Level 1 of the Messaging game is being able to create that “Holy s—-, you wrote that email just for me!” experience for your audience.
AKA “Rookie level”.
Milk and cookies.
Tequila and bad decisions.
All very mainstream.
Level 2 involves asking a far more interesting question of your audience:
“Where are you at right now?”
See, let’s assume we know who our ideal avatar is.
(Not a given… but anyway)
The next relevant question is:
At what stage of the journey are they?
And of course within any audience you’re going to have a people at different levels. That’s the nature of an audience.
For experts, it’s a common mistake to assume too much knowledge on the part of your audience.
Consider your avatar at two different stages:
- Well-informed and shopping around for options
- Just getting started and not even aware of solutions yet
Very different, right?
What this means for your:
By tailoring your messages to people at different stages of the journey, you can make your marketing far more efficient.
Let’s look at an example.
Business: We teach business owners how to transform their company into a self-managing organisation (SMO).
Nice and specific, I’m sure you’ll agree.
“Level 1” of Messaging is to speak to everyone, assuming that they know what SMOs are:
Problem = dissatisfaction with traditional hierarchical structure
Solution = SMO
Benefits: – higher profit – higher employee retention – increased productivity
In this mode, you might run Facebook ads promoting a webinar teaching “5 tips to run a successful SMO”, followed by a pitch to join a training course.
You see this kind of thing all day long.
But consider this:
Imagine you reach the correct avatar…
But they’re at an earlier stage of the journey…
And they’ve never heard of SMOs before.
Are they likely to buy your training course directly off a webinar? Or even sign up to a webinar on SMOs in the first place?
Unlikely.
They’re in a different place:
- They know they don’t like the traditional org chart
- They’re open to alternatives
- But they’ve never heard of SMOs (or didn’t think they were relevant to their of business)
Suddenly, the messaging in your ads and offer is broken.
They’re not ready yet.
- they’re aware of the problem, but
- they’re NOT aware of your solution
Right person. Wrong stage.
So what do you do?
Rather than trying to sell them on your programme, instead you need to:
Educate them about the solution instead.
For your advertising, this means switching out your conversion-focused webinar for:
- a PDF guide
- a video masterclass
- a case study or white paper
The aim here is not to sell, but to educate.
Our education focused ad might be:
WHITE PAPER: “How returning control to employees helped this business grow employee satisfaction by 210% and profits by 73%.”
In this case, we’re not even mentioning SMOs here.
We’re speaking to the problem experienced by the early-stage avatar.
Make no mistake…
They will buy. Just not yet.
Right…
Let’s recap.
- Even within your “avatar group” people are at different stages
- Some people understand what you do and are ready to buy right now
- Others know they have a problem but don’t understand the solution yet
…and this means we need different messages at different times.
Good in theory?
Yes.
But even better in practice…
See, if you’re running ads, being able to correctly message to people at different stages will MASSIVELY increase your efficiency.
It means that:
- you can sell to people who are ready to buy
- you can educate those who aren’t ready yet
And then:
Every $ you spend on marketing is going to work a lot harder.
Lowering your costs…
Increasing response…
And making you so happy and rich you’ll turn orange and start installing gold toilets in your home.
You see…
Messaging isn’t a marketing trick.
Messaging is about deeply understanding your audience… at all stages of their journey, and producing marketing that speaks to them accordingly.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Before you even stand a chance of producing marketing like this, you’ve got to do the deep work of understanding your audience.
Namaste,
Olly