How to Build Relevance in Your Marketing (The Practical Guide)

What relevance in marketing really is

Relevancy is what gives you the ability to draw someone's attention and keep it. It's how you get people interested and invested in what you offer. It creates the way your business is positioned in someone's mind, and it determines how your offers get received before they ever see a price.

It's what you're saying to your market that pulls people in. It's what makes someone stop scrolling and think "this is for me." That reaction, the one where someone feels caught out, seen, understood, before they've even decided to trust you yet, is relevancy landing.

I've watched Entrepreneurs build large followings, get plenty of engagement, tons of people consuming everything they publish, and still struggle the moment it's time to convert that attention into revenue. Usually the messaging is fine. The problem sits somewhere else in the stack, positioning or offer, and no amount of better copy fixes a structural gap underneath it.

You can't be relevant if you don't know who you serve, what your actual offer is, and how you're positioned. If someone can't tell instantly that what you're offering is specifically for them, they won't give you the time it takes to find out. From what I've seen across fifteen years of doing this, the Entrepreneurs who are relevant to a specific group of people are the ones making the most money in that niche, consistently, regardless of how crowded it looks from the outside.

There's no competition, only someone more relevant than you

I don't fully believe in competition as most people frame it. I believe some people are more relevant to a specific group than others are, and that's what separates outcomes in a niche. Relevant people get the better clients, at better prices, with more satisfied outcomes, while doing objectively similar work to everyone else in their space.

Most Entrepreneurs don't think hard enough about the foundations underneath their relevancy. How their messaging is building or draining it. And the frustrating part is that small changes to your messaging don't show up as immediate, obvious results. There's a lag between doing the research work and seeing the number move, which is exactly why most people give up on it before it compounds.

That lag is also why AI-generated copy feels so seductive right now. It's instant. Relevancy work isn't. But instant and effective aren't the same thing, and the businesses treating AI output as a replacement for research are going to find that out the expensive way.

The eight elements of building relevance

I've taught this for years, refined it across hundreds of Entrepreneurs I've helped scale, and used it building my own businesses. There are eight pieces. They build on each other in order. You can't skip from avatar straight to brand story and expect it to hold.

Bringing it together

There are a lot of pieces to becoming and staying relevant, and if you apply all eight, it takes real time to execute. The question is how they come together into something coherent rather than eight disconnected checkboxes.

Most Entrepreneurs I work with have one or more of these dialed in already. If they didn't have any of them working, they wouldn't have a business at all. What moves the growth curve is adding whichever pieces are missing while sharpening the ones that already exist, not perfecting one piece in isolation.

I don't want you thinking about relevancy as a funnel stage. It shows up in every interaction someone has with you, in your content, your sales calls, your social presence, your ads, your website, everywhere. Anything you create to attract customers that skips this process is going to be difficult to scale, and difficult to fill with the kind of customer you want to work with.

Work through these in order. You can't go backward from story to avatar and expect it to hold, because each one is built on the assumption that the one before it is already solid. Get all eight right and it stops feeling like marketing. It starts feeling like recognition.

The research work AI can't do for you

Here's where this piece has to update for where the market really is.

Every one of the eight elements above depends on one thing underneath it: knowing your customer's actual language. Not your language for their problem. Theirs. The words they use in a DM, on a call, in a review, when nobody's trying to sell them anything and they're just describing what's wrong.

I keep a bank of these. Actual quotes, pulled directly from calls and messages with the Entrepreneurs I work with, sorted by pain, fear, desire, and result. Lines like someone describing their week as "notes coming out my ear rolls" from information overload, or a founder saying revenue's "in the shitter," or someone naming the exact moment they lost trust in their own decision-making after a launch went sideways. Nobody writes copy in those words unless they've sat in the room and listened for them. That's the whole exercise. Voice-of-customer work is not a brainstorm. It's a transcription job. You go find where your market is already talking, unprompted, and you write down exactly what they said.

This is the part AI has no way to do for you, and I mean that as a documented, tested position, not a hedge to sound balanced. A model can generate infinite headline variations, infinite email drafts, infinite ad angles, all grammatically flawless, all instantly available. What it cannot do is know that your specific market says "in the shitter" instead of "underperforming," or that they describe overwhelm as "notes coming out my ear rolls" instead of "cognitive load." It doesn't have access to that language unless you feed it in, and if you have to feed it in, you already did the hard part yourself.

That's the actual shift. The research used to be one input among several. Now it's the only input that can't be automated around, which makes it the scarce asset in a market where everyone has access to the same generation tools. Two Entrepreneurs with identical AI subscriptions will produce wildly different marketing, because one of them fed the model real customer language and the other fed it a guess. The gap between those two outcomes is the whole game now.

This also changes what a good email requires, not just what a good ad or a good landing page requires. From what I've taught on this for years, a great email comes down to five things. You know the specific subgroup of your list you're writing to, not the whole list at once. You're writing from a genuine emotion, not a manufactured one. You're reinforcing the reader's future identity instead of their current one. You're matching the message to where that specific reader is in the Sidewalk, Slow Lane, or Fast Lane. And you're matching the underlying level of consciousness that reader is operating from. Every one of those five depends on research you did before you opened the draft, not cleverness you apply while writing it. A model can help you execute all five once you've done the diagnosis. It cannot do the diagnosis for you, because the diagnosis lives in your list, your calls, your actual customers, not in the model's training data.

One technique from that same body of teaching depends entirely on research holding up: writing as if the reader already has the identity they're trying to reach. Instead of building the case for why someone should want to be a seven-figure Entrepreneur, you write to them as if they already are one, and let them step into that frame rather than trying to sell them on wanting it. This only works if you know exactly what that identity sounds like from the inside, in their own words, which is exactly the research this section is arguing for. Try to shortcut that identity work with a generic AI prompt and you get a hollow version of the technique, the kind of copy that sounds aspirational to nobody in particular because it was never built from anyone in particular.

Practically, this means the work looks like this. Pull your last fifty sales call transcripts, or your last hundred DMs, or your reviews, and read them for language, not content. Don't summarize what they said. Copy their exact words. Build your own version of that pain, fear, desire, result bank. Then, when you sit down to write anything, whether you're drafting it yourself or directing a model to draft it, you're not asking "what should I say." You're asking "which of these real phrases belongs in this specific piece." That's the difference between AI-assisted marketing that resonates and AI-generated marketing that reads like it was written by someone who's never met the customer, because it was.

Relevancy is clarity

To sum up everything above: relevancy is clarity. Clarity on who you're selling to, clarity that they know you're selling to them specifically. You both know exactly who you're helping. You have a clear sense of how you want them to see you, clarity on the message they need to hear and how it needs to land. You have clarity on who you are, and you can articulate your uniqueness and your story in a way that makes people resonate rather than just nod along.

You have a simple methodology that makes your solution legible, and an offer that's aligned with who it's for and how you'll deliver the result.

Once you have that clarity, growth stops being a guessing game.

Relevancy isn't easy, and that's the good news

You probably didn't want to hear that this takes real work when you started reading. Most people go looking for the tactic that produces results immediately, and if the foundation underneath it is missing, tactics only ever produce marginal improvement.

That's also exactly why most people won't do this. The eight elements above require actual reflection and some uncomfortable self-examination that most people would rather skip, and most people avoid that. Which means the businesses willing to do it are working with less competition for attention than it looks like from the outside, not more.

Bring all eight pieces together and something specific happens. You become ultra-relevant to the right people, seen the right way, at the right time, in the right place. People who understand your unfair advantage, see the value in what you offer, resonate with your story, and want what you're selling.

Most Entrepreneurs don't understand how these pieces interconnect, which means doing this work puts you ahead of most of your market immediately. When clients finish this process with me, the pattern I hear back is consistent: their webinars convert better, their websites convert better, their emails convert better, because everything downstream is now built on top of something legible instead of something vague.

Relevancy is being able to get someone to understand exactly who you are, quickly and simply. In a market flooded with AI-generated sameness, that kind of clarity is the actual differentiator, not a nicer logo or a faster funnel.

Omnipresence takes what relevancy builds and makes sure the right people see it enough times to remember you. Intimacy takes what's left and turns it into trust deep enough that you stop having to sell at all. If you want to see how the three sequence together, and run the diagnostic on which one is your real constraint right now, that's what /frameworks/roi-method walks through in full.