“If you confuse, you’ll lose.” Donald Miller, CEO StoryBrand and Business Made Simple
The absolute worst thing you can do when marketing your business is confuse your ideal customers. Yet, this is what so many businesses all over the country do every single day.
The result?
Businesses of all sizes leave enormous amounts of money on the table and never reach their full potential.
When you confuse your customers, they don’t know why they need you or how you improve their lives. Therefore, they go somewhere else to solve their problems. The result is your business spending a ton of money on marketing that doesn’t work and not getting anything in return.
No one wants that, right?
Most of the time, the confusion is unintentional. You aren’t TRYING to confuse your customers; you just don’t realize you are doing it. You look at your website, digital and print ads, billboards, and everything else you are doing and think, “Makes sense to me!”
That’s the problem. Your customers aren’t you. They don’t have your knowledge of the business. They didn’t participate in creating your marketing collateral. Therefore, it makes no sense to them, even though it makes perfect sense to you.
To succeed in marketing, you need to have extreme clarity in your marketing message. When you create extreme clarity in your marketing message, your business will grow!
Here are two main ways creating clarity in your marketing helps your business grow.
Clarify What Matters
When you take the time to create clarity in your marketing message, it makes everything you do stronger. First and foremost, it clarifies what matters to your customers. Here’s how it works.
+ Clarify Your Customer Identity
First, you need to clarify who your customers really are! You don’t serve everyone. You can’t. It’s not possible. So, who do you serve?
Clearly define who your ideal customers are. Maybe you look at existing or past customers and cherry-pick the best ones. The ones that were the most enjoyable to work with and who brought in the revenue needed to grow.
+ Clarify Your Customer’s Problem
Once you know who your ideal customers are, you need to clarify the problem they have that you solve.
This is probably the most important step of them all. People only pay for things that solve their problems. If you don’t clearly identify the problem your ideal customers are experiencing, they will never know they’re your ideal customers. Confusion ensues.
So, clearly define the problem your customers are experiencing that you can solve. Then, go a step further. Identify how that problem makes your customers FEEL. As it turns out, people more readily pay to solve INTERNAL PROBLEMS (how they feel about a problem) than EXTERNAL PROBLEMS (the physical problem in their way).
Once you have clearly defined your customer, their problem, and how that problem makes them feel, you are off to the races!
+ Clarify Your Solution to the Problem
When you have clearly identified the right audience, their problem, and how it makes them feel, your audience will know without a doubt you are the company for them.
Still, it’s not enough. You need to state your solution to their problem clearly. What is it that you do that will help them overcome that problem?
This should be stated in plain language in the clearest way possible in your marketing. You especially want to state this clearly in the header of your website. Leave no doubt about the solution you provide your customers’ problem.
+ Clarify What Success Looks Like
Your customers want to know where you are taking them. To take the solution one step further, show your customers what success for THEM looks like on the other side of their problem.
This isn’t what success looks like for YOU. When talking about success, our clients often want to say things like “More leads. Increased Revenue.”
Nope. THEIR SUCCESS! Not yours.
How is their life better on the other side of working with you? What will their business look like? How will their business success impact their personal life? Get creative, and show this in every way possible in your marketing.
When you clarify your audience, their problem, your solution, and their success, you leave no doubt in the mind of your ideal customers that you are the right business to help them win!
Clarify What Doesn’t Matter
“Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what doesn’t.” ~ Cal Newport, Author of Deep Work.
The second way clarity in your marketing grows your business is it clarifies what DOESN’T matter for your business.
Look at the four points you clarified in the previous section. Not only does clarifying those things help you attract the right customers for your business, but they also help you repel the wrong ones.
When I worked for my family’s law firm, we used to get tons of calls that had nothing to do with the law they practiced. Calls for other law firms. Calls for car washes. Calls for all kinds of weird stuff.
When I dug deeper, I realized their Google Ads campaigns attracted the wrong callers. They hadn’t set up their keywords correctly, so they were getting calls for any search term with the word “car” in it…instead of “car accident lawyer.”
Once we fixed the keyword structure and added some strategic negative keywords (words that tell Google we don’t want anything related to this word), the worthless calls stopped coming.
We clarified what didn’t matter.
+ Clarity in Your Marketing Repels the Wrong People
When you are extremely clear in your marketing about who the right people are for your business, the wrong people will quickly see that and move on their merry way.
This saves you time and money having to field calls and contacts from people you have no business spending time on.
Time is money for you and your employees. The less time you spend on things that don’t matter, the more time you can spend on things that grow your business.
Stop putting time, effort, and money into things that don’t solve the problem your customers are experiencing
Be Clear Over Cute, ALWAYS!
Most businesses tend to want to be cute in their marketing. Puns and plays on words abound.
This is a mistake.
For example: Recently, there was a billboard I could see from my office window. It was sky blue, with a large yellow half circle on one side with the phrase, “Rise and Shine! The Job is Done!”
So, I naturally thought the yellow circle was the sun rising.
I’m not THAT far away from the billboard, but I couldn’t make out the business logo or any of the other words on the billboard. So, I had no idea what it was for.
It turns out it was for a local painting company. The big yellow thing was a can of yellow paint.
Still, what does “Rise and Shine! The Job is Done!” have to do with anything? Do you paint overnight? Are you in my house while I sleep? That feels creepy.
Why not something clear like, “Never Lift a Paint Brush Again!”?
People HATE painting. Drop that line and enlarge the logo that shows you’re a painting contractor, and boom, strong billboard.
Instead, they got cute, and it was almost impossible to understand what the billboard was about unless you were close enough to see the words “Commercial, Industrial, Residential” and their logo with the word “painting” in it.
Never sacrifice clarity at the altar of cleverness.
There is a very small percentage of marketing copy that can be both cute AND clever. That is marketing gold! However, that rarely ever happens.
Use StoryBrand to Bring Clarity to Your Marketing
The best resource for bringing extreme clarity to your marketing that I have found is the StoryBrand Messaging Framework.
StoryBrand uses storytelling elements to help you clarify your marketing message so people will listen. Story itself is the universal clarifier. It has worked throughout history in every country, culture, and language.
As a Certified StoryBrand Guide since 2019, I am an expert in helping businesses and nonprofits create clear marketing messages that help them transform their marketing and bottom line.
Want to create crystal-clear marketing for your business or nonprofit? Schedule a Free Discovery Call with me, and let’s make this year your best year ever.
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