This is Part Two in our series on effective messaging. Click here for Part One.

Here are five key concepts to remember as you sharpen your messaging:

1) It’s not about you – it’s about your customer. Effective marketing tells a story, and every story has a hero. The mistake most business owners make is that the hero of their story is themselves and their business. But to create a truly compelling story and marketing message, your customer has to be the hero. Your role in the story is the trusted guide – think Yoda, Gandalf, or Mr. Miyagi – that is helping your hero overcome the obstacles, defeat the bad guy, and ultimately live happily ever after. One of my favorite authors, Donald Miller, wrote a book called StoryBrand which explores this idea in depth. I highly recommend it.

2) Focus on the benefits that your business creates, not the features and specifications. Apple does a great job in this area – their commercials never focus on the technical specifications of their devices. They don’t talk about processor speed or motherboards or anything technical. Instead they focus on how Apple products make their customers feel. Innovative. Cool. Creative. Resist the temptation to talk about how everything works, and instead focus on how your products or services are going to make life better for your buyers. Again, customers don’t want to know how the sausage is made – they just want to know that it tastes delicious!

3) Speak the right language. Remember our poor astrophysicist, struggling to explain the complexity of the universe to an average joe? They’re both speaking English, but it might as well be two different languages. At Spotlight Branding, we work with lawyers who often have a similar problem. They’re so highly educated and so focused on the complexities of their legal work that they sometimes forget how to talk to the general public. Most business owners make similar mistakes. You need to make a concerted effort to think like your customers and clients, to speak like them, and to write like them. If you don’t already have this ability, you need to develop it quickly. The best way to do this is to immerse yourself in their world. Subscribe to the magazines they get. Go to the events they attend. Watch the TV shows they watch, read the books that they read, listen to the podcasts they listen to. This can be the difference between your message resonating perfectly, or being completely incomprehensible to your target audience.

4) Paint a clear picture of success and failure. What good things will happen to your buyers as a result of your products and services? Will they feel better, look better, save money, make money? Will they experience new opportunities and adventures? Will they gain respect and status? Create more security and safety? What deep, emotional wants and needs can you meet for your clients? Conversely, what happens if they don’t hire you? Are they putting themselves, their family, their stuff at risk? I always prefer to focus on the positive, rather than the negative, with my messaging. But there is a time and a place for clearly defining the stakes, good and bad. Depending on your industry, you may need to spend most of your time talking about the disasters that could befall your customers if they don’t hire you. The appeal of home security systems, fire alarms, and most forms of insurance is entirely based on avoiding bad outcomes, and effective messaging will clearly make this case.

5) The more specific and targeted you can be, the better. Your audience is going to be more engaged if they feel that you are talking directly to them. I pay more attention if you address me as a Minnesota Vikings fan than as a football fan, and even less attention if you address me as just a sports fan. But even sports fan is better than nothing! If you already target a very specific niche, this won’t be a problem for you. But if your target market is broad, you may want to develop sub-messages for various demographics. At Spotlight Branding, we target solo and small firm lawyers exclusively. If we ever decided to pursue customers in different industries, such as financial services or real estate, we’d probably create a separate website and separate messaging to focus on each industry separately, rather than lumping everyone together.

BONUS: A Simple Formula to Create the Perfect Magic Statement

The struggle to clearly communicate what you do is more obvious when you’re out networking and somebody asks you what you do. So many business owners just don’t know how to answer this question effectively! Often, they know that they don’t have a good answer, which is why so many people get nervous about networking in the first place.

So here’s your simple formula:

I help [PERSON] do [THING] so that [GOOD THING HAPPENS and/or BAD THING DOESN’T HAPPEN.]

As a criminal defense attorney… I help people who were charged with a crime to fight the charges and stay out of jail.

A CPA… I help successful business owners pay less in taxes so that they can keep more money in their pocket and take better vacations with their families!  

A basic budgeting app… Our app gives young professionals more control over their money and helps them make financial decisions with confidence and clarity.

Who do you help?
How do you help them?
And how does their life improve as a result?

Want to know more? Click here to sign-up for our exclusive Weekly Marketing Hotsheet. It’s packed with tips and ideas to help you sharpen your messaging and take your marketing to the next level.

How do you talk about your business in the marketplace?

Surprisingly, many business owners struggle to effectively communicate what they do and why it matters. Obviously, it’s not because you don’t understand your business. It’s usually the opposite problem – you’re so deep into the weeds of operating your business that it can be difficult to communicate with people who know little or nothing about it.

It’s like asking an astrophysicist to explain the complexities of the universe to a layperson. Both parties in the conversation are likely to walk away frustrated, and the average joe is probably going to be more confused than he was before the conversation happened!

When it comes to your marketing, confusion is your worst enemy. To understand why, you need to know a little bit about how the human brain is wired. The brain serves one primary purpose, and has for millions of years – it’s number one job is to keep you alive.

And keeping you alive requires avoiding danger. To your primitive brain, confusion and uncertainty represents a strong possibility of danger. To your ancestors thousands of generations ago, entering a dark, unknown cave could be walking into a deathtrap. Venturing out into the jungle in the pitch-black night could be a suicide mission. We have evolved to strongly prefer familiarity to uncertainty, to prefer the known rather than the unknown.

As a result, our brains are naturally repelled by uncertainty, and attracted to clarity.

Think about the last time you were having a conversation with somebody who was doing a poor job explaining a complicated concept to you. How long did it take for your eyes to glaze over and your mind to lose interest in making sense of the conversation? That reaction is your brain’s attempt to keep you save – to keep you from wandering down a dark and potentially dangerous jungle trail.

All that to say – it’s absolutely critical that you can talk about your business in a clear, compelling way. And that you completely avoid confusion!

The first step in this process requires thinking like your customers and clients. You need to forget everything you know about your business from an operational perspective. And you need to instead approach your business from a customer’s perspective. There’s a simple, overriding question you need to answer for them: what’s in it for me?

How does your product or service make their life better?

At Spotlight Branding, we create a premium brand for lawyers which allows them to attract more clients, better clients, charge higher rates, and generate more referrals.

FedEx gets important packages delivered, anywhere in the world, quickly and reliably.

Jimmy John’s delivers delicious sandwiches – fast.

TurboTax makes it easy – and cheap – to get your taxes done.

If FedEx were run by the average small business owner, he’d probably spend way too much time talking about shipping networks and intermodal transportation and data transfers and border exchanges. That’s the world he lives in, but it’s not the world that his customers live in, and it’s not what they care about!

People don’t want to know how the sausage is made. They just want to know that it tastes delicious.  

With that in mind, you need to create a marketing message that accomplishes the following:

Clearly communicate what you do. Not from your perspective, but from the perspective of your customer. How do you make their life better?

Clearly communicate who you help. An effective message is attractive to your target clients and customers, while also keeping the “wrong” prospects away. Your message should instantly let target customers know that they’re in the right place, while encouraging the rest of the world to find a different solution. 

Clearly communicate what makes you different from your competition. Why should a customer do business with you, instead of another option? Note that you generally don’t want to state this explicitly – it’s not about trashing the other guy, it’s about highlighting the key unique benefits that you provide.

Clearly communicate urgency and explain the stakes. Marketing is hard because people are lazy and set in their ways. Successfully creating new business involves persuading someone to take action, make a change, and take a risk. The average human is averse to all three of those ideas! We’d generally prefer to stay on the couch, do things the way we’ve always done them, and play it safe. So your messaging must create a sense of urgency in order to motivate action. And it must explain the stakes – why is it so important that the customer takes action, what good thing will happen if he takes action, and what negative thing is likely to happen to him if he does not?

Clearly communicate the path forward. Remember, the human brain is programmed to fear uncertainty above almost everything else. So, you have to make the path forward crystal clear. That often involves spelling out the initial steps in 1, 2, 3 format. For example, the process for working with Spotlight Branding is as follows. First, we’ll have strategy session to get to know your law practice. Then, we’ll create a plan and make sure you feel great about it. Finally, we’ll execute that plan for you while you focus on practicing law! Simple, clear, and no ambiguity or confusion.

Stay tuned for part two in this series!

Want to know more? Click here to sign-up for our exclusive Weekly Marketing Hotsheet. It’s packed with tips and ideas to help you generate more referrals and take your marketing to the next level.