It most definitely is what you say when it comes to marketing.
I’m not sure when it happened, but perhaps in order to sound fancy, elite, or just vague, we started using these terms - you’ll know the ones:
Solution
Service level agreement
Quality
Etc etc
But what do they actually mean, really?
And what do they actually mean to you?
And perhaps more importantly what do they actually mean to your clients?
Because - all of those things can be totally different.
This is a house
These are all indeed ‘houses’ but they are fundamentally different in what they have to offer… and yet they share the same identity as a ‘house’.
(and when you were thinking about a house, you probably initially thought of something completely different.)
So when we talk of quality, for example, my idea of quality may be so far off what you consider to be a quality service or product. And using such vague, quite frankly meaningless, words in your content, on your website, or even as part of your why/company purpose - leaves so much open to interpretation…
…and it’s also doing your business a huge disservice.
If I can’t paint a picture in my mind of what you can do for me - and indeed who you can do it for - your offer isn’t clear enough.
Led by language
When I work on my clients’ marketing, I am fundamentally led by the language as it’s pretty much the lynchpin for everything that comes after:
You’ll be able to easily articulate exactly what you do and how you’re able to do this in terms of the jobs (these can be both notional eg. popularity and work-related). People will then start to believe that you are the business that solves their problems
Your prospective clients can self-sort and say ‘ah that’s me!’
All your marketing activity can be prioritised and joined-up according to what the business is trying to achieve
You can brief in-house and outsourced teams more accurately so that everything is geared towards where the business is trying to get to
And I do this in a few ways:
If you’re already marketing your business, we’ll work through what language you’re using now and how this might be perceived by your client
Together, we’ll take a look at some of the others in the space, or marketing campaigns that have caught your attention and see what’s working well and why it could be working well
We’ll really get to grips to speaking to your clients in their language in terms of what they are thinking, feeling, and doing, before and after they interact with the business
We’ll use this as the basis for how you speak about what you do, who you do it for, and why you do it.
Voila.
No, it’s not a silver bullet…we don’t do those here.
But getting your language on-point is pretty. damn. close.
To help you out - I’m sharing the exact framework I use with my clients to take their language from meaningless to meaningful - just send me a message and I’ll send you the link ↴
ATB,
