Simplicity

Want to be Heard? Some important Dos & Don’ts

We all want to be heard. Yet, no matter how hard we try we still struggle far too much to make ourselves heard in a noisy world.

Why is it so difficulty to be heard?

There is not ONE simple answer to that, but there are however simple reasons why we sink into oblivion as soon as we utter a single word – or write one. Here is a brief selection of some important ‘Don’ts’ if you want to be heard.

3 Reasons Why No One Hears Us

Here are 3 mistakes most of us make that silences our voice immediately.

• We try to speak to everyone, so we end up speaking to no one

• We don’t REALLY know what we want to say, so we sound vague and repetitive. That’s an immediate turn-off

• We confuse authenticity with writing/speaking without reflecting, so we bore the audience with our longwinded rant and irrelevant content.

I could go on, but you get the basic trend! To overcome the problem of not being heard, we have to be ready to make an important shift.

Most of the problems we encounter when we communicate arise because we are over-focused on ourselves, particularly on our performance and image – how we stand, how we move our body, whether we come across as confident, whether we make enough eye contact, etc. We spend far too much time assessing ourselves from an external perspective that we are neither present in ourselves nor are we conscious of how the audience is engaging with us.

The shift comes when we stop over-focusing on ourselves. Instead, we need to focus on our audience.  If we want to be heard, we need to focus on making it easier for our audience to hear us.

Make it Easier for the Audience to Hear Us

How do we make it easier for the audience to hear us?

We have to be willing to change the way we communicate – and not just reach for another glitzy gimmick.  We have to see successful communication as a dialogue with the audience in which both sides are engaged in an active exchange.

Here are 3 very simple steps that will make that shift a whole lot easier and more effective!

1. Be brief! The less you say, the more your audience can hear. Always be ready to condense and shorten what you think you need to say
2. Simplify what you say! Once you’ve shortened it, distil your ideas into a clear, simple message. If you struggle to simplify what you say, you don’t really understand it.
3. Personalise it! Communicate in your own unique voice – it makes is much easier to listen to and remember what you say

Instead of sinking into oblivion, you want to be heard. To make that shift happen you have to begin and the best time to begin is now.

Simple Stories: Why they are so effective in business communication

Stories are key to effective business communication. They engage us emotionally, facilitate better understanding, create meaning and build personal, trustworthy connections. Simple stories amplify all these benefits.

Simplicity: A Navigation Tool in a Complex World

How do simple stories help us communicate more effectively in an increasingly complex and confusing world?

Simplicity is our best navigation tool for many reasons:

• On a practical level, ‘simple’ is user-friendly, i.e. it’s shorter; quicker; it’s easier to remember, understand, evaluate and use

• It’s the outcome of a process that distils complexity into its essentials – without stripping it of substance to create a simplistic, dumbed-down version 

• It helps us easily recognise new ideas, systems, products, brands in an increasingly overwhelming and confusing marketplace

Simple Stories Simplify Communication

Simple stories are not just shorter stories. They clarify and refine complex ideas and data, making it easier for an audience to engage with what is being communicated and eventually act on it. The great physicist, Albert Einstein, gave us advice on how to do just that: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

We are complex human beings who live in an increasingly complex world, so our task is to make complexity simple, not simplistic! Simplistic is a when we dilute the substance of our message to the point that it can be consumed without reflection or question.  

Editing, organising and sharpening our ideas are part of a skills-set we can develop and then improve with practice. The benefits of investing time and effort to learn these skills are huge. By making complex material ‘user-friendly’, i.e. simpler, you create immediate access to it, which in turn makes it more relatable, relevant and applicable.

That’s a huge part of my job. When clients present me with a 3/4-page document, I help them create a 2/3-sentence back-story, or a brand stories or a personal profile statement. The work is first of all finding the pattern in all the detail: it’s the pattern that connects it all together. Then creating the simple story to illustrate that pattern.

How to Tell Simple Stories

I.          The Story Structure

The structure needs to be simple if you want your story to be simple. That’s easier said than done when most storytelling courses and workshops present beginners with needlessly complex diagrams and structures, while at the same time assuring us we’re all natural-born storytellers!  

The story structure is the container for what happens: the details of who, what, when, why, how. The structure creates a pattern that helps us grasp and remember those details. The simplest structure and easiest one to use is created around a linear, temporal pattern:

Before – Turning Point – After

II.        The Storytelling Structure

Once we have our story structure we then need a structure to tell that story. The same rule also applies here: the simpler the storytelling structure, the easier it is to communicate the story and the easier it is to receive it.

The most natural and effective structure to communicate information is the one we use every day – conversation, or dialogue. Dialogue is about reciprocal exchange, response and interaction, as opposed to the monologue, which is a one-way form of communication.

Another characteristic of telling simple stories is using simple language. That means getting rid of the jargon and the buzzwords because they act as a barrier to real connection. Replace them with personal, straightforward, simple language that supports and promotes human-to-human connection. Use the same language you would use in a conversation with a good friend.

The Benefits for Business of Making it Simple

How does keeping it simple actually translate into better outcomes for businesses?

The simplicity-index surveys show that simplicity pays. The top brands globally and nationally all share the common feature of offering their customers a simple experience that is communicated as simply as possible. Here’s how Ben Osborn from Siegel+Gale puts it:

“Our research shows us that 55% of consumers are willing to reward brands that make their lives simpler – and penalise those that do not. Simplicity is an important metric for the communications industry because empathy is the cornerstone of the contract between creators and consumers.”  

If simplicity pays, how do we recognise it in how other brands communicate and then implement it in our own communication? Start by asking yourself this question:

Do I consciously choose to communicate in a way that is simple, honest, transparent and personal for my audience?

Isn’t it time to simplify?

Crafting Your Marketing Message: The 1 strategy that guarantees to connect you with your ideal clients

Maybe you’re like most professionals and small business owners who believe that crafting your marketing message is an easy exercise of arranging basic information about your business into a concise format. There’s tons of advice offering you 30 tips, 20 hacks or 10 steps on how to identify those pieces and combine them to craft your perfect marketing message. 

The myth of crafting the quick and easy marketing message

So why then if it’s so quick and easy, do so many marketing messages fail to deliver, i.e. attract the right clients?

The answer is simple

It’s not a quick and easy task to get your marketing message right.

It’s a process; a challenging and time-consuming process, that forces you to reflect on the essence of what you do and how you want to get your business into the market place. But it’s a process that is well worth the time and effort you invest in it, as you’ll discover below. It’s a process that is becoming more and more relevant in a post-pandemic world.

To understand why the process is so importance, let’s cut through the confusion surrounding your marketing message by answering two primary questions.

Getting clarity about your Marketing Message

♦ What exactly is it?

It’s how you communicate what you do to the audience you want to reach.

Here’s where the problems begin.

A lot of people confuse a marketing message with a mini bio, a self-promotional pitch or a catchy tagline. Yes, it’s connected to them, but it’s not reducible to them.

Your marketing message should inform your bio, your pitch and your tagline. It should, in fact, inform all your content, e.g sales letter, social media posts, website copy, etc.  It should function as the golden thread running through all your marketing material, that gives it a distinct identity.

Your marketing message is the blueprint for your marketing strategy and all your marketing content.  

♦ What does it do?

Some people promise that your marketing message will get you more paying clients, build immediate trust, explain your offer and get people to instantly buy from you.

The truth is it won’t and can’t do any of those things.

It’s the starting point, the cornerstone that gives all that a consistent frame of reference.

The job of your marketing message is to position you to be easily found by the clients you want to reach.

It does that by getting their attention and making them curious to know more so that they then want to connect with you.

How Your Marketing Message Creates Connection

Let’s start at the end and reverse engineer the process.

If the purpose of your message is to connect you with your potential clients, then what creates human-to-human connection? 

Communication. Our ability and willingness to talk to each other. 

That means we have to abandon the conventional monologue we string together about our ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘why’ and replace it with an interactive exchange that invites a reciprocal response.

Your marketing message is the beginning of a dialogue!

This is the ONE strategy I promised you above.

It’s a strategy that evolves organically once you have clarified who your ideal clients are and what they want. During the process of crafting your marketing message, your intended audience become the ideal clients you want to reach.

So how do you craft a marketing message that connects you with your ideal clients through dialogue?

Your Marketing Message starts a Dialogue

Because your message starts a dialogue, you have to shift from the monologue mode of talking AT the other to talking TO the other in the form of a dialogue.

How then do you start a dialogue?

You can’t start a dialogue with by ticking the boxes on a best-of list. Nor can you start a dialogue by talking about yourself and promoting your business.

Starting a dialogue forces you to shift your focus away from your perspective to that of your dialogue-partner. You have to know who exactly your partner is – what are the unifying factors in that group – and what matters to them. To know what matters to them, you first have to do the vital preliminary work of listening.

When you listen deeply, you’ll discover what they want e.g. more clients, different clients, increased revenue, more efficient systems, etc., You’ll also hear how they describe what they want, so that you can use their language to explain how you can help get it and create a better outcome. And finally you can tell them why you are the right choice to get them those results.

But if you’re talking to them all the time in your marketing message, how can they engage in a dialogue with you?

They don’t respond verbally. They respond by self-identifying with your message because it shows them you know them and know what matters to them. For example, their auto-response to finding their problem described is, “Yes, that’s me. That’s what I struggle with!” or, when you describe the outcome you provide, “That’s exactly what I want!”

Your marketing message has done its job!

You now have the attention of your potential clients who found themselves and what they want described there. It invites them to take the next step and continue the dialogue.

Have you made it easy for them to continue the dialogue? Can they easily (one click) book a call? Do they know exactly how and where to get more information, etc.?

A Personalised Marketing Message is Authentic and Unique

What I hope is obvious from the above one-step strategy for crafting your marketing message is that you can dispense with ticking the boxes on a best-of list. You can also disregard the typical manipulative tactics and the conventional sleaze-bait in the language of mainstream marketing.

You can drop the language of scarcity, guilt and fear whose only purpose is to manipulate audience response. The ‘irresistible’ buzzwords and jargon are unnecessary as you are not trying to coerce a response from your dialogue partner. Because you’ve listened and responded directly to your potential clients, your marketing message is customised for them and communicates the value of what you do in an authentic, empathic language. Your potential clients helped you craft it after all.

You can learn from other successful marketing messages, not by mimicking their language or the tactics they use, but by understanding how they crafted a message that speaks directly to the audience they want to reach. What works for a corporate brand – no matter how brilliant or successful – does not transfer on a scaled-down version to service professionals, micro or small business owners.

How we communicate is gaining on relevance as we move into a post-pandemic world. People have had the time to reflect on their ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ and plan for a more personalised, sustainable and authentic way of doing business. Dialogue belongs to the emerging ‘new’ normal.

Your marketing message is your unique identity – it communicates the essence of why your clients choose to work with you.

Why Your Marketing Message is so Important

To understand why it’s so important, let’s summarise again what your marketing message is and what it does:

• It’s the blueprint for your marketing strategy and all your communication
• it positions you to be found by the people looking for what you offer

Crafting your marketing message is the vital first step in your marketing strategy. Think of it as the resonance of a pure tone or the ripples created by the pebble.

You now have the attention of your potential clients and they’re curious to know more. How do you keep their attention, build a sustainable, trust-based relationship and turn them into ideal clients ready to buy from you?

You continue the dialogue you started with your message.

How do you do that?

Watch this space!