“Your message is the first thing you need to shift if you have millions on your mind.” – Dr Darnyelle Jervey Harmon
Episode Summary
This episode is powered by the God Girls Making Millions
Messaging is how you get known and if you don’t get known, you won’t get found which means you can forget about getting paid. And as you craft your message, it must focus on a SPICE Problem – that’s right, the message you share in the marketplace must speak to the specific, pervasive, insurmountable, contrarian and expensive nature of the problem your pinnacle client currently has and is actively looking for a solution to. Originally shared in April of this year, this is one of our most popular episodes of season three, so you get to hear it again. Grab your pen and paper and let’s REWIND Messaging that Will Make You Millions. Listen in to discover:
- How to rise above the noise in the crowded marketplace
- The fastest way to get to the 67% of your market that you’re not reaching right now with your message
- The 7 c’s of million-dollar messaging
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Powerful Quotes from the Episode
- “If you’re not closing, it’s something you’re saying or not saying”
- If your message isn’t compelling and contrarian, you’re leaving millions on the table
- Your message determines if your marketing will convert
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I’m excited to be with you for this episode because here’s the thing. If you want to make a move to millions, you are going to have to change your message. Your ability to make the money that you want to make inside of your business hinges on your message.
What you are saying when you speak to potential clients, what you are posting when you are online, what’s in your email sequences, all of that is your message. If your messaging is missing the mark, it will mess with your millions. In this episode, I’m going to help you to the game because I don’t want that to be your story.
This mission is to help as many people as I can start to build companies that generate millions of dollars a year so that they can also create legacies that are going to leave millions of dollars to their children’s children, their children’s children’s children, and their children’s children’s children’s children. Can we get excited about what is possible when we think about legacy?
Your Legacy
Let’s keep it real. Your legacy is going to be tied to the message that you articulate now inside of your business. I’m excited that we are together because I want to share some of the most important things you need to know so that your message can make you millions. Let’s jump in. First and foremost, I have to remind you that there’s a lot of noise in the marketplace, tons and boatloads. We couldn’t possibly get all of the noise out of the way.
Rise Above The Noise
What we have to do instead is tweak your messaging. We have to level it up so that you can rise above the noise. Let me break it down for you. In 24 hours, 294 billion emails are sent, and 2 million blog posts are written, yet people still blog 864,000 hours of video are updated and uploaded to YouTube alone. That’s not counting Wistia, Vimeo, and some of the other video services that we don’t even know about yet.
If you’re not closing, it’s something you’re saying or not saying.
48 million Google searches are conducted, 2.4 million tweets are posted, 16.4 million pieces of content are shared on Facebook, and 95 million posts are made on Instagram. You probably already know this data is outdated because I didn’t mention TikTok, which is going on now. I know there are still some people Snapchatting, and whatever else has popped up. I didn’t mention Pinterest. My point is simply this, there’s a lot of noise out there, and most messaging only scratches the surface.
I want you to imagine looking at an iceberg if you have watched it on TV. If you have ever been to Alaska, take your breath away. That’s how beautiful these icebergs are. You probably have heard that only 5% to 10% of the beauty of the iceberg is visible to you. The majority of the iceberg, the most beautific part of the iceberg, is beneath the surface like most messaging only scratches the surface.
Like what you can see in an iceberg, and the most amazing part of the iceberg being beneath the surface, so does your message need to go beneath the surface. I like to call that SPICE messaging. If you have been rocking with me for a while on this show, you already know about SPICE but I’m going to break it down to all of our newbies as you might be getting to know us. It all hinges on your message.
Clear & Concise
Messaging is how you get known. You must get known before you will get found, and you must get known and found before you will get paid. It’s because millions are at stake, we’ve got to get this message thing right. I want you to get it right. If you want to position your business above the noise, you have to look at what you are saying and make sure you are saying the right things inside of your message. If you want to reach your most ideal clients, your message needs to do several things. Number one, it has to be clear. If you tell it to a fifth-grader, they get it. It has to be concise.
Sometimes you go on and on instead of getting right to a very succinct point. Do you know that you have 1.9 seconds to get their attention and 4.9 seconds to keep it? That’s a total of seven seconds. It’s not a lot of time, so you’ve got to be concise with your message. You have to be consistent. You should be saying the same things over and over and one more time again after that. It’s almost like being a broken record.
You guys remember records. I know they are a thing of the past. I was saying to my assistant, “They don’t even make iPods anymore.” Isn’t that crazy? You just have Apple Music. Anywho, you’ve got to be consistent like a broken record. If you remember, if I’m not dating you or dating myself, when I talk about records, if there were a scratch in the record, the same verse or part of the song would keep playing over and over. Your message needs to do the same thing.
Confident
Your message also needs to be confident. I need to hear between the words that you know that you are the bomb dot-com and you are very clear that not only do you understand my problem but you can resolve it. You can do better than I have been able to do on my own. That’s what a confident message looks, feels, and sounds like. Your message must also be compelling. It’s got to make me stop.
Contrarian
I’m dating myself again. If you remember Arsenio Hall, he used to have this segment, which was called Things That Make You Go Hmmm. That’s how compelling your message needs to be. I get a lot of flack for saying that a low six-figure business is small business poverty but here’s the thing about it. It’s compelling. It is also contrarian. I’m saying what other business coaches are not saying. I’m creating that emotional connection that is necessary to get the attention of my most ideal clients. You’ve got to get known before you can get found. If you don’t get known and found, you can’t get paid.
That message has to make them go, “Hmm.” It must also piss them off a little. That’s what I mean when I say, contrarian. You’ve got to ruffle some feathers. What I know is that consumers are programmed to notice what’s different. If you are only talking about the same thing that everybody else is talking about, you are not going to keep their attention if you ever get it at all. You’ve got to be contrarian.
Will It Work For You?
Lastly, your message and messaging have to answer two questions. Number one, WIWFM, “Will It Work For Me?” Number two, WIIFM, “What’s In It For Me?” If your message doesn’t make clear that it will work for them and what they have to gain by taking a step in the direction of you and your solution to their problem, you are not going to close them as a client.
If your message isn’t compelling and contrarian, you’re leaving millions on the table.
Convert
All clear, concise, consistent, confident, compelling, and contrarian messaging is also that you can do a final C, and that is to Convert. All of this is what’s going to determine your ability to get to the point to make millions. We know there are some other variables involved in that but it is mostly about your message and how your message hits them in the marketplace. If you want to convert, your message has to focus on a problem.
Problem Or Promise
There are different schools of thought about whether or not you should do problem-based marketing or promise-based marketing. I did my Master’s thesis on problem-based marketing versus promise-based marketing. I did it because I believe that people in pain are actively seeking a painkiller. If you can identify the pain and the symptoms they must be experiencing because of the pain, what I learned is that the average consumer will see you as the expert and the only person to be able to solve their problem.
Expertise, Experience, Emotion
It’s calling out the obvious, and because you identified and noticed it, it gives you an edge up on the other people in the room that it went completely by. We’ve got to focus on a problem. We’ve got to make sure that your messaging also educate them. This is how we demonstrate your expertise before you have the ability to solve their problem.
Additionally, your messaging has to give them an experience. It has to be experiential. When they read or hear the words, it has to transport them to a place they have never been before but thought about often. That’s how you will know your messaging is set up to convert. Lastly, your message has to get emotional.
I think about Whitney Houston, I get So Emotional. Every time I read messages dealing with the problems that I am experiencing in the various areas of my life, emotion-based marketing is what’s going to convert the most. You may or may not realize this but 93% of any sale is emotional. The last 7% is logical. Here’s what happens. We make an emotional connection and try to find a way to back it up with logic.
I know we have mostly women that read this show, although there are some good men out there reading. I’m going to make this for the girls. You are walking through the mall, minding your business, and you happen to pass a shoe store. You peer in and look at the display, and all of a sudden, you hear Ave Maria. It’s as if the heavens are beckoning to you. The shoes are the exact shoes. You have already fast-forwarded, and you see yourself wearing these shoes as you accept your Oscar, Tony Award or your Nobel Peace Prize.
You see yourself wearing these shoes when you tell your husband or wife that you have finally made it. You can see all of that in an instant. Without even realizing it, you have changed your course, and you are now heading into the store. You get into the store, and the salesperson is right there waiting to help you. Without even thinking, because you are so mesmerized emotionally, you ask them to bring you your size. If we are talking about me, it would be a size 9. They go and hurry to the back and bring the shoes back. They also bring a 9 and a half just in case you might need a little extra room.
You can’t wait to take the shoes out of the box, move all of the tissue, and stick your foot in immediately. The heavens open, and now Ave Maria has turned into the most beautiful aria. These shoes are yours, and you take a look at the price. You didn’t know the shoes were going to cost you $800. At this point, you have connected emotionally to them. Therefore, you have to have them. What do you do? You back up your emotional decision with the logic to justify making this purchase.
Here’s the thing. These shoes are not even an investment. They are just a purchase but what do you tell yourself? “I work hard every single day. It has been months or years since I treated myself. I deserve this.” You pull out your credit card, make the purchase, skip your way out of the store and continue to what you came into the mall for in the very first place. You might not be a shoe salesman, a person selling shoes. You have a product or a service that solves a real problem for your most ideal client. If you can connect with them emotionally, you will get their attention and investment that they will find the logic to back up to pursue.
Your Key To Millions
Your message is the key to your millions. I’m so clear on that. Here’s the other thing that is important that I share with you because I have wanted you to get a vision of what it looks like to have messaging that will make you millions. Every single one of us has our own market. Whatever industry you are in, it’s its own market. Inside of your contingency in that market, you have your own set of people who are either paying attention to everything you are doing or not paying you any attention at all. Here’s typically what it looks like.
Your message determines if your marketing will convert.
Three percent of your market loves your products and services. Anything you say, they are in. Seven percent of your market considers hiring you at the time that is most convenient for them. Thirty percent of your market are aware of you for the future. They know exactly where you are in the event that they decide they are ready to solve the problem that you solved. Thirty percent of your market has no idea who you are, and 30% are not interested in your products and services.
Here’s what most people do who don’t have their minds on millions and don’t have messaging that will easily make the millions. They focus all of their time, attention, and energy on the 3% that love everything they do and the 30% that want nothing to do with them. Here’s the thing. There’s a juicy 67% that your messaging has the ability to move so that they will make an investment decision in themselves through your product and service if you shift the way you show up in your messaging.
I remember very early in my small business career when I learned about what I call the Universal Law of Business. That law says, “Our goal is to get found by a group of people.” This is your audience of one who has the exact SPICE problem that you solve that are ready now to invest in a SPICE solution to that very problem. Before you can get your message out into the marketplace in a way that is going to cut through all of the noise that exists, you have to get clear about the SPICE problem that you solve and how that problem is wreaking havoc in the lives of your most ideal prospects.
This is where most people go wrong. Your messaging has to demonstrate both the problem and the solution in one fell swoop. If you create surface-level marketing messaging like most small business owners and entrepreneurs, as evidenced by the statistics, 65.22% don’t make more than $50,000 a year, 89.19% don’t make more than 6 figures a year, and 2.35% are making 7 figures a year. The numbers don’t lie. I’m going to go so far as to say it’s because of their messaging.
It all starts with the message. If you create surface-level marketing messages like most, and those messages do not cut through the noise and hit their prospects deeply, you will continue to be part of that 294 billion emails that are sent and 95 million posts that are placed on Instagram every single day. You will be the noise instead of rising above it.
Your Messaging Is Not For You
One last thing that I want to share with you now before I’m going to break down the SPICE mostly for those of you who are newbies because you probably haven’t heard me talk about SPICE before unless you have gone all the way back through the previous 100 episodes of the show. The other thing I want you to keep in mind is if you desire to make millions, and your marketing message is the first thing you want to tweak to get there, your messaging is not for you.
That means you don’t have to like it. That means you might not like it. That is perfectly okay. Another mistake I see business owners make all the time that stifles their ability to get to the million-dollar mark is because they are trying to make messaging that resonates with them. Check it. You are the after, and your ideal client is the before. If you are talking so that it makes sense to you, you are talking to the people who have already solved the problem. That isn’t going to make you more money.
Instead, remember journeying back to who you used to be before you’ve got to the other side and realize that life was better over there before you solved the problem and made the big change. That is what you need to do. Some of us feel like we are so far beyond who we used to be that we are missing the mark with our messaging, and it’s messing with our money and keeping us from the million-dollar mark.
It’s going to be important for you to realize it’s not about you, and you don’t have to like it. It’s about the people you want to attract, your audience of one. The specific people you are called to edify with your message are who you want to talk to. That’s what it has to be about. There are important questions to ask yourself to identify that audience of one.
You want to make sure you are using the words they would use to describe themselves and describing the struggle the way they would describe it so that it doesn’t go over their heads that pull them in deeper. Remember, it’s got to be compelling so that they get stopped dead in their tracks and need to make a pivot because they realize that they have just come into contact with a person who could change their life.
SPICE Problem
The way you do this with your message is by focusing on a SPICE problem. SPICE is an acronym. I created this acronym many moons ago. It stands for Specific and Substantive. That means you are not staying on the surface. You are going deep. The P stands for Pervasive and Persistent. It’s like a rash. If you have ever had a rash or a baby with a rash, it’s going to take a lot of ointment to get that bad boy to stop. The problem that your most ideal clients have is like a rash. The I stands for Immediate and Insurmountable, meaning they needed to have solved the problem. Until they get help, ideally help from you because you are the expert, they are not going to be able to solve the problem.
The C stands for Clear, Conscious, and Contrarian. Your ideal client needs to be clear and conscious, and your message needs to be contrarian so that it gets their attention because we are programmed to notice what’s different. The E stands for Expensive and Expansive. Expensive, meaning the problem is going to continue to cost them lots.
It’s going to continue to get bigger. It will continue to expand until you show up on the scene to solve the problem for them. Here’s the thing. This is the game-changer, and you are welcome because I’m really on this mission to help you get your message to millions. I want you to make millions, move millions, and leave millions. It all starts with making sure that you have a very clear message.
There are a few more things I want to share with you before I call it an episode. Once you get clear about that problem, you want to make sure that the problem you have identified hits all six of the categories that people are willing to invest their money into to get a solution. They are identity, purpose and legacy, health, wellness, and mental health, love, relationships and communication, money, career and business, time and life balance, and sex, happiness, and fulfillment. Those are the six categories. I want you to ask yourself, “How does this problem hit all six of those categories?” When you can clearly articulate to yourself that your problem does, you have a message that could make you millions. I will see you next time. Take care.
