Marketing Archive - Page 6 of 13 - The Art of Communicating

Inner clarity, outer confusion

Clarity is a tricky beast. We can feel inner clarity but sense outer confusion.

Confusion’s best mate is the Curse of Knowledge which reassures us that everything’s super clear. Which it is. To us. I mean, we just know it, right? But the Curse of Knowledge is brilliant at hiding the fact that for our audience it’s super hard to understand. They don’t know what we know, after all.

The more we know about something and the deeper we care about that thing, the harder it gets to speak about that thing in simple terms.

If you want a reality check to beat the Curse of Knowledge and put confusion back in its place, join us on September, 7th for a free Q&A. You’ll meet like minded people and get a chance to ask me anything, e.g. how to overcome the Curse of Knowledge in your case.

Clarity and complexity

Clarity doesn’t make complexity go away, it makes complexity accessible.

The purpose of clarity is to make the difficult feel easy. To give us an entry point to the rabbit hole. To light us a path through the mess that makes sense and is easy to follow. It makes the complex feel simple.

But of course when complexity is accessible, it can help to reduce complexity.

Making people fall in love with what you make

Marketing is widely considered to be the art of making people fall in love with what you make.

But what if you turned this around to make the things people will love. Let’s say: not build a course and make people love it but build a course that people love?

Or in a way that people love. Let’s say not build an app and educate people to love it but build it from the start in a way that people love to use?

This shift in perspective has a profound impact on the decisions you make during development. It has an even bigger impact on how you market your product. Because you can stop to decorate your product with fancy sounding slogans. You can just speak plain English and tell a true story.

What are you building?

What customers want

Are you giving your customers what they want or what they need?

Many of the people who care for making an impact and who have turned their passion into their job, maybe even built a company out of it, would say it’s the latter. Their customers might not see it at first but it’s definitely what the customers should be doing.

For example, a client might call a marketing agency because they want more customers but what they really need are better customers.

Now, any marketing agency that fails to address what the customer wants, will never be called by the client in the first place.

There are basically two things you can do about it:

Teach the market what it needs, in other words: that they want something different so that they might consider you.
Figure out what the customer actually wants and put it in their words.

For example, the client from above says they want new customers but what they actually want is more business. Address that and they might call you – which gives you the opportunity to sell them what they need.

So, what do your customers actually want? And how does that relate to (what you think) they need?

We need to spice it up

The whole piece needs to be more emotional to get people interested. Let’s add some in. Juice it up with some nice storytelling. And gorgeous images.

Also … count me out.

Because if you need to decorate your story with emotional bits, it means that your story is flawed.

A way better approach would be to EXTRACT the emotional aspects, not add them.

What’s the spice INHERENT in your idea? Surface that!

Of course, the obvious question is what to do if you feel that that’s exactly the problem … because it feels like there is no inherent emotion.

I don’t believe you.

If your product is the solution to an actual struggle that actual humans have, then there is no way that there are no emotions involved.

Surface them! Make me feel the pain of my struggles, make me feel the happiness once I get rid of the struggles.

Add-on emotions might give you attention, inherent emotions drive action.

Silly Faces

Making a silly face and writing a provocative statement beneath it is one of the best ways to get people on YouTube to click on your video thumbnail.

If silly faces are what you want to be known for, that is.

Not everything that works needs to be done.

What do you want to be known for?

(Also: if you’re on the other side, the audience’s side, it’s your decision to click on that silly face or not.)

Silly things marketers do

Among the silliest things marketers do is decorate diamonds.

You don’t decorate a diamond, you polish it. You don’t hide its beauty underneath layers of fluff, you surface it.

Many marketers don’t trust in the beauty of their products, though. So many great products are buried underneath layers of fancy sounding marketing slogans and flashy videos.

But if your product is a diamond, i.e. it solves an actual problem for your customers, you don’t want to decorate it. You want to polish it to surface its true beauty.

By saying – in plain English – how it solves my struggles rather than dazzling me with bonuses and stuff that I don’t really need.

What’s the true beauty of your product?

What’s your promise?

Marketers spend so much time looking for fancy statements that they sometimes forget to just plainly state their promise.

What’s yours?

In love with an idea

Did you ever act foolishly after you’ve fallen in love with someone?

Probably, your mind went a little over the top with all the things it suggested to impress the beloved one with. Or you struggled to find the right words, bombarding the beloved one with thousands of things you love because you thought that they might love it as well. So maybe, in trying to make a good impression you achieved, well, the exact opposite?

You’re not alone.

Also, this does not only happen when you fall in love with SOMEONE. It also happens when you fall in love with an IDEA.

We’re easily overwhelmed with all the things we love about that idea. We would want to tell the world everything about it – at once. And it’s not uncommon that in trying to impress others we’ve actually alienated – or at least confused – them.

Just as with building new relationships, it helps to listen more than you want to talk. It helps to figure out what the others love so that you can figure out whether it’s a good match. And it helps to take a deep breath so that the words that you do say come out in a way that makes at least a little more sense.

Selling diamonds

All too often, corporate messaging suffers from – let’s be straight – bullshitting. Promising the blue from the skies, using fluffy statements, and decorating vague claims with some sweet candy and cream.

One of the reasons for this is that these corporations think that great messaging can fix inferior products.

And maybe it can.

But I think it pays much more to fix your product first. To make sure that you’re actually selling diamonds.

If you’re selling a diamond, you don’t need to decorate it. You wouldn’t even want to. You much rather polish it to surface its pure beauty. You wouldn’t ever hide it underneath layers of fluff and stuff to make it appear more beautiful. It’s already pure beauty.

When you’re selling a “diamond” product, your communication becomes way easier. You just need to speak the truth, in plain English, making clear statements and bold promises.

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