Make Marketing Suck Less

Dr. Michelle Mazur (00:00): When you're an expert, you're in a pretty exclusive club, a club filled with a small number of other humans who are passionately and a bit obsessively interested in your specific topic. It's pretty easy to talk to the other experts in your club, but how do you translate your expertise and make it interesting to other humans? How do you translate it so other human beings want to pay you for it? As a business owner, that's what you got to figure out. Otherwise, what you do and how it benefits your clients gets lost in translation. Let's figure out how to make your expertise interesting to humans. Let's do it.

(00:52): Get ready for the Rebel Uprising Podcast, the only podcast dedicated to business owners who feel overlooked for their expertise, skills, and experience. Let's claim your expertise and turn your complex ideas into unmistakable messaging that grows your business. I am your host, Dr. Michelle Mazur, the author of The 3 Word Rebellion and Your Rebel Truth Telling Guide to Building a Business That Gets Noticed.

(01:23): One of the best times in my life was graduate school. I was surrounded by other students and professors who shared my passion for communication. We could get nerdy with it and have long conversations about what we were reading, discovering, and the new connections we were making that would move the field forward. Then, I would talk to my mom. Now, don't get me wrong, she super supported my graduate school decision, but when she asked me about what I was learning and I would tell her all about the very cool theory call elaboration likelihood model and how I was thinking about how to apply it to my own research and all about the new study I was designing, I could hear her slowly fading away in the background. Her, "Uh-huh," and, "Oh, that's interesting," would grow fainter and farther apart. I could tell that she checked out and didn't have the heart to tell me to shut my pie hole because she didn't care as much as I did.

(02:36): Your potential clients are my mom. They don't share your passion or obsession. They don't care about the tools in your toolbox or the theories you use to inform your work. They might be interested in it from a super high level. They don't want to know all the intricacies or complexities of writing great copy or how your new app works, or all the tools you use to get a client a result. Clients want to benefit from your expertise, not become an expert themselves. You've got to make your business interesting to other humans. But how do you do that? Well, it begins by taking the first step and assessing, looking at your website, your marketing materials, and if what you're talking about in your email, blogs, podcasts, however you're marketing, is that for humans who have no idea about your expertise or is it for other experts?

(03:46): In the 3 Word Rebellion book, I write, on a scale from one to 10, with one being nothing about a topic and 10 being you are an absolute expert on a topic, you're an 11. Your audience is at a one or two, and that's a huge gap to close. During my 25 years of working with business owners of all types, I've noticed that when a business owner feels like they are bringing it down to their audience level, their expertise rating is still at a six or a seven. That's still a ginormous gap.

(04:25): This means that the business owner is still assuming that the audience has a level of expertise with the message that they don't have, and that creates confusion. Your audience doesn't get it. The message feels out of their league or, worse, they feel kind of stupid. When your message does not connect with your audience on their level, they walk away from you and the change you want to create. Even if you think right now you are doing a great job of translating what you know into a language that your clients get, I would still proceed to the second step of this process because step two is all about if you want people to care about your business, you've got to care about them first.

(05:24): One of the first things we're going to be doing in my new community, Expert Up, which is a community dedicated to getting experts known and hired for their work so we can change online business for the better together. What we're going to be doing first is talking to your clients. I know this can be a scary step for a lot of people, but talking to people who do not share your expertise is how you translate your message to something that matters and resonates to the people you want to do business with and the great news is that you're already talking to people. Sales conversations, intake forms, emails, comments on social media posts, that information is all around you, so gather it and understand what matters to your clients.

(06:26): What are they struggling with? What do they see and hear about the work you do? What are their misconceptions? Because this is the starting point to making your work interesting. You're meeting them exactly where they are. You are speaking their language. If you want to be doing this work as part of a community, be sure you're a part of my newsletter community, and you can do that by going to drmichellemasur.com/expert to get on the list and also download a copy of the Rebel Expert Manifesto, because doing this step in a community can be a powerful way for you to see what you've been missing when it comes to talking about your work.

(07:21): Step three. Now, you've talked to your people. You care about them first. Now, it's time to talk about your expertise, but focus on the results, the change you want to create, and not the nitty gritty detail. My father would always say to me, "No one cares how the sausage is made. They care that it's delicious," and it's the same for your work. No one cares about all the minutiae that gets your clients results, they just care that they get the results. They want to see you have a process, a framework, a method to guide them through. I always tell my clients, "Structure breeds trust. If you can give your clients a structure, they're going to feel safe working with you because they know what to expect next." It's important for experts to remember that what interests you about your own work is not going to be interesting to other people.

(08:32): The work I do in the 3 Word Rebellion messaging intensive is actually based on seven different communication and psychological theories. Seven theories inform my work, and I rarely talk about all the different theories I use, even though those theories, they fascinate me. I love them. I love talking about them. You want to know how many clients have asked me about the theories that inform my work in 11 years? Three. Three whopping clients wanted me to nerd out about the theoretical grounding and how I approach messaging work, so take that to heart. People hire you to be the expert, so be the expert. Don't overwhelm them with all the information and details. Ask yourself, what do they need to know in order to become ready to work with me? They need to know the process. They need to know a structure, a framework. They need to know why this work is important to them, what results they can expect. They need to know it solves their problem, right?

(09:52): When you assess care and empathize with your clients and focus on the results your clients want, your work will become far more interesting to the people who need it. Your marketing will actually do its damn job and get people ready to work with you and, the best of all, you can talk to your family about your business without them wishing they could get out of the conversation. Experts, you have a mandate to communicate, so making your business interesting to other humans is part of that job.

(10:33): Hey, rebel, wouldn't it be amazing if people just recognized your expertise on the spot and decided to hire you? Of course it would, but we know business doesn't work that way. Instead, you have to show up and market. Let's face it, marketing has not been your jam and it feels like it doesn't work for your business, and there's a reason for that. In order to market effectively so you grab attention and lead people to your offer, it takes having a one of a kind message and an ability to build the case for why people should hire you, and that's exactly what we'll create in the 3 Word Rebellion Messaging Intensive. Yes, we will co-create your 3 Word Rebellion, but you'll also create all of the other messaging your business needs to efficiently and effectively show up and market your business while translating your expertise into a message your clients want to know more about.

(11:39): Interested in that? Then, let's chat. Go to 3wrcall.com. That's 3wrcall.com, and book a free consultation with me. I look forward to helping you get your message out in the world so that more people can hire you.

(12:04): If the Rebel Uprising Podcast is helping you claim and communicate your expertise so that your clients can find and hire you, please share the show with a friend. The easiest way to do that is through PodLink. You can find the show at pod.link/rebel, and that page will allow anyone you share the show with to subscribe and start listening in their favorite podcast player. That's pod.link/rebel.

(12:34): The Rebel Uprising Podcast is a production of Yellow House Media. Our production coordinator is Lou Blazer. Our production assistant is Emily Kilduff. The podcast is edited by Stephen Mills. Our executive producers are Sean and Tara McMullin. The Rebel Uprising Podcast is recorded on the unceded traditional land of the Coast Salish Peoples, specifically the first people of Seattle, the Duwamish people, original stewards of the land, past and present.