Hey, it's Samantha Hartley of the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. This season we're talking about marketing, and today I wanted to share with you what I believe to be the most powerful word in marketing.

I was listening to a podcast this week which had Brene Brown as a guest on Alan Alda's podcast, and they were sharing the overlap between their work, her work on empathy and his on improv. And she was saying that in empathy, one of the key things is to take the focus off of ourselves and put it onto other that other person. And he shared that in improv, that's the whole way you do things, is that instead of trying to make yourself look good and anticipate the next moment and things like that, you put your focus on your partner and making your partner and the improv look good.

And I thought that was really interesting because this empathy, this putting the focus on the other enabled better communication and more effectiveness in the work that they were doing. And that is exactly what happens in marketing. When you take your focus off of yourself and you put it onto you, the other person, then you get incredible results. So I believe that you is the most powerful word in marketing. And not only that, I think it's one of the most powerful concepts, the idea of taking your focus off of yourself and putting it onto your audience and centering everything you do around the consumer or the client, the customer who is using your services or products.

So in this case, we're going to talk about our services and our clients and taking the focus off of ourselves and putting it onto them. In this case, you, so I'll share today the whole you as a world view, like turning your concept around of that. I'm going to share with you how to use you effectively in your copy, the text that you write and all of your marketing. And then I'm going to give you an example of when you don't use you. So those are the things I'll be taking you through today.

First Worldview, when I was at the Coca-Cola Company, their positioning statement, which I cannot divulge to you, I can tell you that it begins with the word “for” - for and then they name their target audience. And what's really beautiful about that is that all of this stuff about what we're doing comes down to who this is for. We're focusing not on the product, we're focusing not on the company, the focus is on you who have this experience. And I think that's a very powerful way for us to transform the things that we're doing so often we get stuck on like, you know, I have to make these numbers or I have to sell this much, I have to, you know, I have to write all this stuff, I have to be more visible, I have to do this stuff.

We've been in business this long, we are doing these things you know, how do we make this happen? The key to me is to take the focus off of yourself and put it onto that potential client. Who are they? What do they need? Where is the intersection between their challenges and where we come in with our solutions? That ‘you’ orientation is key and this I call it flipping the focus. So often I'll work with someone on their message and we just have to take all of this stuff, which is we or I oriented, we've been in business this long, here's what we do, here's our background, here's our process, all of these things about us. And in your initial messaging, you have to get the attention of your audience, so we have to take the focus off of us and put it onto them. And that has to be exhibited in the language we use, it has to speak to what they're interested in and their concerns.

In general, it's a much more empathetic view to take as a company and the story that Alan Alda told about, you know, doing improv and having to put his focus on a partner, it reminded me of one time I was going to give a speech and I remember there's this wonderful bridge that I crossed as I'm driving to my speech, there's this gorgeous view of mountains on one side and river on the other and I'm driving and I was just thinking, oh my gosh, I'm so nervous, oh my gosh, I'm so nervous. I have to speak for these people and I caught myself and I thought ok, one person in this room really needs to hear what I have to say today. So my job and my entire focus from now until I'm done with my speech is ensuring that I bring that message to that person.

And I didn't have time to worry anymore because I was thinking about how can I make this more valuable? How can I make my speech more relevant? I wonder who that person is but all my focus turned from me to “you.” And when people ask me, when clients ask me, you know, I'm nervous about this thing or I can't make this work or whatever, I'm always reminding them, take the focus off of yourself and put it onto the client. So shifting your focus from we to you or I to you is the first thing to do here “You” is powerful, not just as a word, but as an entire attitude for your company.

The second use here is in your copy, all the text, all the communications. I'm talking right now to you and there may be hundreds or thousands hopefully of people listening, but I am talking right to you one person. And the key to being effective in your marketing is to really get clear on who that one person is and to speak to her. So the first exercise that we do is identifying that avatar or that perfect client, that profile and then all of your communication is targeted to that one person and when we write copy or when I speak in a situation like this one, we speak to a single person. So I like to take all of this perfect client profile stuff and then have, you know, an avatar in mind, a perfect client, someone who kind of symbolizes all of them.

And in my case, I could use, for example, Martina, let's say she represents two of my perfect clients put together and they have these qualities and they have these kinds of businesses. And, you know, maybe one of them has children outside the home and maybe one of them has three dogs but the core commonalities are what I'm marketing to and what I'm speaking to, so when I say you and any of my marketing, I'm picturing or imagining Martina, this is important because so often I'll read something and I'll say, who's your perfect client? And they'll name them and I'll think, well, that's not who this was addressing, this is, you know, you've kind of gone off track with who you're writing to here.

Another thing that can happen is I'll see ‘you plural’. Well, you know one thing that you all know, it's fine if you're standing in front of an audience of numerous people that you're speaking to assume with numerous people on it, that's different than this video right here. On this video I'm speaking to one person and so I'm not using y'all or any other form of you plural, you all, I'm speaking to one that makes the marketing, I believe, more incisive and more specific and more personal, I believe when I hear someone was speaking to just one person, then to me I feel like they're speaking just to me. I don't know if you've ever gotten an email and it said something like, well we've heard from many of you who blah, blah, blah and I think whose many of me, I'm just one person reading your email right now. So especially in email, which I believe to be a very intimate communication format because you're right there in their inbox, which by the way is right there in their phone, right there in their hand. That's a time when you really need to speak, especially to one person.

So you want to have a ‘you’ orientation in general, you want to speak to you specifically in your text or your copy or any of the language when you're in this kind of a medium in a marketing medium, which may go to many, but in it you can speak to one person. There's a time when you don't want to use the word you, I believe, and that is in networking when you're one to one. I'll tell you why, if somebody says what do you do? And you say, well I work with people just like you who are, you know, needing to, you know, worried about their family's future, and they want to secure that financially by saying you and kind of doing that kind of motion, even if they're not literally doing it when they say just, you know, people like you who personally I get this feeling of like, who, me? Like why there's a kind of a confrontational energy or a forward leaning energy to me, that is first of all, it's too powerful, it's coming at someone too much, I wouldn't say it's aggressive or assertive, I would just say it's much, right? Extra, so it's more than we need in that kind of an interaction.

I've talked in creating the jaw dropping client getting messages before about how I want you to, especially when you're just meeting someone and they haven't said, how would you help me with that? If they're just saying, what do you do? Well, I work with and then you can say I work with this kind of client and I help them to get this kind of results. So, for example, I work with human resources directors who are struggling to retain their top talent, and I help them to build a pipeline and retain their best people. Even if the person in front of me is a human resources director, I don't say, well, human resources directors like you, because when I do that motion, do you feel that kind of comes at you? It just feels a little too much. I like to consider like I have a little PowerPoint presentation going on over my shoulder and it was indicated over there because over here is like, well, you know, this is the thing that I do. If I come at someone, it's a very different feeling.

I think that speaks to the general power of this word ‘you’, it has the ability to help us connect closely to someone and it also has the ability to like short out the system, like the too much electricity going on between us and the communication. So be judicious about your use of the word ‘you,' when writing I want you to use the word ‘you' in its singular form, profusely write the word ‘you’ a lot and in this kind of one to one networking situation, I want you to consider avoiding it unless someone says, well, how would you do that for me? And then you could say, well, in a situation like yours, what we might do is and then you can take it from there.

There are a lot of powerful words and marketing, new, sale, money, intention, but I still think that the most powerful word in marketing is ‘you’. So I want you to use it, use it judiciously, and I think it'll make your marketing even more effective. And with that, I'm wishing you a profitable and joyful consulting business. I'll see you next time.