By Laura Ege

As business owners, we tend to fall in love with our processes and the "technical" aspects of what we do. We spent hours getting trained in the procedural know-how of our craft and often many more hours carefully setting up our processes for working with clients. So it can come as a rather disconcerting shock to realize...your prospective clients don't care about how you do what you do!! When it comes right down to it, everything in marketing is really about problems/pain and results. That's what people actually care about. They're paying for results. What's in it for me? Will my investment pay off? Can you get rid of my problem or get me to the goal I want to achieve?

So how do you make the best of things in the face of this "cold, hard fact"? Here are a few quick tips to get you started in the right direction:

- Become intimately familiar with your niche. When you know every detail about what keeps them up at night or what dreams fill their hearts, you will be able to easily and deeply connect with your clients. It's especially helpful when you get to the root of a problem they are experiencing that they are willing to pay you to solve!

- When writing any sort of marketing content, spend the bulk of your time (on average a good 80%) either addressing your audience's deepest problems/pain or the biggest results they will achieve from working with you.

- Use stories frequently in your marketing...your signature story, stories of your clients, general stories of interest that prove your point. People love stories! We can relate to stories on a much more personal level than we can to a list of facts about your process. Stories draw us in emotionally--helping us see at a heart level how we can be a part of your services--instead of simply engaging the brain in a logical argument about whether to invest with you or not. As a bonus note, even when I'm using stories to communicate in marketing, I still employ the same basic structure... pain or problem someone started with, the turning point, and the results or outcomes experienced afterward.

- Touch on your process only briefly AFTER you have established a strong and emotionally compelling case for problems/results. So you talk about how they will accomplish A, B, C, D, E, and F by working with you... and "oh by the way, we achieve that through X, Y, Z."