The #1 Messaging Mistake That’s Costing You Sales
If an 8 year old can't understand your sales message, it's too complicated and it’s costing you sales.
Simplify Your Message to Make More Sales
This post came about because the other day, someone commented on a social media post of mine, and it was as if he was speaking another language. The language was Human Design, but I didn’t understand what the heck he was saying.
And I know Human Design!
So, today, we’re going to unpack how and why it’s time to simplify your message so that the people you’re here to work with can quickly understand what it is that you do and hire you to help them. If you prefer to listen, you can do that here.
I would love to invite you to repeat after me: “I, [your name], do solemnly swear to take all of the gobbledygook out of my messaging.” Seriously, there’s this thing that we do when we write that we don’t normally do when we’re speaking. It’s like we stop behaving like real people and start speaking like encyclopedias. If you’ve ever been guilty of trying to sound smart online, I am begging you to stop doing this. Never, ever, ever do it again.
The highest compliment you can get is that you are capable of simplifying things.
Create Content that Converts by Simplifying Your Message
Let me take you back to my yoga teacher days. I had a knack for teaching seniors and low-mobility yoga. There was another teacher at the studio who really looked down on me and dismissed me as a valid yoga teacher because I “just” taught seniors or low-mobility. Then she had to teach my yoga class one day, and the people were lost. They couldn’t do any of what she was doing. She was a one-woman show on the mat, contorting herself into all these poses that they couldn’t even begin to wrap their minds around, let alone their bodies. She completely lost them, and the class was horrible for them and for her.
And that’s how it is for your audience when you use complicated language in your posts. This is rampant in the coaching space. I call it coach speak, and it doesn’t land at all. It’s also rampant in Human Design spaces because Human Design can be complicated, right? I’ve been guilty of it myself on this podcast. We have all these funny words in Human Design, and we speak about our industry as if everyone else gets it. But they don’t always get it. If they don’t get it, they can’t hire us to work with them.
The simpler you can make things, the better. People will understand that you get them. They’ll see that you know what it feels like to be them. It’s harder to teach or simplify things than it is to do the advanced version. When I taught yoga, I had to take a lot of specialized training to understand how to make small movements matter. It’s really easy to teach people who already know the poses, but it’s more of an art to consider injuries, chronic conditions, and replaced body parts when you’re trying to simplify something for someone.
It’s not about dumbing it down; it’s about simplifying it. The better you understand something as a coach, teacher, or service provider, the easier it will be to simplify it. Sometimes we use big words and don’t make them understandable for our audience because we can’t grasp how to make it make sense for them. This means we might not fully understand it ourselves. It’s going to be harder for you at first to get the hang of speaking simply, but once you do, your content will flow more easily, and your engagement will absolutely go up.
How to Simplify your Message
I’m going to give you an exercise, and the good news is, by the end, you’ll have at least 10 more posts ready to go. Go back to your last 10 posts on social media, blog posts, or emails. Rewrite them as if you’re speaking to an eight-year-old who has no idea what you do.
The other piece of this is to speak about one thing per post. In my Content by Design course, every single post that new students write has about 12 posts in it. It’s too much for our audience. We make them work too hard to consume our content. So, you’ll likely get more than 10 posts out of this exercise.
If you find that a single post is talking about four things, separate that post into four pieces and create four posts with it. By doing this exercise alone, you’ll get a month’s worth of content that you already have sitting there, ready to be used better in your business.
Should you Use a Social Media Scheduler?
Here's a link to my favourite scheduler, SmarterQueue. With my affiliate link, you’ll get double the amount of free trial time. SmarterQueue is amazing. It will automatically pull either your top-performing posts or all your posts from Instagram. When I started using it, I pulled all my posts from Instagram back six months and loaded them into my drafts folder. Then, I could rework all these posts.
Instead of starting from scratch, which is painful for Generators and Manifesting Generators in Human Design, you can go into your drafts folder and see what you’re responding to today. SmarterQueue allows you to revamp each post to have different versions come out at different times. I might have three months of content scheduled out as a skeleton, giving me a baseline of posts in my business.
Having a skeleton of posts allows you to still be present even if you need to retreat. For you, if you don’t love social media or can’t be online all the time, that’s okay. By setting up a skeleton of posts, you can maintain a presence without being constantly active.
What is the Best Social Media Scheduler for Instagram?
Simplifying your message and using a scheduling system like SmarterQueue can make your content creation process much easier. Go back and do your homework—rewrite those last 10 posts, simplify them, and separate out the multiple ideas into individual posts. This will help you create a robust content plan that resonates with your audience and draws them to you.
Once you’ve signed up for SmarterQueue, if you want a 15-minute call for me to walk you through how mine looks, I’m happy to do that. Connect with me on Instagram or through the links below.
You can also grab the replay of the workshop I did on repurposing content for just $27.
It’s all about simplifying your message and making your content work harder for you.
So, go on and do your homework. Let me know how it goes and how many posts you get out of it.
Happy content creating!
Exercise: Review your last 10 pieces of content and rewrite them for an eight-year-old, ensuring each post is clear and focuses on a single concept.
SmarterQueue: Check out the SmarterQueue scheduler using Vickie's affiliate link for an extended free trial and consider joining a 15-minute walkthrough call.
Workshop: Purchase the $27 workshop replay to see content repurposing in action and gain further insights into simplifying your message.
Simplifying your message is not about dumbing down your content; it’s about making it accessible and understandable for your audience. Clear, concise communication helps potential clients quickly grasp what you do and why they should work with you, ultimately leading to better engagement and increased sales.