Garbage Words

Garbage Words

Most marketing is garbage and you want to make sure your words don’t end up in the trash. If your marketing is full of awesome adjectives (i.e. — best, greatest, advanced, special), know that your audience is not having the same reaction, as when you wrote it.

Why?

The ad industry, my industry, has done an exceptional job of making impactful words completely meaningless. If your competition claims the same thing, and they often do, the consumer is left with a big bag of confusion… and the answer to confusion is to toss it out.

Think of it, all of your best stuff, mentally crumpled down into the waste basket.

So how do you capture attention and trust?

TIP 1: Use unique qualifiers and real world examples to help differentiate your brand from the pack. A qualifier like “We’re the no.1 __________” is a whole lot better than the word, “best“. No.1 is provable and leaves little room for doubt.

TIP 2: Choose to be the leader in something… anything, even if you’re a small fry in a big market. If it isn’t sales volume, perhaps it could be customer service or on-time delivery or that you have a process/formula/product that is truly unique in your industry. “We work harder,” is a start… but you can already see the doubt creeping in, so you better back it up with “…and guarantee you’ll agree or your money back.”

TIP 3: Becoming credible in today’s market is paramount, and the best way to gain credibility is familiarity. Your marketing plan and messaging needs to lose more adjectives in favor of finding ways to spend more time with your clientele… like YouTube videos, social site engagement, LI commentary, thought-leadership articles, networking, workshops …and 162 other ideas not mentioned here.

TIP 4: Don’t be afraid to recycle your message. Stop creating new mousetraps, all-the-time. Move your best material into every social silo you can think of. You need prospects to bump into you and spend time with you, so that you can gain their trust to buy from you.

Great stuff, right?

 

Have you read the Million Dollar Sentence? It will make this article even stickier.