On-Demand
We live in amazing times. Think about it; anything you need can be delivered to your door. If you need any furniture, you can call Wayfair; Wayfair has just what you need. Great brand, right? Think about Amazon. Amazon sells you a membership where you can get two-day Prime delivery at no charge, and things I used to go to the store for, like light bulbs, now magically show up at my house. As a matter of fact, you can set up buttons for anywhere in your house. Need toilet paper? Hit a button. Need washing detergent? Hit a button. It’s amazing.
Packing Peanuts
But there is an annoyance, and that’s not with every shipment, but a lot of them: packing peanuts. You know what I mean? Those little foam things. Now, some of them are bad for the environment, others are biodegradable. But packing peanuts are there to protect whatever items are inside the box and it stops it from breaking, which is good, right?
But have you ever tried opening a box with packing peanuts outside when it’s windy? There have been times where I’ve walked around after opening a box, and all of a sudden people are picking packing peanuts off me because the static cling stuck them to my clothes. They’re annoying. Today I want to talk about, not necessarily packing peanuts that come in a package, but how to avoid packing peanut messages that hurts your brand.
Networking No-No
What do I mean by that? Have you ever gone to a networking event and you go up to somebody and you say, “Hi, what do you do?” They come off and they say, “I’m a financial advisor.” Now, I’m not going to pick on financial advisors, I’m just using this as an example. Some people will say, “Yeah, I’m a financial advisor with such-and-such company.” Other people will act as you asked them what time it was and try to tell you how to build a watch.
They may come off and say, “Well, yeah, I’m a financial advisor that specializes in annuities and life insurance to help people maximize their lifetime benefit of working, and taking those inventories and turning them into assets by investing them in bonds and stocks and mutual funds to a very incredible program, which extrapolates data in a way that….” You know what I’m talking about, right? I mean, I can go on for an hour. When we’re communicating our brand, can we concisely, with the least amount of packing peanuts, get across what we do?
120 Characters
One of my favorite tools is LinkedIn. LinkedIn gives you the ability to create a headline. This headline can only be a whopping 120 characters. Now, 120 characters will give you between 20 to 24 words, depending on how big or small the words are. But in that time, can you communicate specifically to somebody what it is that you do? Now, what I mean by that is there are three core components, I want to come back to these.
- Who do you work with?
- What problem do you solve?
- How do you do it?
A very common way that financial planners will come off and say this kind of message is, “I help people plan for their future through our professional financial planning services that help you maximize investments through our knowledgeable team. Cutting edge technology and award-winning investment insights.” Right? Okay. Kind of says I work with people who want to plan for the future, and what problem they solve, maximize investments, and how, through a knowledgeable team cutting edge technology and award-winning investment insights. But do you recognize the packing peanuts around there?
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Supporting The Goods
Packing peanuts are designed to protect what’s in the box; packing peanut messages are there to protect your statements. What a lot of people do is they’ll say the core of what they do, but they’ll start to build additional messages on top of what it is they’re trying to say to protect their messages by giving you sub-statements or things around it that’s going to help compact and hopefully get the point across better. But people are living in a short attention span theater these days. The more concise you can be, the better you’re going to be at getting people to understand…
- Who do you work with?
- What problem do you solve?
- How do you do it?
Easy As 1-2-3
Let’s examine those three things. I actually did this exercise at a networking event, and people loved it because they could hear other people adding those packing peanuts around.
Start off with a very simple, who I serve; for example, “I help people.” In my case, I say, “I help B2B businesses.” It’s pretty plain and simple, right? I don’t work with consumers, I don’t work with animals. I work with B2B businesses. The second piece of this puzzle is, what problem do you solve? In my case, I improve sales relationships. Pretty simple, right? The third piece of this is, how do I do it? And I say with proven LinkedIn strategies.
Let me put all three of those together. I help B2B businesses improve sales for relationships with proven LinkedIn strategies. Pretty simple, right? Well, guess what? I still have room. Now I can include my tagline, which is, “I show you why and teach you how.” In 120 characters, I can say, “I help B2B business improve sales relationships with proven LinkedIn strategies. I show you why and teach you how.” Can you see how that has no packing peanuts? It opens up the option for conversation. As I said, it’s super clear who I work with, what problem I solve, and how I do it. I even have room left over to be able to give my tagline, which hopefully people will remember.
Final Thoughts
What I want to do is leave you with some final tips about things that you can do to make sure that it’s even stronger and tighter. Number one, visual words help. Anything where you can see something, something that your audience can visualize to imagine themselves in a position where you can help them. The second thing is active verbs propel your message. Things like actively or positively, anything that promotes action helps you get your message across. The final thing is, you have to have some emotion tied to it. It could be fear, it could be pleasure. But the bottom line is, the more that people can visualize and actively feel the emotion that you’re trying to get across, the better success you’re going to have.
Check your messages for those packing peanuts, and take them off today.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas or questions about showing the concepts presented. Have you had to overcome any of the presented concepts? What worked and what did not live up to expectations? Do you have any ideas or advice you could share?
