Yesterday we talked about the importance of digging deeper into the psychology of your potential customers.

And about the dangers of considering them a blob of sameness.

Thing is, when I start working with clients, I see a lot of them treating their ICPs (Ideal Customer Personas/Profiles) as Magic The Gathering cards.

They pass them along to their teams, with their nice stats, bar graphs and data points, and expect them to get a true understanding of what these people need, what motivates them, and what keeps them up at night.

Well, that doesn’t really work.

And inevitably their marketing messaging falls on deaf ears.

See, when you consider your audience as a set of data points and stats, you miss out on a very important part of the conversion process.

I’m talking about their transformation.

It’s the transition your prospects have to go through from a moment before buying to after they take out their credit card.

What’s a better way to go about studying this?

Enter the Transformation Map.

I’ve heard of this concept first from Joanna Wiebe at Copyhackers so credit’s due, but a lot of good copywriters think of it the same way.

Honestly it’s mostly direct response copywriters or those specializing in writing long-form sales pages who use it. I’d love to see more conversion copy folks make it their own.

Anyway, what’s the Transformation map and how can you use it to write better copy?

You first write down the stages your prospect/customer is in throughout their journey:

• Early stage: they are looking for a solution or just know about their problem
• Consideration stage: they’ve found potential solutions and are considering what to go with
• Conversion stage: they become customers

Then, and this is critical, you divide each stage into a “Before state” and a “Dream state”.

In other words, each of the 3 stages should have a before and after. With each Dream state leading to the following stage. And you have to fill in the gaps.

It’s a great way to also pinpoint what you know and don’t know about your audience too.

Using this timeline of events along with the before and after states will give you a pretty accurate map or what your prospects go through psychologically in their journey.

It’s the reason why I called my methodology The Alchemical Transformation Process™️, because I wanted to emphasize the importance of the transformation itself, over fixed traits.

So go ahead, try it out in your business. Map your prospects on the timeline and add the details for each before and dream state.

Let me know how it goes.

P.S. In case you missed it, our first ever giveaway is live and will be for the next 6 days. Help us spread the word 📣 so more business owners can nerd out about this stuff (and you might win a few cool things).

Quote and reflection of the day:

“Passion is a side effect of mastery.”

–  Cal Newport, So good they can’t ignore you

Give yourself permission to be obsessed about and love your craft. Obsession might not equate to passion right out of the gate. When you get started it will be out of necessity, or out of frustration, or simply out of the willingness or need to explore. Head down that path with enough decisiveness and passion will find its way.