Are
You Speaking Your Customers’ Language?

This is how many of my trips to the dentist go. I can sort of piece together what they’re saying. I gather the news isn’t that good.

But on the specifics? Sketchy at best.

Of course, my dentist is probably trying to hide the truth from me until the end. After he’s all done, he’ll give me the recap in terms I can understand.

That said, for most businesses, potential customers probably aren’t stuck with you for an hour. You don’t have time to work your way around to the pitch.

If you don’t tell them what they want to hear, right from the beginning, they’re gonna bail on you.

You’ve got to make your pitch clearly, right away, in terms your potential customers not only understand, but also relate to emotionally.

In short, you need to speak your customers’ language.

Do you? Let’s find out.

What Words Do
They Use?

We’ll start with something really basic:

Say you’re a clothing retailer based in the United States, and you’ve just expanded into the UK market. Right away, you notice that pant sales are lagging way behind your other categories.

What gives?

Well, in the UK, “pants” generally means, well, underwear. The word you really needed to use was “trousers.” You didn’t use the right search term that your customers were using, so they didn’t find you.

(And the ones who did find you were looking for something different altogether!)

Understanding how people describe products or services—including the specific words that they use—will help you better target your SEO keywords to your target audience.

To that end, you can use keyword research tools from Google, Moz, and others to figure out which keywords get the most search traffic, how effective they are, and how difficult it might be for your website to land on the all-important front page of the search results. Then, you can prioritize accordingly.

Another Common Obstacle To Communication? Lingo.

Say you’re offering a highly technical or advanced product or service, to target customers that typically aren’t especially literate or knowledgeable about the field.

Take telecom, for example—business phones, internet, online security, the works. You might offer the best product at the best price, but if you talk about it exclusively in terms your customers don’t know or don’t understand (T1, SD-WAN, managed hosting …) you’re gonna lose most of them.

It’s still important to talk about those things, of course. But discussing them using terms, examples, and analogies that are instantly understandable and accessible to a layperson becomes critically important.

How Do I Know If I’m Speaking
My Customer’s Language?

Ask them.

One way to do this—at least partially—is by sending out surveys to people in your contact database. This is a good way to get quantitative data about customer satisfaction.

You should also consider asking a couple of well chosen open-ended questions, but only if you’re genuinely able to read through and evaluate the responses. (If you’re getting hundreds or even thousands of responses, that might not be realistic.)

Surveys should be short, simple, and clear. Don’t make it an ordeal to complete! Really focus on the most important questions and topics you want to cover.

We also recommend you do some more qualitative research by using in-person interviews with some of your customers.

Obviously, the content of what they say matters. How do they feel about your business or products? What challenges are they facing? What could you do to make your product or services better?

But you should also listen carefully to the way they say it. What specific language and word choices do they use? How do they describe your business? Are there any go-to metaphors or examples they use?

You can then take these questions and responses to begin constructing “buyer personas” of your primary customer demographics.

Get really specific with these personas: