Want a secret to “writing” great messages for your business?
Want to learn the art of crafting copy that your ideal clients will actually want to stop and read?
SHUT UP. SERIOUSLY. JUST SHUT. UP.
Just stop talking, stop over-explaining, stop rationalizing and stop confusing everyone, including yourself.
Notice the quiet? It’s lovely, isn’t it.
Now that you’ve kept silent long enough for the echo of you voice to fade away, I invite you to pay attention to the other noise many of us ignore: The ones made by your ideal clients and fans.
OK, telling you to shut up might sound harsh, but sometimes it’s the only way to get many business owners to understand that if they want to find the most powerful way to speak to their audiences, they don’t have to get clever and pull stuff out of thin air.
Instead, just start paying attention to what their clients are already saying about their product.
In “The Micros-Script Rules” by Bill Schley (who by the way, has one of the best sub-titles, “It’s not what people hear, it’s what they repeat”), he talks about the company Airborne, the over-the-counter product that was invented by a second grade teacher. For many travelers, Airborne is the go-to supplement to take before getting on the plane, especially if you don’t want to get sick.
Of course, this wasn’t the intention of their marketing or even their original target.
“The company wasn’t even thinking of an air travel connection when they named the product. They called it Airborne because of all the airborne germs in second grade classrooms. It was their frenzied fans who jumped to the conclusion that the name Airborne must have something to do with planes, too, and quickly generated the “take it before you get on the airplane” message. The company just listened.”
Here’s my favorite part of the passage:
“Airborne got its message from ‘Customers who told them you take it before you get on a plane to keep from getting a cold. That went into their advertising and their packaging and contributed greatly to their legend.”
The lesson here is simple: Great messaging sometimes is the result of figuring out what your ideal clients are buying on their own, but more often than not, they will tell you precisely what they want, and why they want it.
It’s just a matter of whether you can shut up long enough to hear what they are telling you.
Matthew Goldfarb
