I used to blame the marketing industry, generally, for overcomplicating things. For acting as if marketing is about technology, detailed trend reporting, and intense programmatic analysis.
But now I see that that’s actually a reaction to the buyer.
Because when I tell entrepreneurs, expert advisors, and even other marketers to just... write something true about their business and improve on it later, they tend to look at me like I’m missing something.
Like I’m not aware that marketing is actually extremely difficult, technical, and confusing.
That it requires heightening the truth, or painting a facade on top of their real business to make it more appealing.
But you know what that facade does? It doesn’t highlight their uniqueness, it hides it.
It hides what’s valuable under a varnish of what looks popular, common, or best practice. It’s a cloak of camouflage.
And best practices, in marketing, are usually just the classic mistakes. Because marketing is about standing out, being different, setting yourself apart.
It’s not about blending in, or making a big splash all at once.
The clients I’ve worked with, over the years, who’ve been most successful are the ones who kept at it.
How? By telling the truth.
Sounds easy, right?
Or does it?
When I tell people that all their marketing needs to do, in Ogilvy’s classic phrase, is, “tell the truth and make it interesting,” I again get that strange look.
Surely it’s not that simple! Surely you need eight different dashboards, tools, and trackers.
Surely you need to embellish, just a little bit.
It can’t be that easy.
But let me reassure you that it’s not that easy. I said it was simple, not easy.
It’s hard to tell the truth and make it interesting.
But it reminds me of the old Hemingway quote:
“Write the truest sentence that you know.”
He said, “If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.”
That’s the secret, at its core: Just write down something true and interesting about your business and publish it.
And if what’s currently true about your business isn’t interesting, or isn’t valuable enough, you don’t embellish it.
You don’t fake it. You make it.
One of advertising’s most important pioneers, John E. Powers, put it this way:
“The first thing one must do to succeed in advertising is to have the attention of the reader. That means to be interesting. The next thing is to stick to the truth, and that means rectifying whatever’s wrong in the merchant’s business. If the truth isn’t tellable, fix it so it is. That is about all there is to it.”
That’s about all there is to it: Tell the truth, make it interesting. And if the truth isn’t interesting, fix it until it is.
So what does that look like? In our Marketing Rangefinder parlance, if someone needs your business but doesn’t know about you yet, you just... tell them what you do in an interesting, attention-getting way.
Once they know about you, you reveal how you do what you do in an interesting way, showing them that your values and theirs overlap. So your best clients get extra value by working with you.
And if what you do is exactly the same as another business? Well, that’s not really a marketing question, is it?
That’s a business challenge, one that a facade, an embellishment, or a mistruth wouldn’t fix, it would only make it worse. So telling the truth forces you to fix what’s broken.
The truth is, basically, a marketing shortcut.
It doesn’t just save you time, it saves you energy and wasted effort. Because embellishment, detailed attribution analytics, and advertising technology stacks rarely help.
Over the decades, I’ve seen them do far more to hold marketers back than move them forward. I’ve seen them lead marketers and advisors in endless circles, rather than give them direction.
So use the truth about what you do, how you do it, and who you do it for as your shortcut to saying why it matters, and why it’s valuable.
Good marketing seeks to, as George Lakoff put it in his book on conceptual models, “be characterized as a correspondence between the understanding of the sentence and the understanding of the situation.”
“Meaningless structures cannot give meaning to meaningless symbols.”
Clever words and fancy design don’t make up for lack of truth, or lack of meaning.
But real truth, real meaning, can make up for almost anything else.
So when I say that all you need to do is write down the truest sentence you know, I mean it.
Because it’s the truth.
Kelford Inc. are content marketers for expert advisors. If you’re struggling with what to say and where to say it to attract your ideal clients, we’ll show you the way.