Podcast Transcript:
This is the number one reason your messaging doesn’t work. Hey, there, I’m Jillian Kendrick and welcome to the Momentum Marketing Podcast. I’m a mama, a wife, an entrepreneur and a three time best selling co-author. In each episode, you’ll get real world practical advice and strategies and maybe a parenting tip or two along the way. If you’re ready to create a business that supports your family and your lifestyle, then you’re in the right place.
Hey, welcome back to the podcast. It’s Jillian. I am so glad that you’re here joining me. Whether you’re watching in the morning, afternoon, evening, or night time. Is evening or night, the same thing? No, evening there is like dinner after dinner night is like night, 10 o’clock, 2 a.m. night. Anyway, slight tangent there.
Speaking of nights, we have had some really rough nights in our household lately. I think our son is going through a growth spurt and just all of like the 3.5 year old changes and everything. On top of the fact, the poor baby is sick right now, I think he just has the common cold. He’s had it for a few days. If you have any great cold remedies that work for three year olds. Please email me. Please let me know you can send a message to me on Instagram @automatedmama or email hello@jilliankendrick.com. I would love to know some good remedies for three year olds. It’s so crazy as an adult. I know that when my throat feels a certain way, or when my sinuses feel a certain way. I know that I know how to fix that. I know how to take care of those things. When I feel a certain way, I feel the scratch in my nose, or the scratch in my throat, and I know what will fix it for me. But doing that for my son is so different because number one, he doesn’t have the vocabulary to quite explain I have an itchy or my throat is sore or I have congestion or stuff like that. And even if he did have this miraculous vocabulary, you really can’t give a lot of medicine to toddlers and three year olds. In fact, a lot of the medicine that I was looking at said if they’re under four, or if they’re under six, or if they’re a certain age, or if they’re a certain weight, don’t give them XYZ. Obviously, listen to your doctor. Don’t take medical advice from me, but it’s really hard when you get woken up at one and two in the morning, every single night over and over and over again.
Anyhow, I wanna talk about your messaging. I wanna explain to you the number one thing that I see all business owners missing out on and messing up on. I want to share with you the number one thing that I see business owners and marketers completely getting wrong and because you’re here with me, because you’re listening to this podcast, you’re going to find out exactly what that is and you’re going to do it better.
I haven’t said this in a while, but go ahead and hit the subscribe button or the plus button wherever you get your podcast. If it’s Apple Music, Spotify, somewhere else, there’s dozens of them. But please click, subscribe, please click the plus button and leave me a review even if it’s just a couple of stars, I would love four or five. But whatever you’re feeling, I would love a couple of reviews out there for the podcast. If you’re enjoying this and you’ve gotten value out of it, please, please rate the podcast. It would mean so much to me.
So here’s the number one thing that I see business owners and marketers getting wrong when it comes to your messaging. If you’ve been in business for any length of time, if you’ve been doing marketing for any length of time, you know that above all else, your messaging, the words that you say, the way that you say them and the manner in which you say them really lay the groundwork for everything else in your business. It determines who you attract, whether or not they’re ready to buy, whether or not they’re going to keep following you. And some of that, let’s just be honest, you don’t really have a whole lot of control over. If you say something and you’re being your authentic self or you’re doing your best or you’re honestly describing a product or a solution or a program, then you’ve done your job. Even if the person receiving that message doesn’t get it or they don’t see the value. And honestly, that’s a good thing because our messaging needs to simultaneously attract the right people and repel the wrong people. If you explain what you do for a living or you describe your product or service and people say, well, I don’t get it. I don’t understand. I don’t think somebody’s going to pay for that. Just know that they’re probably not your people or you need to do a little bit of work on your messaging.
But the number one thing that I see marketers and business owners getting wrong when it comes to messaging is timing. It’s not timing in terms of comedic timing or the time frame in which you send your emails or the time of day that somebody sees your Facebook ads or all of those nuanced things, have their place within your marketing, within your messaging within your business. Sure. But when I’m talking about timing. I’m talking about the lead, the customer, the client, the person on the other side of the message. I’m talking about, what’s their timing? Where are they, what are they doing? What’s happening in their life, life and in their business? What are they struggling with? What are they going through? What are they feeling? What is their timing? Because from the business owner perspective, we want people to buy when we want them to buy. I want to show you my ad, I want you to watch my training. I want you to go through my course and do absolutely everything that I tell you to and then get an amazing result. That’s what I want. But it’s not about what I want as the business owner, as the marketer. It’s about the timing of the lead and the customer and the client and where are they? So let me give you an example.
The very first online course that I ever created was actually a wedding planning course. It was called mybestwedding.com. I don’t own that URL anymore. And it was a step by step, wedding planning course. I would do wedding Wednesdays. I would go on Facebook live every single week and answer questions and give it advice and talk about wedding planning. And I felt like I had the authority to do this because I had just planned my wedding and gone through that process and knew what other brides were going through or would go through. And it was really easy to target people in Facebook, because all I had to do was select that they were female. They lived in the United States or Canada and they were engaged. That was my market. It was super easy. But what I didn’t realize at the time and this is why for a myriad of other reasons. But one of the bigger reasons that the course had a hard time being sold, I sold a few of them. I actually did. Ok. But the number one reason that the course had a hard time being sold was that I wasn’t always able to capture the attention of the person when they first got engaged. Because when you’re first engaged, you are super excited and everything’s dreamy and you’re living in the clouds and everything’s perfect and you have no budget shit and your in-laws don’t hate you yet. All of these things, you had fights with your maid of honor and, you know, the suit shrank at the dry cleaner, all the things. So you haven’t had any of the issues to, like, feel the pain of going through the process of planning a wedding to then seek out help. Because if you haven’t felt and gone through the pain and the frustration of whatever the circumstances that you’re in, in life, then you haven’t gotten to a place where you are actively seeking help. You haven’t gotten to a place where you understand that you need help or that you have a problem. So now you need to go find that solution. And especially for people who are engaged and they’re super excited and it’s all new and happy. And if your heads in the clouds, that’s a really difficult place to then sell somebody on a course or program or a difficult place to just sell them on seeking help in general.
The difficulty with the wedding planning course was that when it comes to wedding planning, people usually plan a wedding for like a year, nine months to a year I think is the average. It could have changed in the last several years since I’ve looked up that statistic. And so the reality for my program was that I was only ever going to have people in my program for about a year or so however long that they were engaged and then they would leave that program because they wedding would be done. And I don’t think anybody goes into a marriage wanting to get a divorce and then plan another wedding someday. Maybe they knew, I don’t know, no judgment, I would think or hope that most people who get married do so wanting to have that person for forever and not really thinking about planning another wedding.
So I had a difficult job of selling someone a solution when they didn’t know that they had a problem and selling them a solution that would only last for a definitive amount of time. And there really wasn’t any hope of longevity and long term value that I could offer. And so for me, that business was just not a great long term solution. And I know that there are people that are really passionate about wedding planning. There are people that are way better at it than I am, or was. And that’s great. I’m not saying that it’s a bad business model at all. I’m saying that I saw the holes and I experienced the challenges as I was trying to sell that and it just wasn’t good for me.
And that’s where I think a lot of people mess up on the timing. They don’t understand the timing that is happening on the other side. What’s the narrative that’s going through your prospect or your lead or your client or customer’s head? What are they going through? What are they experiencing? What’s front of mind? What’s keeping them up at night? What bothers them to the point that they’re willing to spend money to solve this issue?
And the next thing that you need to think about when it comes specifically to your messaging is which stage of the problem or which stage of the process are they in? So for instance, in the wedding planning course example, it would be a very bad idea for me to market my course and say, hey, let me help you plan your wedding. And market that to people who were at the end of the wedding planning stage. They’ve already gone through all of the things. They’ve already done all of the work. They don’t need my help in that sense.
And when you’re thinking about the timing of your messaging to your audience, you can think of it in four stages. So first, there’s awareness, they need to know that they have a problem, period. And that’s where the wedding planning thing was really difficult for me because people early on in the wedding planning stage don’t realize that it’s difficult and that there’s a lot of work to be done potentially. So very first, they need to know that they have a problem period. Second, they need to know that that problem is solvable. Third, they need to know that you can fix that problem for them. That you’re the expert. That you’ve been in their shoes, you’ve gone through what they’re going through, you have a solution. And then fourth, the solution to their problem is either product or service X. So they need to know that they have a problem. They need to know the problem is solvable. They need to know that you are the person and who will solve that problem for them. Secondary to that is they need to trust that you are going to solve that problem for them. And then fourth, they need to know that your product or service is the thing that’s going to solve that problem.
So whatever step they’re at in that journey or in that evolution of the buying process, that is where you want to target your marketing. So first, they need to know hat they have a problem. So that’s like an educational process. Second, they need to know what their problem is. So that’s acceptance or comfort or empathy. Them understanding that other people have gone through this or that you, as the expert, have gone through this. And you know what they’re going through. Next, you need to introduce yourself, you as the expert, your company as the expert solution. And they need to be able to build trust within you or build trust within your company or your brand or your sales person. And last, they need to know that your service or product is the thing that’s going to get them to where they want to be.
So four stages. Every single time I see marketing, every single time I read messages or see billboards or this or that, I always think about those four stages. I think about, OK, who are they trying to attract? And at what point in that evolution are they looking for people? And then all of your messaging falls into one of those four categories so that you can attract the right people based on where they’re at.
The four stages come down to this awareness, acceptance, trust, and action. Awareness, acceptance, trust, action. They need to know, they have a problem. They need to understand that that problem is solvable. They don’t just have to live with it for the rest of their life. They need to know that you’re the expert or your company is the expert that’s going to help them and they need to know that your product or service is the right one for them. Then all of your messaging, all of the marketing, all of the apps, all of your emails, everything that you do, all of your posts, all of your content falls under one of those categories and gets marketed or sent to the right person based on the stage of that evolution that they’re in.
This is one of the big key concepts that I teach within List Builder Blueprint™. If you haven’t watched the master class yet, go to jilliankendrick.com/masterclass and you can grab a free copy of my training. It’s gorgeous. It’s like 38 minutes long. It won’t take up your entire day. It is so good. You guys check it out. If you’re interested in List Builder Blueprint™, you can get more information there through the master class and I’ll see you on the next episode. Have a great day.
Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of the Momentum Marketing Podcast. If listening to this has brought you value, improved your life, or given you insight on how you can build your own momentum, then please share this with a friend. And if you’re ready to grow your business on autopilot, then I want to help you get there easier and faster with a free car copy of my Entrepreneur Survival Kit. Just leave a review of this podcast wherever you’re listening right now. Hopefully it’s a five star review and you love it. Then screenshot the review and email the screenshot to hello@jilliankendrick.com. Once we confirm the review, we’ll send you a copy of the survival kit totally free. Thank you so much for joining me and I’ll see you on the next episode. All content is written and recorded by Jillian Kendrick. Copyright 2023. All rights reserved.
The Momentum Marketing Podcast
By Jillian Kendrick
Episode: # 34
Topic: #1 Messaging Mistake
Contact: hello@jilliankendrick.com
Follow IG: instagram.com/automatedmama
https://jilliankendrick.com/masterclass/
