How to Make Your Customer the Hero of Your Business
Updated: Sep 16
How do you make your customer the hero of your business?
You make your customer the hero by guiding them toward a solution instead of making your business the center of the story.
About 20 days ago, I felt really stuck with what I was building like never before.
I decided to stop working for a while and just try to absorb some new information. So I bought a couple of business books, and there was one great one!
Marketing Rebellion: The Most Human Company Wins by Mark Schaefer.
I got really excited when I read a chapter where the author explained how customers want to belong, be acknowledged, and be involved with companies.
I immediately realized that I was doing the opposite.
And not just with the building, but especially with the process of the service.
What my business basically said to customers before was: Hey, don’t care, just fill out your info, and I’ll do everything for you because I’m super smart.
But there’s a problem. Customers don’t trust you, especially at the beginning of a business. And why would they?
So I decided to change it, open the doors, and bring my customers on board with me.
Make them play,
Tell them a story,
Be their guide,
But make them be the heroes!
1) I had to build a simple tool, and i got an idea.
I chose a problem based on something that actually bothered me a lot when I first started building a business.
Target audience.
Whenever I’m testing something, I always look for the easiest way to do it. Not because I’m lazy, but because I don’t want to spend too much time on something when I don’t even know if it will work.
It took me a while to understand the importance of having a clear target audience, and especially how important it is to be specific at the beginning of a business.
Would Facebook be the same today if it had started as a social network for everyone? Probably not. It started specifically for college students.
So I went really deep to figure out how to properly define a target audience and break down the customer into the smallest details.
Then I created a simple tool that takes care of the difficult parts while still making people part of the process of defining their own target audience.
And I built the first version of this free target audience tool in one day.
2) Marketing plan? Bring people to the website as quick as possible.
I believe in organic traffic.
And I'm trying to build a brand and create communities on Reddit, a newsletter on LinkedIn, and a blog on my website.
I don't want to rely only on ads or constantly chase people. I want to create marketing fuel that keeps working for me, even if I don't open my computer for a week.
But in this case, I wanted to bring as many people to my website as quickly as possible.
So I decided to run ads on the platform where I'm already really active: Reddit. It's a platform I use a lot, my target audience hangs out there, and Reddit ads are also pretty affordable.
I set a simple expectation: bring around 100 people to the website in 7 days with a daily budget of $10.
Reddit ads work a little differently. First, you have to be active on the platform. Without that, the ads don't work at all. The format is more like memes. Reddit users really don't like traditional ads, so you have to be a little creative.
But again, I was testing, so I didn't want to spend too much time on this. So I created the ad in one day and launched it.
The result was around $1 per click, bringing 84 people to my website in 7 days.
Nothing crazy, but that's okay.
The problem? Only one person filled out the form.
The positive part was that this person took the time to answer every question properly and showed genuine interest in getting the results. So that kind of told me there might be something here.
But only one person for a free tool?
That's low.
I didn't want to give up yet.
3) I changed the landing page and especially improved the tool.
I changed the headline, the text, and improved the tool to make it more customer friendly.
It took me 2 days off. I didn't enjoy it that much (it was a struggle), because I was really worried that I was wasting another 2 days of my life lol.
Which doesn't seem like much, but if you do this again and again, it gets a bit frustrating.
I also stopped the ad because I wanted to try bringing some people from LinkedIn. So I put $100 into a LinkedIn ad on my company page for one week and decided to do some manual hustling on Reddit with posts and comments.
I did this for the whole day. Before I went to sleep, I was kind of tired and frustrated, to be honest, because nothing happened.
4) I woke up in the morning, and my website already had 200 views, 14 subscribers, plus 4 people who signed up for my free PDF.
Also, the leads were from my target audince, especially people located in North America.
What a great feeling! Somebody was actually interested in what I was building.
This comment got the most attention (1,604 views).
But the LinkedIn ads also worked, bringing around 35 people per day to my website.
To be honest! There isn’t really any service after people fill out the form yet. They just receive a PDF with their questions and answers, which can still be valuable.
But I decided to email everyone who filled out the form anyway.
I apologized, explained that I’m still testing and building the tool, and promised to send them the full version for free once it’s ready.
I also asked them a few questions to help me understand what I should improve next.
PS: Writing emails to your first “customers” actually feels pretty cool. Suddenly, you’re not just building something on your laptop. There are real people on the other side waiting to see what you create. It finally starts to feel like what you’re doing makes sense.
5) What's the next steps?
That's a great question!
I wrote this small plan:
Add more value to the product while still testing it (after the form, send an email with a target audience profile).
Prepare to test if people are willing to pay for a better version of the target audience tool.
Continue with the hustle and create a small marketing plan.
Release date: Mid-September.
It's still a free tool, so there's a lot more to test, especially whether people are willing to pay for a better version.
But I got initial interest, and that's enough for me to keep going.
You can try the free target audience tool here:
Thanks so much for reading, and don't forget to define your target audience!
Speak soon,
Jan
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