Marketers- Nobody Cares About You, Your Product or Your Company!

People are looking for an authentic voice. Nobody wants to talk to a machine or people that talk (or write) like machines. You have a very short window of opportunity to get your message across so make the most of it. It makes sense since a powerful principle of marketing is to build relationships (key 5). Relationships are person to person so the more personality you have in your writing and marketing communications the better.

Do you like to sit and listen to people talk about themselves? “I did this and then I did that, and oh ya I’m really good at this too.” Now look at most advertising and web copy, it is inward focused on how neat the company or person writing is. Is this fun to read?

Before I was married 8 years ago the pre-marital counselor had my wife and I practice “I” messages. Stuff like “I feel hurt when you say that,” instead of “you always say hurtful things.” Good advice and it takes away some of the negative feelings when communicating. This does not work when speaking to your customers. You must do the exact opposite and use “you” messages if you want to communicate effectively. What if the previous sentence said “when I communicate I always use you messages?” Is it as powerful? Does it get in your head the same way? You want to get into your customer's head and out of yours. You know what you are about, they don’t. The challenge in marketing is to communicate yourself better than your competition.

When you go online and do a search you are looking for answers. You type in problems and are looking for someone to solve it, whether it’s how to spell something, find restaurant, or get your plumbing fixed. So when you are creating your copy or website set it up in a way that it is providing answers and solutions to people’s problems.