In today’s episode, I’m going to help you to NAIL your business messaging.
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Let’s dive in!
First and foremost, what do I mean by business messaging?
The reason why I want to make sure we clarify this is because your messaging is NOT your copy.
It’s not ONE certain piece of copy, or ONE way of writing an offer, a sales page or an email.
Your messaging is an entire ecosystem.
It’s formed by written content, video content, and the message that your brand gives off. It’s the message that you have to share with your audience in its entirety.
We need to make sure that when we think about your business messaging, we’re not just thinking about writing an offer on social media, and then someone buying from you.
We’re talking about the way you speak in sales conversations, the type of questions that you ask, the webinars that you facilitate, and the intellectual property that’s inside working with you that really puts what you have to offer into a meaningful process.
All of that forms part of your messaging ecosystem.
Now how do you nail that entire ecosystem?
1. Different messaging for different audiences
Recognise that there are different messages required for different audience heat:
- Hottest audience – they know you, like you, trust you, feel connected to you, are familiar with your work and are hungry for it.
- Warm audience – they know what you’re about and what you have to offer, but they’re not quite ready to work with you yet.
- Cold audience – people discovering your work for the first or second time. They aren’t yet familiar with who you are, and what work it is that you do.
Think about it: The way that you introduce yourself to someone who is brand new to your world is so different to the way that you introduce yourself to someone who already knows you and has been around for ages.
Why would we try and come up with one-size-fits-all messaging for all of them?
Remember: If you try to speak to everyone, you end up speaking to no one.
We want to make sure that your messaging ecosystem has a range of content and messages that work for hot audiences, warm audiences, and cold audiences.
2. Get hyper-specific about your niche
You’ll hear me rabbit on about niches all the time.
This is because it’s through the lens of your niche that you’re able to speak to real, tangible examples – lived experiences that resonate with your ideal client.
That resonance does not come from you talking about big concepts and theories that don’t align with what your audience THINK the problem is.
Niching is critical to make sure that your messaging is on point and it speaks to your ideal client.
It allows you to use those tangible lived experiences that help people feel like you deeply understand what it is that they:
- Have already
- Love about what they have
- Hate about what they have
- Are looking for
- Want
- Think will take them from where they are to where they want to be
That understanding is critical for a messaging ecosystem that actually works.
3. Get clear and map out your value proposition
Value proposition is the gap between before working with you and after working with you, and why that is valuable through the eyes of your clients.
It’s not why YOU think it’s valuable for your clients to transform from A to B. It’s why THEY think that it’s valuable.
Most people that I work with in the early stages of business are still trying to convince their audience that this transformation is valuable.
That is not your job.
Your job is to understand what would make it valuable to them right now, WITHOUT convincing, persuading, tricking, or having to walk people through a 16-step educational process.
How can you connect what they want with what you offer?
How can you connect what they see as the bridge between where they are and where they want to be, and how you help them bridge between where they are and where they want to be?
It’s not a Trojan Horse thing. People don’t come and say, ‘I want X’ and then you simply say, ‘No, you need Y’.
A lot of marketers and messaging experts talk about what your audience wants and what they need.
In most cases, what they want is a part of what they need.
What they want is linked to what they need – there’s overlap. It’s not two separate things.
Get clear on the before working with you, after working with you, and why that is valuable through the eyes of your clients – not through your own perspective.
Map out your value proposition, and you’ll find that your entire messaging ecosystem up-levels really quickly.
4. Connect with your ideal clients to refine your messaging ecosystem
Women connecting on a call to refine business messaging and copy
Have human-to-human conversations in writing or on Zoom. Refine as you go.
When I first started my business, I assumed that one of the big reasons why my ideal client would see working with me as valuable is because they would need someone to cheer them on and help them get over their fear of failure and rejection.
But actually, the biggest thing that was driving my ideal client was that they believed that if they didn’t do it now, they’d never do it.
The messaging for those two different challenges is very different. There are two different perspectives.
I started out by creating content on how to overcome a fear of failure and the fear of rejection, and why rejection is actually really good for us.
Very quickly, people were saying to me that they don’t feel that way. They feel like they’ve already put their business off forever and if they don’t do something about it now, they’ll never start… they’ll continue to procrastinate, get stuck and make excuses.
Very quickly, I refined my messaging to be more reflective of that experience.
I started to get more and more engagement, and more and more inquiries.
No great business message was built on theory alone.
Don’t spend months and months (or even weeks and weeks!) working on your business messaging behind the scenes without actually connecting with your ideal clients, and without actually having some conversations.
That may mean:
- Inviting people to send you a direct message
- Asking questions of your audience
- Doing some interviews
- Doing some market research
- Offering up your services and seeing what reasons people give for not investing
- Offering up your services and inviting people to jump on a free chat to talk about it
There are thousands and thousands of ways to connect with your ideal clients so that you can test your messaging, test your offers and refine them moving forward. Yet I find so many people would rather spend six hours behind the scenes doing it in isolation, versus six minutes having a face-to-face conversation with someone.
That six-minute conversation is far more valuable to your messaging than all the copywriting courses, all of the work that you’re doing behind the scenes, the different models that you’re building, and those diagrams that you’re putting together in Canva to try and express it.
You will be far better off just having a conversation with some real human beings. Find the ways to do that and get moving.
Thanks so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business podcast.
It’s time to go nail your business messaging!
As always, if you have any questions or lightbulb moments you’d like to share with me about this episode, come on over and slide into my DMs on Facebook or Instagram.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
