Don't skip the Cold Audience Test
Use the Cold Audience Test (CAT) to check if your marketing message is ready for paid ads or other forms of mass marketing (e.g., community posting and email outreach to name a few). In other words, is your message ready to spread beyond your friends and close contacts?
Stubborn growth
You may have a great product. Better yet, you may even have the right product for the right market. You’ve read the books about growth and tried every growth tactic / copy hack you can find. But growing your business still seems like pushing an 800-pound rock up a mountain.
But why?
You haven’t nailed how to position and sell your product to a cold audience.
Think about it. Almost every growth tactic you’ve ever tried depends on converting a cold customer (someone who has never heard of you or your product before). This could be someone who visits your website for the first time or receives your email message without having known you before.
What's missing
When you buy ads, email individual customers, write social media posts, or create content, your success depends on just one question:
Can a cold audience easily understand how your product solves a problem they actually care about?
I call it the 'Cold Audience Test.' Its a question you should ask yourself before investing in almost any growth tactic.
How can you pass the Cold Audience Test?
- Know how to clearly define your ideal customer and the best channels to reach them
- Know what problem(s) they really care about solving and how to talk about those problems
- Know how to position and message your product so that it speaks directly to the problems that matter to your ideal customer
You can chase growth by writing SEO content and relentlessly emailing potential customers before passing the Cold Audience Test. And many entrepreneurs before you have taken that route.
If you skip the Cold Audience Test, it will feel something like this:
- Your potential customers can’t easily understand the value of your product
- Your site traffic refuses to convert into sales
- Your emails and social media activity are ignored
- Word of mouth does not spread
- And your sales cycle takes too long
Ultimately, you find yourself working harder and harder for the same lackluster results because your marketing efforts that were supposed to scale never did.