Communicating your WHY

One of the things that seems a little bit funny to us when we start to get out there and try and market for the first time as entrepreneurs is just how hard it is to really get people to notice what we’re trying to say.

There are so many businesses and products in the marketplace and it is so hard to get noticed.

And one of the most important ways is to craft communication that really stands out from everybody else’s. But this is quite a task. This is not an easy thing to do and every brand and business is trying to do it.

One of the secrets to making this work is to do what seems completely opposite to our nature as human beings and logical creatures. And that is to talk less about what we do and to talk more about why we do it.

Because what’s actually true is that when we make decisions, specifically decisions to purchase, we are doing that from an emotional place, not from a logical one. So a really important part of marketing is being able to understand the emotions, the feelings and the needs of our potential customers and being able to appeal to those feelings and needs rather than just their logical brain, which wants information about price and timing and location and that kind of thing. So today I want to explore this idea of leading with your WHY in your communications instead of leading with your wallet, which is what you sell.

Most of us, our default position when someone asks us what we do is to talk about what we sell. But actually you have a huge opportunity here to talk about why you do it or why it matters instead and get that person hooked and then you’ll have time to tell them what you do and what it costs a little bit later. But at that point they’d be desperate to work with you.

Being able to understand and communicate your WHY is a huge advantage of being a brand instead of just a business.

Businesses don’t bother with this nonsense, they just get to work. But brands, they understand just how important the emotional component is of marketing. And they put a lot of time and money in to being able to develop a quick instant bond based on language about why and based around stories and other elements of desire building, which we’re going to talk about in our next episode, that bring people to a place where they are not thinking, but feeling. And this is where the great decisions happen. This is where you get impulse purchases. This is where people are willing to spend more and where they are connecting with you and really becoming raving fans instead of just a one time customer who’s shopping based on price.

So let’s have a look at how to communicate this.

Why and how to start your conversations in a way that are gonna make people more interested in buying from you.

Let’s make some magic, shall we?

So let’s bring it back to basics.

A business exists for one reason and that is to make money. That’s what a business is for humans. We exist for lots of reasons. We want to connect and belong. We want to love, we want to do good work in the world. We have a lot of reasons to exist and guess what? Businesses are run by humans. If you combine those two things, the needs of the human to connect, to belong, to do good work and the needs of a business to make money, you have a brand.

A brand is half human, half business and it is about more than just making money and it’s also about more than just being pretty or doing good. It’s got to bit both, but one of the huge differentiators between how a business and a brand shows up in the world is that generally businesses only understand and work with what they sell and what the prices are and very, very factual information and brands.

Brands build relationships.

Brands communicate why they do what they do and they communicate why what they do matters, what the impact in the world that they’re having is and why you should care about what it is that they sell. And this, this is the magic stuff that makes us more likely to trust and repeatedly buy from brands then having to research and buy from businesses. So one of the key ways that this happens is brands are able to quickly and efficiently communicate why they do what they do instead of just what and that communication has to be crafted in advance and then repeated over and over again. And this is sort of counter-intuitive from what most of us want to do or we’ll instinctually do. Because what we want to do is just give you the facts, right?

The facts are easy, they’re straightforward, they’re easy to rattle off. But what is actually going to make someone make a purchasing decision is to connect emotionally. And that’s what communicating your why is all about.

So in a future episode, we are going to talk about brand cool. And in particular we’re going to talk about the chunks of language specifically that you will use to communicate your why. We’ll talk about your brand statement and your origin story, taglines and Hashtags, and the stuff in pieces that you’re are going to really actually need to craft and use to do this communicating.

But today I want to explore this topic from a slightly higher level and talk about the impact that it needs to have and where you’re going to find the right words and the right messages in order to connect with your customer and to have all of this brand why stuff turn into actual money.

So the key place where all of this begins is by really understanding why you do what you do and what makes you special.

What is it that you care about? What is your version of weird?

And we talked about that a little bit in the last episode. So if you haven’t watched or listened to that episode yet, make sure you go grab it. It’s all about exploring your weird. And I gave you some great exercises in there to kind of uncover some of this stuff that you can use in this communication. So go grab that.

But the next step is to actually turn some of that stuff into actual communication that you can use in the real world. And to do that, we have to kind of filter it from the raw state that it’s in, into one that makes sense for other people.

In order to do that, we need to make a connection between all of that stuff about what we care about and, and why it matters with the stuff that we sell. So that there is a straight line for the people that we’re communicating to about why our stuff matters and why they need to actually buy it.

So one of the things that we talked about in the last episode was being able to understand the crossover between your stuff, what you care about, your skills, resources, your weird and why you do what you do with what your customer wants and is willing to pay for.

And that is a critical connection between what you care about. And what is actually going to make you money. So the next step on from that is really being able to dive in to what people want and what they’re willing to spend money on and being able to dive into why, why do they want it?

Why are they willing to buy it? What do they want to get out of it? I briefly mentioned in the last episode that one of the most important decision making factors for most consumers is how is the world going to perceive me? We are all making decisions all the time based on what we want people to think about us. And if you can tap into that as a business and really help them understand how your product or service is going to increase the appeal of what the world thinks about them, you are onto something great. But that’s not the only option.

What we’re talking about here are psychographics. It’s the stuff that your ideal customer thinks and feels, and this is way more interesting than demographics when it comes to your actual communications.

So let me break this down a little bit. Demographics are age, income, location. They are the facts about your customers, where they are and how you’re going to target them in places like Facebook ads for example. Then you have psychographics which are their thoughts, their feelings, their values, the stuff that’s actually going to drive their decision making. So if we break this into pieces, we need to know their demographics so we can target them on Facebook with an ad. We need to know their age, where they’re located, maybe their zip code. Maybe you want to know their income level, maybe some of their interests so that we can create an audience.

For example, a Facebook ad, but when it comes to actually putting the copy or the images in that Facebook ad that’s going to attract them, that’s where it’s all about psychographics. That’s where it’s all about what are they thinking or feeling that you can connect with that is going to make them click or by, and this is where you want to steer away from.

Buy my thing, buy my thing, buy my thing too. Here’s what I believe. Or wouldn’t it be great if or are you feeling like x? That kind of language is the stuff that’s going to actually get people to stop and pay attention, especially if they feel like you totally, totally get them. When we feel understood, it’s extremely compelling and it makes us want to know more. We want to connect. We naturally want to connect with other human beings, so if they feel like there’s an opportunity here to connect with someone who fundamentally understands them and better yet can help people are intrigued and they will often hop over to your content, your email list, to your website or whatever it is you’re trying to drive them towards. Whereas if all you’re talking about is what you sell, buy my thing, buy my thing. Isn’t this a nice thing or talking about yourself?

I do this, I do this, I do this. It’s very, very easy to ignore. It’s, I don’t necessarily want to connect with you if you’re trying to sell to me, but I do want to connect with you if you’re a human being who has something in common with me. So when we look to create this communication, we want to always be thinking about from your customer’s standpoint, what’s in it for me? And being able to think about them first in terms of how to make them the hero or how to tap into their thoughts and feelings rather than just talking about ourselves.

That is going to be the critical difference between getting people excited and getting their attention versus getting them to simply ignore. And that is the huge connector between knowing and understanding your why and knowing and understanding your customer and having them actually buy from you.

And again, it’s really important that you understand both yourself and your customer because what you’re trying to show is a connection. You’re trying to show what you have in common, how much you understand them, which is what creates that trust and their desire to actually trust you into doing the calls to action.

You’re asking them for going to the website or making a purchase. So as I mentioned, you want to stay tuned for the next couple episodes we have coming up because I’m going to take this sort of big abstract concept and break it down into some really tangible bite sized chunks of actual communication that you can use to to have this impact that we’re talking about in different ways. We’re talking about a brand statement or tagline, your origin story tools that you can actually use in different places like your website or out loud and conversations that will allow you to do what I’m asking you to do here in a way that just works.

But for now, grab the PDF that is connected with this episode and it will help you really do some brainstorming about how to find that crossover between what your people want and are willing to pay for and what they’re feeling and thinking, which is the language that you’re going to want to use when you’re out there trying to communicate.

This is the stuff that is going to connect you to the money. If you want to have a chat about this, definitely hop over to our free Facebook group, where we can workshop this together. I’ll be there to answer your questions, and we have a great community going over there of entrepreneurs who want to build brands instead of just businesses, because we’re all trying to chase our freedom and fulfillment. So come join us.