No disrespect to anyone who loves vanilla but it has no place in your marketing messaging. When it comes to the all important role of differentiating your business in the market place, your message has to be chocolate all the way. What exactly do I mean by that?
As I shared in my recent webinar: Hiding in Plain Sight: The Real Secret Behind Creating a 6 figure+ (or even 7 figure!) Business as a Solo Expert, your messaging is the single most important thing that determines your success in getting new prospects.

Some Vanilla Messaging

Vanilla messaging is the kind of messaging that’s generic, unclear, unfocused, vague and confusing. Here are some examples (apologies to anyone who might be offended by this exercise, it’s done with the best of intentions to educate and to inform)

• “…equips individuals and groups to move forward and achieve their it!” (coach)
• “We are passionate about sharing stories that matter” (PR firm)
• “…Consulting Group helps senior executives manage the strategy, organizational, and infrastructure transformations required to become effective leaders (consulting co.)

The results of vanilla messaging are really simple-lack of new business, very slow growth and general frustration for both you and your prospect.

Why Vanilla Messaging Happens

When businesses haven’t found their specific specialty niche, they have no way to explain what they do to themselves, their families or to new prospects. They use umbrella words like ‘Leadership Expert’ that can mean a million different things. These businesses have no idea how to select which facet of the multitude of pain points that their prospects are bleeding from. In fact, most businesses don’t even know what they don’t know, namely that they SHOULD pick such a single-minded facet to lead their marketing message with. For example, when my client who started off as an Executive Coach repositioned her messaging as a Decision Making Coach for Leaders of Manufacturing companies, her whole business shifted. CEOs started taking her calls and showing up at her Roundtables.

Some Chocolate that Converts

Here are some examples of really clear, differentiated messaging that I’ve helped create over the years:

• Creating fearless decision makers (decision making leader expert)
• More clients, more money, more free time (ezine VA)
• The Repositioning Expert helps B2B service providers get keep and a decision maker’s attention (me)
• Sell Without Regrets (Business Exit Strategy Consultant)

Chocolate Messaging cuts through the competitive clutter and talks about one specific facet of a pain point. The messaging is rooted in the pain and specifically showcases words that prospects use to describe the pain.

The Chocolate Formula

If you’d like to go from Vanilla to Chocolate, you have to do the work to figure out the following:

• What is the biggest pain in your natural networks that you can help with?
• What specific facet (out of a several options) is most in demand and would pay you what you’d like to make?
• Which group that self-gathers (either industries or interest groups self-organize) needs this help the most?
• What words are they using to describe this facet of this pain?
• Once you find all this out, you’re well on your way to creating your Chocolate Messaging.

 
So if your company is growing slower than you’d like, think about your messaging. Is it Vanilla or Chocolate?
Want to reposition your messaging to grow your leads? Follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, watch me on YouTube or connect with me on LinkedIn –and let’s talk