Make Marketing Suck Less

Michelle Mazur [00:00:55]: Happy 2024, Expert! I'm noticing something that I never thought I would see in online business.

Messaging is finally having its moment. While I'm thrilled that messaging is getting the attention it deserves, there is a catch, my friend. Most of the business coaches and marketers who are talking about it are oversimplifying what messaging is and leading business owners astray about its true strategic purpose in your business.

So let's start the year off right by demystifying what messaging is with all the nuance, the goal it helps your business achieve, and how to use it to make marketing suck less.

Let's do it.

Michelle Mazur [00:00:55]: Welcome to Make Marketing Suck Less. The podcast that knows marketing is freaking hard, especially when you're a solo business owner trying to juggle it all. I'm your host, Dr. Michelle Mazur, author of the 3 Word Rebellion and founder of the Expert Up Club. Forget the latest marketing fads and tactics promising social media stardom. I'm here with research-backed strategies to help you clarify your message and get twice as effective with your marketing. And while I can't promise you'll ever love marketing, I'm here. to make you hate it a tiny bit less.

Michelle Mazur [00:01:44]: For years, I felt like it was me, Donald Miller, and Tamsen Webster who were banging the drum about messaging and how important it is in your marketing, sales and copy. But now it's definitely having a moment amongst a whole swath of business coaches who I'm seeing post all the time on social media about messaging. But here's the rub - they're only getting one piece of the messaging puzzle. Messaging as voice of customer research, messaging as being ultra-specific, messaging as an elevator pitch. messaging as a content plan.

Alright. Except for that last one, those are all parts of the messaging puzzle. Now messaging as a content plan? No. No. No. No.

Messaging informs what your content strategy should be and what you could have in your content plan, but it isn't a content plan, my friends, those are 2 different things.

But the rest of these ideas around voice of customer and elevator pitches, those are all bits and pieces of what messaging does. Now you know, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, that messaging is an essential piece in making marketing suck less. Because if you don't know what to say in order to build the desire for people to work with you, then your marketing is not going to be effective. It's going to be hard to know if it is working or even what is working.

Michelle Mazur [00:03:32]: So I always say that messaging is everything your business communicates, and I'm going to break down exactly what I mean by that in a moment. But first, I wanted to talk about the goal messaging helps your business achieve. It's a super simple goal, and it's critical to understand this. And I think it might be helpful to look at another industry where messaging is talked about a lot, and that is politics. Groan. Right? Politics is terrible, especially with all the divisiveness. But there's still something business owners can learn from politicians.

More specifically, how pundits talk about politicians. There always seems to be these questions about, was the candidate on message? Is this issue distracting from the message they want to get to in front of the voters? Is the message getting to the voters, or are they having problems with the message being seen, or is it unclear?

So messaging is this hot topic for politicians. The reason why is that politicians, their strategists, the pundits, all know the same truth - that messaging is how you get a person to vote for a specific candidate. That's it. That's the goal. Being on message, having a message is how you get people to vote for you.

Michelle Mazur [00:05:19]: Everything a politician says drives a person to the poll to cast their vote for that individual or maybe not cast their vote for that person. And that is why a politician is showing up and saying the same things over and over and over again to drive home their message.

Now you're not getting the vote in your business. Thank God for that. But the job of your message, the goal your message helps your business achieve is to make people wanna work with you. That's it..

That's why you need to show up and say the same ideas over and over and over again to help move people, to help persuade people in seeing the value of the work that you're doing and that maybe they should hire you.

So that brings me to a super simple definition of messaging. Messaging is the key ideas that need to be conveyed in your marketing and copy to persuade. Let me say it one more time because this is important. Write it down. Messaging is the key ideas that need to be conveyed in your marketing and copy to persuade.

If you don't know what the message is, you're not going to be able to persuade people to work with you, to opt-in to your email sell list.

Michelle Mazur [00:07:04]: So that brings us to the next question, persuade to do what? Right? There's so many different things that you can be persuading people.

And I don't mean, like, see. Icky, bro marketing, persuading. I mean, like, honestly, building an argument for your work, showing a need for what you do, how it helps, how it benefits, and really making the best case for it.

So when we start thinking about, like, well, what do I want to persuade my audience to do? Well, it could look like book a consult, tt could look like follow you on social media. It could look like join your community, buy your book, join your membership. There's a lot of different things that you might want your audience to do in order to get them to work with you. Right?

So the important part of this is before you sit down to create marketing, you have to understand what the goal of the message is first. And then you can combine the right messaging ingredients, deploy those in your marketing so people are persuaded to take a specific action. I really want you to think about creating your messaging like creating a cocktail, how you're blending different elements together to create a compelling narrative.

Now picture this - you walk into your favorite restaurant. You smell the food in the air, the garlic bread. It's in the oven, and you know it's going to be crispy and delicious. And there's a bar with a bartender and so many bottles of booze at that bar that the bartender can choose from. There are infinite drinks that she could create. And if the goal is to make a mai tai, she needs different ingredients than if the goal was to make an old-fashioned, and that's the same with your own messaging.

So let's say my goal is to have you join the Expert Up Club which is one of my goals for for doing this podcast. Right? And one of the things I know you must understand before you would be even interested in working on your messaging in this community working on your marketing is you have to understand what messaging is and its relationship to marketing, because you're not gonna wanna join the club if you don't think messaging and marketing are important. You're not gonna wanna work with me one-on-one if you don't see the role messaging plays in your business and how it helps you get closer to your audience growth goals, your revenue goals. Right? So my job in my marketing is to get that key idea across from you.

Michelle Mazur [00:10:01]: And, really, you are a mixologist when it comes to creating marketing. You're a mixologist of messaging. But before you can figure out what drink you're going to serve, what message you wanna put out there, you have to define what the goal is of that marketing. Right? Like, what do you want persuade people to do, and then you can assemble the right ideas to persuade people and to take action. What are the ingredients that go into your messaging? That is a bigger conversation. So for the first part of this year I want to do a deep dive into creating your minimum viable marketing message. Like, what goes into it? Why does it matter? How does it help you achieve certain goals in your business?

Michelle Mazur [00:11:04]: And this is all a part of the work we see you in the Expert Up Club, which is now always open to join at any time. You can do that at ExpertUp.Club if you want to get a jump start in creating this messaging and becoming a master messaging mixologist. Okay? Like, that this metaphor is over as of right now. But the bottom line is messaging is what makes see your marketing work. It's what makes your copy persuade people to take a specific action, and it is always the key to making your your marketing suck less.

Michelle Mazur [00:11:51]: If the Make Marketing Suck Less pod is making your marketing more effective so that your clients can find and hire you, please share the show with a friend. The easiest way to do that is through pod link. 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.

The Make Marketing Suck Less podcast is a production of Communication Rebel. Our production coordinator is Jessica Gulley-Ward. The podcast is edited by Steven Mills, our executive producer is me, Dr. Michelle Mazur.

The make marketing suck less podcast is recorded on the unseated traditional lands of the coast salish peoples, specifically the first people of Seattle, the Duwamish people, original stewards of the land, past, and present.