Hey everyone, today we’re going to be talking about helping your audience feel seen and heard.

All right, if you are new around here, and you haven’t noticed the name of the show, it is called the Know, Like and Trust show, and that’s all based on the quote:

“All things being equal, people are more likely to do business with and refer business to those they know, like, and trust.”

Bob Burg

So I don’t often dive into this, I have done a wonderful interview with Bob Burg himself in the past, but know, like, and trust are three separate words, that doesn’t mean that they’re all disconnected. Beyond the first step of building your know, like, and trust factor is capturing attention or interest, right? But what about the rest? I’m going to throw this out there, and I want you to think about it for just a moment.

After capturing interest, how do you build that like and move into trust? The answer is by helping them feel seen and heard.

Those are really basic words. So, I want to break this down a little bit, because being seen can be an active and a passive thing. I’m not going to dive into the English language and how seen is actually a passive voice verb or any of that fun stuff. I want you to think about all the things you do on a regular basis. You walk down the stairs, technically, you are seeing the stairs in front of you, but you’re not really paying attention to them. So I would argue that those stairs are not being seen.

So as opposed to, for example, something that happened to me just this morning, my nine-year-old was not really paying attention to me as I talked to him. I was like, “Buddy, look at me, what did I just say?” That is how I, as a parent can say, you need to see what I’m talking about. You need to hear what I am saying. I can direct his focus to do that.

That is the difference between being seen and heard and saying that you saw something or heard something. So those basics aside, I have referenced helping your audience feel seen and heard and other ways before on the show. I’ve said things like, “headlines that were ripped from your own client’s thoughts”, for example. And yes, using your client’s own words, and copy is incredibly important. But we are going to go deeper here. We’re going beyond your clients asking how did you know what I was thinking all the way into, “Wow you really understand me. You see my pain, you hear the words, I can’t even voice myself and now I know you know me.”

Just like seen and heard a few minutes ago, I know you know me, same word, but that emphasis makes all the difference.

So in dating, there is like that mythical love at first sight moment or maybe lust at first sight. Who knows? It’s that “oh duh” moment where you wonder, “How did I not see that before, it is so freaking obvious? Wow, I feel a little silly right now.” But in marketing, it does not just love at first sight or oh duh, it is like the be all end all moment. It’s the moment where the client decides they have to have your thing, whatever it might be, they feel so seen and heard that your solution is now the only solution that they can imagine for them.

So I typically don’t do touchy-feely kind of stuff on the show. And this is the fun little disclaimer that goes with that. This episode is a little bit touchy-feely, you can’t feel seen and heard without it. I mean, it’s just when I’m saying there’s a difference between know and know that right there is telling you that it’s going to be a little touchy-feely.

Also, I’m going to include three concrete stories to demonstrate how to help your audience feel seen and heard. One of them is personal to my life, and not at all business-related, but still has really good lessons in it. And the other two are stories from my own clients. Of the three, I’m sure you can learn from at least one and probably all of them ways that you can apply this in your own business and in your own online marketing so you can help your audience feel seen and heard in that profound way that moves you from nice to have to must have.

Story #1

Alright, so my first story is about two of my clients, we’re going to call them client A and client B. This all started when client A had been my client for several months and she sent me an email that said, “Wow, I started one of my groups yesterday and as they were introducing themselves and saying what inspired them to join the group, I thought of you because more than once, one of them said it was like Google was reading my text. It was exactly what I needed to see at just the right time. One mom, whom I’m sending your way, complimented me on my marketing.”

So client A did indeed send client B my way and she is now obviously my client since I’m calling her client B. When she first booked with me, what she said, “I felt like client A’s marketing knew exactly what I was thinking and obviously she was going to be able to help me, I want you to do that for my own marketing. That’s what I want my clients to feel like.”

That right there is helping your clients feel seen and heard.

Now this happened to be a client that had her own business, right? It might not have been a client that had their own business, it might just have been a consumer of the goods, but they still felt seen and heard. She was just in the looking for a marketing person who could do the same thing. So I actually happened to hear about it, but that right there is feeling seen and heard.

This is a great level of both the surface level and the deeper level because she felt like Google was reading her text, that’s the surface level, and then deepening it, you can do that by starting to ask your clients the questions that they might be too afraid to ask that will help them deepen that level of feeling seen and heard, because you now know the questions that they were a little bit too cautious to voice, which means you really know them. That was story one.

Story #2

I’m moving on to story two now, which is my personal story. A little background here, I have a three-year-old and a little more than 18 months ago, so a little more than half of his lifetime ago, I knew something wasn’t right. I brought it up with a pediatrician and she was kind of like, let’s wait and see the next time. She was like, “Well, if you really want to we can, you know, send them to get checked out,” and I just I knew I knew something wasn’t right but I didn’t have the words to describe it and I felt very unseen and unheard through this process

Well, long story short, he does have a speech problem. He has a communication disorder of some kind. We’re still trying to get to the bottom of it. Due to COVID, we got bounced around from doctor to doctor and private speech therapy offices were all closed. All of that led to me feeling like nobody really understood what was going on and there was even a practitioner at one point that was like, “Well, if you think he’s got a problem with this, why don’t you help him?” My response, of course, was like, just because I’m capable doesn’t mean that my child doesn’t need help. I know he does.

Now, after a month with his new speech language pathologists through early intervention, she realized something was off. She told me just this last week that we were going to do an exercise that felt like a step back. But she wanted to do it because after reviewing the data from our past few sessions, she was a little confused by some of the things that were going on.

So we did this new exercise, and it showed what I’ve been trying to say to people all along, which is my son knows sounds he knows sounds like M, B and P sounds, but he doesn’t put them into words in the right spot. He can say them separately, he can say them in some words, but not other words. The example that we had the other day was, she asked him to say moo like a cow and he kept saying boo like a ghost. Then just two minutes later, she was saying, okay, what’s this person on this flashcard doing? The person was waving goodbye and my son said, My with an M, instead of by with a B, like he’s completely transposing things, and we can’t figure out why.

She ended the session last week by saying, “Asher, I’m so proud of how hard you’re trying and also so confused by you,” and you might think that that as a mother is really hard to hear and of course it is, but I felt so seen and heard in that moment because even though she doesn’t have the answers, even though I don’t have the answers, I feel better that someone sees what I see. Together, we can try and figure out what the next step is.

This right here is key, this is why I’m telling you this very personal story instead of keeping it just to business because what I felt in that moment was I know we don’t have the answers, but I feel better because I know that this person understands and they can help me find the answers down the road.

This is what you want your clients to feel like as they are starting to work with you. You want them to realize that they might not have all the answers yet, but you are going to help guide them to those answers. Then you know you better deliver on that or that feeling is going to go away real quick.

Story #3

All right, moving on to story number three, and this one’s more of a hands-on example, it’s something that actually just happened in a recent Business GPS intensive that I had with a client a couple days ago. We were talking about her doing a challenge as part of an upcoming launch for a course that she’s about to put out. Her course is about resetting your metabolism and getting healthy and getting your energy back and all of those things and obviously dropping a few pounds along the way.

Now, she knows her best client intimately because she was her best client not that long ago. But even though she really knows her best client well, and knows all the thoughts that they’ve had, and all the pain that they’re feeling and all the things that they’re going through, she was still into the big moves or the big results that her program creates, not the quick win that a challenge needs to deliver.

So here’s the example, I asked her to give me three things that would help a client restart their metabolism, or give it a big boost. In her first answer was meal prepping and I said no, no, if we’re doing like a three or five-day challenge, that requires way too much planning for a busy single mom, and she was like, oh, right.

So then she needs to put together five meals a day with a lean protein and healthy carbs and again, I was like, oh, no, mama doesn’t have time to go shop tonight for tomorrow’s challenge. What can she do with things on hand, that won’t take her a lot of time, that gives her a quick win?

Then my client thought of removing processed foods and artificial sweeteners. Again, I was like, nope, what if that’s all she has in the house? Or even worse? What if she thinks she’s eating not processed foods, but it is processed, and she thinks is not processed? Because she didn’t buy it at 7/11 and she bought it at a real grocery store. But it’s still processed. That’s something that you can’t educate in the challenge. That’s part of the coursework, obviously.

So this is a really good example. Even though my client knows her best client really well if she were to put this challenge on, her busy single mom clients would be like, this woman doesn’t know me at all, I can’t meal prep with a day’s notice. I can’t put together five meals tomorrow, who’s gonna take the time to do that I don’t have that time, I’m still putting my kids to bed and then I need to finish up the report I didn’t finish at work today. You know, all the things like there’s a rabbit hole of things that a busy single mom is going to be thinking if the free challenge includes this much work.

So that would be an example of not helping your client feel seen and heard. Don’t worry, I helped my client walk through this, we came up with a really good solution, we narrowed it down to one day adding one thing like a shot of apple cider vinegar, and the next day removing one thing like sweetener from their morning coffee and then the next day adding a tiny thing, maybe something like a five-minute walk in the morning or a five-minute walk.

So those are quick wins and they would help the mom feel seen and heard because it’s something that she can squeeze into her already busy frenetic schedule and not end up feeling all crazy.

So I chose this example, this third story for you because it is the perfect example of the expert’s curse. We forget what it was like to sit in the pain. Even though my client literally lives that life of her best client because she has all of her health knowledge and all of her metabolism reset knowledge, she’s forgotten what the overwhelm that comes with learning something new feels like, she’s forgotten that pain.

With the expert’s curse in mind, remember things are not always simple to your client, that’s why they’re coming to you. Again, we forget what it’s like to sit in the pain of our clients, and if we do not address that pain, we will straight up miss helping our audience feel seen and heard.

Alright, so how can you if you live outside of these three examples, right? How can you help your audience feel seen and heard? You can ask yourself these three questions:

1. If Google read your best clients’ texts, what would it see right now?
2. What plan or preliminary answer can you give your audience so that they know you’ve got the answer to the real problem and can work through it?
3. What quick win can you give your audience that will give them new enlightenment around their problem and therefore set you up as being the knowledgeable expert that can help them get rid of that problem or at least surpass it?

Those are three questions you can ask yourself right now to help your audience feel seen and heard so that when they are approached with your marketing, they want to see more they are intrigued enough to take the next step. Whether that step is getting on your email list inquiring about one on one service, listening to your own podcast, whatever it might be, helping them feel seen and heard by what you’re already putting out, t is the first step to making that call to action happen.

Ready to create a content system for you and/or your team so that you can show up with consistency? Learn how to create a content system in my course, The Show Up System.