The Challenge of Simplicity
The Messaging Skill You Either Have To Learn Or Invest In
Here’s the thing, your most powerful messaging is a compelling story that can be told in just a few words.
Here’s why: in any form of digital marketing, you don’t have their attention for very long. Just take these website stats for instance:
It takes .05 seconds for people to form enough of an impression of your website to decide to stay or leave.
Users only spend an average of 5.59 seconds on a web page’s written content
The average visitor only spends a total of 54 seconds on a web page
Everything Must Pass The Skim Test
What does this tell us?
They’re more likely to skim than read the fine print.
We need a smart hierarchy of emphasis in our messaging, so the visitor’s eye is drawn right to the most important parts.
I say “hierarchy of emphasis” because we need to understand the difference between Priority 1 messaging and supporting details- or we won’t know what to put where. For instance: what goes in the big headers that the eye is immediately drawn to, and what goes underneath?
Because most people who chance across your website or social media captions aren’t reading, they’re skimming.
So the most important parts of your digital marketing are the parts they see first.
That includes what is above the fold, of course, or what they can see before they have to scroll. Also, the text in the video vs. the caption, or in the first part of the caption that you can see without having to tap or click to see more, etc.
And because our brains process images MUCH MUCH FASTER than we can register words, we need to be strategic about the visual cues we send and how we use design to draw the eye to the most important messaging… As in:
Headers (the big print)
Pull quotes or other bolded text that is separated out from bigger blocks of copy
Image captions
Text surrounded by whitespace
In-video titles and text
The headline of the ad
Not Everything Can Go in The Big Print
Remember, not everything can be in the big print or it ceases to be big print. The eye is drawn to nothing.
This is why a clear hierarchy of emphasis in your messaging is relevant to everything you do in your marketing.
How else would you know what to put where? How else would you know what your design should be highlighting?
So, how do you know what to put in the places that will first draw the eye?
That, my friend, takes some strategy:
Knowing what will appeal most to your ideal customers…Which means you need to know who your ideal customers are and what they care about.
Highlighting the best of the benefits of taking you up on your offer… Which takes knowing which problems are most pressing for your customer to solve.
Saying it in a way that makes your brand stand out from other businesses with similar offers.
It also takes wordsmithing skill, such as:
Setting appealing & appropriate expectations for what they will get if they a) read/watch/listen on and b) buy.
Triggering the powerful, memorable, emotional response of HOPE. Hope that life will be better once they buy this thing from you. Some goal will be achieved, some pain alleviated, some opportunity they didn’t know was possible for them will open up, etc.
Saying it all in a few well-chosen, deeply impactful words.
Making It Simple is HARD
Now learning how to have a smart messaging strategy and the skill to execute it is something you can learn… with a lot of practice. No matter how you approach it, messaging is an investment:
Either spend the time & energy for you or your team to acquire these skills
Or pay someone with solid messaging capabilities to help or do it for you.
Here are the aspects of effective messaging that, in my experience, people have the hardest time acquiring.
Brevity- while saying a lot with a little
Communicating complex topics in an accessible way
Allow me to explain.
Brevity: “I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time.”
I love this ^ quote that the internet keeps attributing to radically different historical figures.
Regardless of who said it, (Mark Twain? Winston Churchill? Blaise Pascal?) it’s so true!
Brain-dumping a pile of disorganized ideas, data, and possible connections is something we can all do.
But reading a lengthy brain dump? Even if it’s a brain dump of lovely ideas? Not always fun. Not something many of us would exert the energy on - especially if the brain dump is trying to sell us something.
Honing, editing, whittling it down, polishing, and smoothing it into a masterpiece takes much more time and effort.
We also gotta throw in deep knowledge of the customer, the brand, and the benefits of the offer in order to craft effective messaging. Otherwise, knowing what to keep and what to throw out from your brain dump is a crapshoot.
Again, if you don’t already possess these skills, you can learn them- but they take time and practice. Or you can just partner with a messaging specialist. 😉
“If you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself.” - Einstein maybe?
(OK, again the internet can’t decide on who said this quote I love. But regardless of who said this, I agree.)
So many business owners struggle with brevity because the things they have to communicate in their marketing are often complex. Like:
The problem they solve
What causes that problem
How they solve it
Why this works better than other possible solutions
Why they do this work
Why they care about these people with these problems
And some of y’all do fancy important things and are anxious to be perceived as experts. This perceive-me-as-an-expert fever can tempt you into lacing your marketing with jargon and wordy formality.
But here’s what happens when folks are on the receiving end of complex messaging: overwhelm & shutdown.
It takes energy to make sense of something that doesn’t initially make sense. Most people don’t want to exert this effort. Especially when they know that behind the complexity is someone trying to separate them from their money.
So. Your messaging needs to make the complex simple. You need to make sense of it for them.
And, before you start worrying about the perception of your expert status, know that the ability to make a complex subject simple demonstrates more confidence & expertise in the subject matter, not less.
Again, making the complex simple is a skill you can learn - through the time & effort of practice. Or, you partner with a messaging specialist who already knows how.
Spray & Pray Vs Bullseye After Bullseyye
Given what the research shows us about typical user behavior, we know we don’t have much time at all - mere microseconds - to capture attention and convince our aligned customers that our content is relevant enough to them for them to even stay long enough to skim.
And even then, we don’t have their attention for long.
So, simplicity - both in terms of brevity & removing complexity - is a messaging skill you’ll need to invest in one way or another. Either through the effort, education, energy, and time for yourself and your team to acquire these skills or through partnering with a messaging specialist who can do it for you.
However you decide to make the investment, it’s an important one to make. It’s the difference between spray & pray marketing or marketing that hits bullseye after bullseye.
Alright, ready to tackle the challenge of simplicity in your messaging? You're going to want The Brand Storytelling Package, which will clarify exactly what you need to say to sell.
