If you’re in a crowded, noisy room and someone whispers your name fifty times, you’d be no more likely to hear them than if they’d only whispered once.
The cumulative amount of sound they made may have been extensive, but because it was so dispersed it didn’t amount to enough to be heard.
Weird analogy, I know, but stick with me for a second.
It’s possible to do a lot of marketing and get no results. And it’s even likely to happen if you spread your efforts too thinly.
The cumulative amount of energy and money and time may have been plenty, but if it’s too scattered to get attention in any individual place, the outcome can still be nil.
That’s because we are inherently, instinctively protective of our attention.
If we noticed everything there is to be noticed we’d never get anything done except noticing stuff. So, at a certain point, we need to have a line, a barrier, a protective layer of scrutiny and skepticism to keep us from being distracted from literally everything at all times.
A lot of marketing language refers to this as a problem. Perhaps as the problem.
We are told to “break through the noise” (heck, I’ve said that myself), and we use terms like “the battle for attention.”
So, to win that battle, marketing merely gets louder and louder, more and more exaggerated.
In my opinion, that way of thinking just dehumanizes the customer, the client, the consumer, the audience. It teaches us to see their attention as ours to acquire through any means necessary.
Rather than to earn through the means that matter most to them.
Because the prospect is not our enemy. Their skepticism is not a villain. And their attention is not ours to own.
If we actually know what we’re doing and can actually help, we want the same thing as our prospect:
For them to make the right choice about who to work with.
So, for me, that means the job is not to break through that credibility bar, it is to sail over it.
“There is only one way under high heaven to get anybody to do anything. Did you ever stop to think of that? Yes, just one way. And that is by making the other person want to do it. Remember, there is no other way.”
— Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People
How do we do that?
It starts by acknowledging that, as Rory Sutherland points out in Alchemy, “‘Advertising’ comes from the latin ‘anima advertere,’ or ‘to direct attention.’”
So if we want to gain and direct attention, we need to be noticed by being noticeable.
Remember what David Ogilvy said: “People screen out a lot of commercials because they open with something dull. You know that great things are about to happen, but the viewer doesn’t. She will never know; she has gone to the bathroom.”
That doesn’t mean we’re noisy or obnoxious or controversial for its own sake, as if being not dull is the only objective. That’s necessary but not sufficient.
We need to get noticed by talking about what our prospect cares about in places and with sufficient volume that they can notice us.
“The fastest way to be ignored by anyone,” as Josh Kaufman wrote in The Personal MBA, “is to start talking about something they don’t care about.”
It’s true that we don’t necessarily decide what we care about, and we certainly don’t decide what our prospects do. What we can do, though, is notice what they’re noticing.
We can attend to where they place their attention.
I love the expression that “beauty is where the eye rests,” as Joseph Brodsky wrote in Watermark. Because where our audience or prospect’s attention rests tells us a great deal about where to rest our own.
In fact, it tells us where to concentrate to build credibility.
“I do believe that we have this ability to sense care. ... But I think you might understand it more if I said you sense carelessness. You know carelessness. And so I think it’s reasonable to believe that you also know care and you sense care.”
— Jony Ive
People can sense when they’re cared about, when their priorities are being considered.
And we can discover their priorities by merely paying attention to what they pay attention to.
Norbert Wiener, in his book Cybernetics, talks about finding ourselves in the wilderness with someone with whom we share no ability to communicate via language.
Even without any codes or signals, we could learn a lot from our companion.
“All I need to do is to be alert to those moments where he shows signs of emotion or interest. ... It will not be long before I discover the things which seem important to him, not because he has communicated them to me by language, but because I myself have observed them.”
When we pay attention to what our audience, clients, or prospects are paying attention to, we learn so much about what matters to them.
In our own business, we noticed that our prospects and clients kept referring to their problem as “not knowing what to say.” Like not knowing what to put on their website, or in their ad, or on social media, or when someone says, “What do you do?”
They expressed it as a dearth of language, not of strategy or some other service.
Shortly after this realization, we stopped referring to what we do as “marketing strategy,” because while lack of strategy leads to a lack of words, it’s the lack of words that they’re noticing.
Being able to then focus all our attention on solving that problem creates an enormous economy of resources.
We don’t have to have a giant list of services on our website, nor page after page of testimonials or case studies.
No, we demonstrate our capacity to generate attention-getting content by doing that for ourselves.
In a sense, we have concentrated our efforts, creating a type of pressure on the mind of the prospect, leaving an impression of credibility.
Now, instead of having to justify or explain the value of strategy, we demonstrate our ability to create compelling content by doing that. And we concentrate it in the places they tend to go for this type of advice, like LinkedIn, newsletters, workshops, and webinars.
Our clients now often come to us by saying, “Your content worked on me, so can you help me make content that will work on my ideal clients?”
That’s the type of credibility concentration creates.
“Our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people.”
— Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
Ultimately, the impression we leave behind when someone interacts with our marketing could be referred to as our brand, in the same way that the impression we leave behind after talking to someone constitutes our social personality.
The question is, does our brand or personality create a positive and compounding impression or a negative or neutralized one?
Frankly, are we focusing enough to get noticed and are we focused on what our prospects are paying attention to?
Because, for most businesses, that’s not the case.
Richard P. Rumelt, in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, wrote that “Most complex organizations don’t focus their resources. Instead, they pursue multiple goals at once, not concentrating enough resources to achieve a breakthrough in any of them.”
If our focus is so diffuse that we don’t concentrate sufficient resources in any particular place, it’s like whispering from across a noisy room.
It doesn’t matter how many times you do it, your voice wasn’t concentrated enough to be heard.
And, worse, it’s like whispering something our audience doesn’t care about in the first place.
My favourite Claude C. Hopkins aphorism, that “you cannot chop a tree in two by hitting every time in a different place,” is perhaps the clearest expression of that mistake.
“This is the essence of the focusing illusion, which can be described in a single sentence: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”
— Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
If we’re not thought of when our prospect is thinking about what we do, that’s a problem. Because we’ll never be more important in their minds than in that moment.
Which means they need to first notice us by making sure we’re in the right places, at the right times, when they can. That begins by paying attention to where they go when they need the type of support, service, or product we provide.
Then, we need to concentrate our offering, our messages, our content such that we build credibility. Because we’re obviously focused on what our prospect actually cares about.
The more we focus, and the more we focus on what they notice most, the more credibility we build.
But if we spread our messages or our marketing too thinly, across too many media or even moments in time, we won’t reach the minimum viable volume we need to be noticed.
And if we’re merely noticed by not being dull, but too scattered or inconsistent to build credibility, getting attention doesn’t matter.
As I like to remind people, it’s possible to spend endless energy, time, and money on marketing that doesn’t do anything for you in return.
But it’s also possible to spend less than you think on marketing that makes an impression.
As long as it’s concentrated on what our prospects care about most, and concentrated in a sufficient volume we can be noticed at all.
Kelford Inc. are content-first marketers for expert advisors. If you need more focus to build credibility with your prospects, we can show you how.