The single best marketing tip I could give someone
By Jim Logan • Mar 19th, 2008 • Category: Lead Generation Content
I couldn’t begin to tell you why, but last night I was thinking about the single best marketing tip I could give someone. This would be the best single piece of advice I could give someone to better their story and communication with prospective customers.
The answer was immediate:
Every time you find yourself presenting, speaking, writing, or otherwise communicating with someone and you find yourself saying something like “What I mean by that is…” – stop yourself. Whatever you say afterward is exactly what you should have said in the first place.
Knowing this, listen to your conversations and watch presenters carefully. Notice how many times you hear people say “What I mean by that is…” and see if you don’t agree whatever they say next is better than what they said before.
As marketers, we too often value creativity and being cleaver more than simplicity of being direct and clear in our communications. Craft terms, feature speak, and industry jargon can get in the way of stating things as the simply are. The clearer and easier to understand we make things, the easier is it to connect with prospects and advance the conversation.
What do you think?
I can’t tell you how many times, when I’m working with someone on a message or piece, I ask them, “What did you mean when you wrote that?” Then, after they give their answer, I tell them, “Okay, write that instead.”
At one company, I even came up with a name for the technique–I called it, “Say it badly.” The idea is, free people from their expectations of how they should write, and just let them focus on the message. I’ll have to write a blog post about this!
My 10th grade English teacher said to me, “You only write as well as you think.” How true! It takes incredible discipline to speak clearly and say only what needs to be said, in normal English and not industry jargon.
Jim, I think that we should strike from our vocabulary “To tell you the truth…” This is filler and implies that there is ever a time that we would tell a partner, friend, client, etc… anything BUT the truth. not good. Thanks for your thoughts.