Keep it simple!
Keep it simple!
Hi everybody and welcome to my Wednesday wisdom series so today I thought I would talk to you a little bit more about one of the common problems that I come up against when I’m talking to people and that is the question of what do you do and I know it sounds very simple but I thought I would give you some tips about how you might want to start to refine that message.
What I tend to find is that when I’m talking to people whether they’re potential clients, suppliers or if I’m just having a coffee sometimes I just kind of think I don’t actually understand what it is that you do and that’s because sometimes people overcomplicate it. So, how can you make it a little bit more simple?
I think one of the first things that you need to do is almost come up with what I would call an elevator pitch so a 2 liner, what is it? What do you do? Who do you help? How do you help them? And how does it benefit them? Just sit there have a little bit of a think about those key questions and the answers to them. I think a lot of people try to explain everything in one go and often that becomes a bit confused and a bit jumbled so it’s really important to have a very clear message about what it is that you do and that message needs to be conveyed across all of the channels that you work across.
So, it could be a website, could be networking, it could be social media but you have to make sure that you’re consistent with what you do across all the different channels. A copywriter once said to me that the idea really is to take a sentence and refine it to its simplest form and I think that’s really the case when you’re trying to describe what you do bring it right back down. I’ve made that mistake I’ve talked in marketing jargon before thinking it makes me sound professional and that it makes me seem very kind of competent about what I do but a lot of people get really confused.
I would have the same thing if I had an accountant or a mortgage adviser talking to me I’d be like I’m not sure what it is that you do so really refine it down one of the quotes that I like the best is if you can’t explain it to a six-year-old then you can’t explain it yourself, I think that was said by Albert Einstein so it really is a good kind of rule of thumb but if you can’t explain it to a child then you might need to go back and have a think about it.
So, my action or my call to action for you guys this week is really have a think about what it is that you offer and refine it a little bit more and think about it because if people are confused they’re probably not going to buy something from you.
So, I hope that’s helpful I hope that’s giving a bit of an insight into maybe starting to refine your message down a little bit and that’s it for me this week bye for now.
