fears are, what they don't need and what's stopping them from resolving those problems and hitting those goals. Right. We need to know exactly what's going on in their mind. But remember that this is a quote unquote target market and I want you to just bear in mind of that term. That's a super common term. And it's something that we really don't think too much of. Right. We think target market, we think that's the person we want to sell our product to, but just take the word target. What is it? It's a target, right? Just, just imagine it like that. And on this target you have a bull's eye almost every time when you see a target and you're like archery or darts or whatever, uh, your hacky sack or you're not Hacky Zack, uh, cornhole or if you're playing, you know, whatever game it is you wanna hit the bull's eye, right. You wanna hit the dead center, um, unless you're playing high end, right, we won't get into it, but we want to hit the bull's eye and people don't realize how important that is in marketing. We need to aim for that bull's eye. Not just the target, the bulls eye. Ok. There's an old quote from Mel Gibson in the movie The Patriot and this, there's plenty of other movies like this too. But Aim Small, Miss Small. And the premise is that you want to listen and, and really aim for that bull's eye and you'll hit the target at the very least. Right. If we aim for the target, you might even just hit another target. right? You might miss the target, but you might even hit another target all together, right? Straight laugh. You might, if you aim for aim small, you might hit a button, right? You might hit ring two, you hit ring three, but you're still in that target, right? If you are being lax AA and you're not aiming directly for that bull's eye, then you're not gonna get to the market that you're looking to get to, right? Because if we just aim for that general ballpark, it's not gonna cut through. Your average aimless offer is not going to compete out in a market like that. So where do we start? Right. Christian, where is this bullseye? Right? Where do we find it? And how do we create this cut through offer? Well, first we need to start selling what people actually want and this is chronic in service businesses and in e commerce, people are not selling what the market wants, they're selling what they like or they think is cool and that's just simply not going to do it. So let me clarify. That does not mean if you have a product to lie about what you have, you don't say this does this thing or our service does this thing and then just go ahead and get them signed, get them in and then take their money and then deliver on something else or, or send them a product that's not what they expected or it's a lower quality or something, don't do that. Right? For, that's not obvious. But I'm saying we need to really think about this because if you've ever been catfished on a date, you'll know exactly what this feels like. And unfortunately, there's a large number of companies that try to catfish their customers, whether they're doing it intentionally or unintentionally, it doesn't matter, but they're giving unrealistic claims, false promises, the works and what we're gonna do is we're going to take a three step process and we're going to number one, dive into the mind of the customer, right. We're going to become a detective, find all their deepest desires and potent fears that they've expressed online. We're going to use the mind Navigator map to do that. That's an asset that you'll find in this lesson and you can use this. Number two is we're going to become hyper aware of the competitive landscape in this. We're going to strategically calculate market positioning and then we're going to not influencing certain influencing factors in this assessment for the market, we're going to use the competitor awareness map for that one. And that's also found in, in this lesson of the next we're gonna then stack the offer equation and I promise I'll get to that in a sec. But from all of this, we're going to make offerings and stories into a science pretty simple, right? So first the mind and just like dating or being in a relationship, right? You want to listen to who you're communing with, communicating with and that's key, right? We need to listen to the market so we can communicate our offer in a way that makes sense to them or resonates with them and their needs and wants and hopes and fears and desires and, you know, moves them away from what they don't want to be and get them to where they, where they do. The goal is to find out what those people want. And again, this doesn't mean lie about what you have to offer just as anyone gets. Catfish left, disappointed, frustrated. Uh I'm sure in, in many emotional ways as well, but you want to, you do not want to excuse me, uh leave your market, unsatisfied, disappointed and frustrated. So don't force your product for any Ecom brands out there. Don't force your product to be something that it's not, that's it right. For service businesses, you can uh you can change your service quite quickly for the most part for most businesses. Um you can be flexible and move those things around with products is very difficult. So we don't want to sell what we, we aren't actually providing. Um But we do need in some cases to change the product or change the service slightly to really match what this market wants. Right. Let's build it into something that it should be and we can find this out by digging online. It's pretty simple. People are super open online uh If you haven't noticed and generally they're sharing their frustrations and their desires and everything in between. And we're going to go over how we can find that shortly. But I just need to point out the biggest setbacks for brands in building critical offers, right? Most businesses don't craft an offer to suit what the market wants. Instead they just have a product and most have actually poor products. But then they try to tweak the message and sell the hell out of it, right? Trying to convince this is like a pig is appearing as um but most are product sellers not offer crafters. So I just want to emphasize that there is a huge difference because product sellers care more about their business and selling their product and their, you know how good their product is, product, product and they like what they care about, but offer crafters care more about their market, right? And if you figure out what your market wants, you can craft the offer, the product, the service to that market and really drive home value through your product. And soon in this, in this course, we're gonna go over how we can drive value in other ways too. Now you might be thinking all right, this isn't applicable to me. You know, I have this business or, you know, I've made sales of my product. I know people want it and I just need to market it better. And to be honest, I've dealt with thousands of brands, um hundreds of ecommerce brands and done hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and this applies to every single one of them. So even the ones that are pretty successful already to begin with. And the big thing about this is if you've had success with these products, you know, you might be right to a degree. But if you're having things like conversion rate issues or emails just aren't making sales or your ads, whatever it might be or your ads struggle no matter what you've tried. The, the truth is it's usually the offer. And so we really need to dive in and figure out what does this market want and tailor it or tweak it. So that it actually makes sense. All right. So often that clarity and potency of that offer is, is what it comes down to a compelling offer is infinitely more powerful than a convincing argument. And that always rang home with me. Um and with the work that I've, I've ever done, you know, if our product does not meet what our market wants, then we need to modify our product to meet what the market needs. That's it. And most brands aren't willing to do that. Most brands are, they want are headstrong and they're like, I spent so much time on my supply chain and blah, blah, blah, and manufacturing and design and it's just not selling well. And the, the fact of the matter is that they might need to change it. I'm not saying that you always do, but more often than not, it's the offer so that communication of the offer or the actual offering. So in ecommerce, this can be super troublesome, right? Nobody wants to change that product rework things with their manufacturers. However, if that product changes uh or can change and can shift an average or below average offer into an incredible offer and give the market what it really wants, that's when things really start to sink. So don't try your best, do what must be done. That's it, right. If you want success, no one gives a, if you're doing your best, no one cares, right. We only care if what we're doing is resulting in what we need, right? What must be done, right? That's when you hit the Holy Grail, right? Products that practically sell themselves. It's not entirely true that they sell themselves, but it, it sure as hell makes it a lot easier and they do exist. Now, for most of you, you probably don't need to update your product or service. Um, you probably just need to communicate it a bit better. Right. You've probably proven that you've had many sales in your market, all of that good stuff. But you need to do this product market reality check. So regardless this, this process is going to be very useful to you, You might even find little things that you're like, oh, I could just change that in my service or change that in my product. And suddenly it's times better than what it was. Right. Tailor your messaging to make the product and market fit, right? So some action items first, we're going to dive through our markets mind online, you're gonna use the mind Navigator map to do that. You're gonna identify some values and fill out that mind Navigator map. I'm gonna walk you through all this. Then we want you to also be aware of stories and values out in that market. I trust me. That's going to come in handy later on. All right. And then last I would like you to run a reality check on your product market fit just really think about what you're identifying in the market and what you're offering. How connected are they? Do they make sense? Um Does it mesh together and, and really begin to, to match? All right, we'll catch you in the, my Navigator map and show you how that works. We're in the mine Navigator map. We're gonna tackle this. We're gonna keep it concise and we're gonna try and tackle a particular brand. We're gonna use adaptogen mushrooms for this example. Um Ecommerce tends to be a lot trickier uh, than, than service based businesses, but we all have different industries and niches. So take yours, relate it as you can. I'll try and give extra examples. What we do here is we're listening to the market not gonna go over the whole spiel again. We need to find out how we do that. This is going to show you this can take, I'm gonna forewarn it could take a while, this could take days and weeks to gather all the quality information. We need to make our marketing extremely personal and feel like they're, what we're saying is going right to their, to their souls, right? What they feel is like that is me. So I have a cheat code at the end to save you and kind of skip some of those steps. Bear with me. Number one, we have this sheet and we have wants and needs, don't wants and don't needs and any uncertainties or barriers that are holding them back. And we want to gather those types of people. We have inexperienced and we have experienced very simple. Now, in this case, right? Adaptogen and mushrooms, you know, I've put in some examples. I have even a full sheet here, full of examples. I'm gonna show you after, but I'll need more energy. That's something someone who's new, they're usually like taking coffee or something. They're like, I just need more energy. I'm feeling really tired or maybe they are taking coffee and they're like, I, I hate having jitters but I just love the taste of coffee. So, you know, how do we avoid these things? I don't want jitters, but I do want energy. Um And then there's people who have been around a while and they're like, I need focus or, you know, remain healthy as coffee is just created a ton of health issues for me right now. I'm not going to get into all these, but this is the the perspective you need to understand what I would say is during this process, I'm about to show you gather those pieces of uh statements and expressions in this column all the way down here. So if it's a hope or dream or want or need, throw it in here, if it's I don't want or fear or something, throw it in here. And if it's a barrier or uncertainty, a great example in property development would be, you know, I'm unsure if I need a license to get into commercial real estate, right? And so that's an uncertainty, you're not sure. But if it's true, then that might be an actual barrier that they might need a license to do this thing. And so you will identify these in your marketplaces. Uh And you can sometimes just type them in. But I recommend trying to find uh references of that online because the, the market will say things differently than you have it in your head. This is not a place for you to just type in. Oh, I know this. La la, la, la la. No, this is what you need to go and listen and copy paste into. I'm gonna show you how to do that uh for anyone who doesn't have this doc. Just so you know, when you copy the link, this is a Google sheet, you will be able to make a copy directly to your account or you can grab the Excel uh that's downloadable as well. So saying that and move on, this is answer the public. This is step one. What we're gonna do is we're gonna place in our topic here. So what would our topic be? It's adaptogen? Now, you see, I've done some, you know, research already, mushroom extracts or Rahi, which is a type of mushroom. Now, what you want to make sure is that you select United States naturally. When I load it, it will come up Ireland. But you want to make sure that this says United States or wherever your market is. If it's in Europe, if it's in Australia, wherever, make sure you check that because uh every market is gonna be different now, I already have run this and you only get three a day. So let's make it worth it. We're running adaptogen. And what you're going to see is actually these dials first and they're kind of hard to read, to be honest. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna click data and once we have the data, this is outlined in most sought to least sought out of like top 10, top 20. Now, I'm going to show you what this actually does. When we take adaptogen in the word, we're, we're going into Google and we're going google.com and it's going to go to google.com and we place in adaptogen. And what you'll notice is that these come up. Now those are the top so adaptogen supplements or for weight loss or whatever. But we can preface these. We can say if it's a question we say are adaptogen safe, safe for pregnancy. Good for you. This is the most sought. This is the least sought in this snippet of top 10. Now, you will find those right here are safe, safe for pregnancy, good for you, drugs, et cetera. This is short cutting that research for you to find out what is the most sought in these spaces. So you can totally do it manually. But this is a really great shortcut and you can download all of that information if you have a paid account. Um but you don't honestly need it. I would say you know, do as you please. In this case, we're going to take our adaptogen safe. Um I'm gonna show you in a minute what that looks like, but you can also look at indirect competitors. So let's say for adaptogen, the effects are similar to coffee. So we should look up coffee and what are people asking around coffee? Um Maybe they have certain questions. But what we can also see in this is actually prepositions, right? Coffee without a coffee maker, coffee without sugar or coffee with something or coffee for something. And then we also have um comparisons. So coffee uh excuse me, coffee versus tea or we could have adaptogen versus Zoloft or something uh like coffee. And so what we end up finding is a lot of questions. People have a lot of questions and we need to start researching them and you will have to do this many, many times over. I'm going to show you what you're gonna do. You're gonna take that adaptogen are safe as the first one and you're going to go to Google and you're going to type it in now, what you're gonna get is you're gonna get some general answers. The thing is we don't need the answers, we need to know what the market is asking around this and what that conversation is we want to eavesdrop. That's what we want to do. And so I've installed a plug in that I recommend for chrome and it's called discussions button for Google search. But you can also just come in here and type in forum, right? Or put it in quotes if you need. But if you click the discussions button, when you have this plug in, it gives you all the forums and you can tear through these and listen to the market. Now, I'm not gonna dive into them, but other recommendations would be websites like Cora. Um you can go to Pinterest places like that as well. But, uh, you need to bear in mind like if, if you're in a service based industry, like a restaurant or something to that effect, you know, there might be other places like Tripadvisor Yelp places where these conversations are happening or Facebook or Google, like certain parts you need to go and listen. That is the purpose of this, go and listen, find out what they're saying and we're gonna, I'm gonna show you how to gather that information. All right, the top place that we notice is two places, uh, Amazon reviews for products and even for service based businesses. If you think you can't find something on Amazon, I correct you on this one. You can find books relevant to your topic and go look at the reviews on the books and find out the expressions of the pains and the goals and everything that they've had in their life and people will tell their whole stories. So go in there. But the second best place is actually youtube. So when you go in here and you put adaptogen are safe, you end up with a bunch of different videos. Now, these usually won't be in the order of view count. So you go here and select view count on the filters and it will give you the, the views top viewed and all the way down. Why am I doing this? Well, usually if it's popular, there's usually quite a lot of conversation happening. So I've opened these up and what you'll notice in these videos is the commentary is plentiful. Uh In some cases it's not, uh but in a lot of these big videos, they will be very long and it will never really stop or what seems like it will never stop. So what you want to do is you want to load a bunch of this, right? Because if it's not loaded, you won't be able to do my next step. So scroll down, let it load, let it load, let it load. OK? And then what you're gonna do, you go, go back up to the top and you're going to hit command f and you're going to throw a question mark in there. OK? You're gonna hit enter. Now, what you'll notice is there are going to be videos on the side like this that has a question mark in it. Don't worry about it. We want to find the questions that are going on in the commentary, right from the market. This is the market leaving the questions. So would Ashwagandha increase testosterone in women? That's a wonderful question. Let's grab it so we can take this and we can place this into. Maybe it's a goal, maybe it's not, it's hard to tell. It sounds like an uncertainty. So let's put it in there and we can begin to gather these, these questions and thoughts. Now that's just a bit of a cheat code. I would say go through all the comments and just read. That's why this takes so long because you have to do a lot of reading. Now, once we've done this, you will end up with something like this and this is a, not even a fully filled out document, but this is a bunch of questions of wants and needs hope, streams, goals and these are their fears and when you'll notice is I have them and some of them are, you know, applicable to both uh inexperienced and experienced. Some are just inexperienced and some are just experienced. So move them as aside as you will. So once you're filling this out and let's say you've, you've filled out a bunch here, you're like, OK, this one's actually not applicable to inexperienced people. Let me put it there simple. OK? So that's what we want to make sure we do and you will end up with something like this. Feel free to record the source. So in that case I would take this link and I would just place the link in my location for that piece of information that I gathered. If you want to refer back to it totally up to you. Now, now that we've gathered that we then want to tear through all our information and find verbiage because this is where kind of the magic happens in a sense. It's like the, the cherry on top of the cake or the frosting or whatever you want to refer to. You want to find words that are commonly used or terms that are only really used in this niche industry. And so we want to find things like um calm, energized hormones, balanced hormones, uh stress management. And when we put these all together, we gather and we throw them all in this side column. And then what we do is we say, OK, well, if it's immune booster, I'm gonna go, well, actually, I'm gonna use mood balancer, you go to Google and you type mood balancer definition and you will end up with a definition. Uh examples, you can do find a bunch of information, keep it simple and you're just going to place it in here, right? So mood balancer, it's a product or practice that aims to maintain or restore emotional equilibrium. Emotional equilibrium sounds amazing for our for like a product definition or some information about it to make it sound great. But it also relates to mood bouncer we want to use words that the market uses. It's very similar to the doctor equation where like the doctor is speaking all these, all these terms, we want to knock it down to something that we can relate to. And in this, we want a brand, well, we don't want it, but when it happens, you love it, a brand speaks just to you. That's because they're using the same words you're using. So just remember that you want this effect to happen properly. It's called direct response marketing. We take what they're saying, we directly respond with the same type of verbiage. Now, you can tell this is gonna take a while. Now, my recommendation is to first use the cheat code that I'm about to give you, which is our market research prompts. OK? I've given you three prompts that you must do in order and this will save you some time. It will gather you the information, but it's not gonna be to the level if you did all this by, by yourself and manually. So make sure that when you do use this, you go ahead and do it manually right after this is just to save you some time and get some balls rolling while you're doing this course. All right. Now you're gonna go into cha G BT chat dot Open A I.com and you're gonna use, throw it on four. So it's creative and then you're gonna use this prompt and you're going to fill it with some information about your brand and product. So in this case, I said, you know, this is the target market for uh an adaptogenic mushroom supplement for a brand like special mushrooms uh which sells ABC D and I wanted to spit out some hope streams, pain spheres. Now, what this will do is it'll spit out something like this. I obviously already already run this for you. Then you're gonna take that information. You're gonna respond again with this prompt and you're gonna basically ask it to spit out commentary as if it was coming from the mind of the consumer. All right, it's gonna spit out quite literally verbiage and content and commentary that is very similar to what you would gather out there online and it is using online, it's using the existing data that's already out there in information. So use that prompt wisely. And then next, you're going to ask it to take that commentary list and you're going to provide it, copy it maybe say uh you only take these ones for the hopes and you do it once you can do it again for the pains, you can do it again for the fears, et cetera and it's going to spit out some powerful headlines. Now, this is more of inspiration for the value and content that you can provide and it will give you something like this. I'm gonna be exactly like this, but you'll see it's addressing brain fog or morning energy or immunity. These are things that people care about in this market and it's giving us a description of it, but also giving a bullet outline of the values that we can provide on that. So, earmark those and the last piece I would say is when you're going through all of this market research, be cognizant of what brands are presenting as stories online. Or if you're listening to someone's comment and they're telling their life story, make note of those types of things and gather, collect and we're gonna go over collection later but collecting values and stories and things just be aware of it. Put it aside if you want to throw it in uh another tab here, you totally can. But this is some sample information. There's obviously some sample information in this too, use it wisely and we'll catch you in the next lesson. Mhm.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

2_Mind_Navigator_Map.xlsx
3_Competitor_Awareness_Map.xlsx
5_The_Bank.xlsx
6_Voya_Believability_Checklist_(CreativeLive).xlsx
7_Open_Door_Sequence.pdf
7_Triple_Hit_Sequence.pdf
8_Email_Bootcamp_Training.pdf
8_Memory_Mapper_-_Story_Prompter.pdf
8_Story_Hacker.pdf
1_Bonus_materials_-_Links.txt

Ratings and Reviews

Jessika Dolph
 

So much valuable information and resources in this course. Christian is a wealth of information and a wonderful instructor.

Taiwo Femi
 

He is a great teacher and he is give all the strategy he is using in his agency, thanks alot.

a Creativelive Student
 

Huge strategic flaw. Being the same as everyone else is not a strategy. Sure it may seem out of date, but go read Michael Porter. Differentiation is the only way to win

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES