Take a good, honest look at your sales and marketing efforts. Are you helping or hyping?
What we mean by that is this: is your messaging aimed at helping your audience solve a financial or operational problem, or are you hyping your brand and your services?
If you answered “helping”, then carry on.
If you answered “hyping”, then keep reading.
If you answered “I don’t know”, then keep reading.
Gimmicky sales tactics are impersonal and, frankly, tacky, and off-putting. They can diminish your industry authority faster than you can build it, and are generally unsuccessful in garnering any solid leads.
Next time you sit down to write something intended for your audience, ask yourself this question:
“How is this helping my audience?”
Every message you craft, every piece of content you write, every email you send should be written through this lens. And if you can’t answer that question immediately, or if you can’t answer that question after a minute of thought, then you need to step back to rethink your strategy.
‘You’ Before ‘We’
Pull up the last sales or marketing email you sent. How many times did you use first-person pronouns (I, we, us)? How many times did you use second-person pronouns (you, your, yours)?
If you read it back and find that you are mostly talking about yourself, your brand, why your services are amazing, and what makes you the best from a first-person perspective, you need to reevaluate your positioning.
When crafting useful messaging, it’s important to focus on how you help your audience. Not why you’re the best, but how what you do or what you sell can help your audience and solve a problem for them.
Sure, you may be the best at what you do. You may have a long list of accolades that proves this point. But your audience likely won’t care if you can’t communicate how this helps them specifically.
Quality Over Quantity
Are you creating sales messages and marketing content just for the sake of having it? Are you attempting to hit a monthly quota for email sends or content creation?
Don’t get us wrong, having quotas aren’t inherently bad, but when the quality of your messaging suffers as a result of pumping out a high quantity, it will hurt you more than help you.
Every message you craft should be intentional, thoughtful, straightforward, and above all, helpful.
Creating content just for the sake of creating generally means there will be a lot of duds. Some gems, sure, but wouldn’t you rather have 2 really amazing messages that get to the (helpful) point?
Instead of inundating inboxes with quasi-helpful anecdotes about yourself, take time to craft a few solid messages that get to the point of how you can help your audience. You’ll thank us later.
The Bottom Line
So if or when you find yourself falling into hype messaging, take a minute to reflect and ask yourself these clarifying questions:
- Is this a helpful message? Does it lend a solution to a problem?
- Does this message focus too much on my brand?
- Would I respond to this message if I received it or would I delete it?
By shifting from ‘sell mode’ to ‘help mode’, you create more powerful and impactful messages that actually grab your audience’s attention because the focus is on them, and not yourself.
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