Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer
Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer
The Power of Clear Communication in Digital Marketing with Ben Guttmann
Unlock the secrets to mastering clear communication in digital marketing with insights from my guest, Ben Gutmann, a former marketing agency owner and professor. Ben shares his journey from leading a successful agency to penning his book "Simply Put: Why Clear Messages Win and How to Design Them," emphasizing the profound impact of simplicity in messaging. Discover how clear and fluent messages not only resonate with audiences but also drive successful marketing campaigns.
Explore the art of crafting simple yet powerful messages, as we dissect the common traps of overcomplicating communication and the science behind why simplicity prevails. Ben and I discuss the pivotal role of focusing on benefits over features, using relatable examples like mint toothpaste to illustrate how emotional benefits can transform your marketing approach. Learn practical strategies to connect with your audience on a personal level, whether through creating customer avatars or tailoring messages across platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram. We’ll also touch on the impact of AI on messaging and the delicate balance between information and persuasion.
Whether you're crafting an advertisement, an email, or a proposal, this episode is packed with wisdom to help you communicate more effectively. So, tune in as we unravel the secrets behind clear and compelling communication with Ben Guttmann.
Guest Links
Learn More:
- Buy Digital Threads: https://nealschaffer.com/digitalthreads
- Buy Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth: https://nealschaffer.com/maximizinglinkedinforgrowth
- Join My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/
- Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmo
- Download My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/freebies/
- Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschaffer
- All My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com
Clear communication is the cornerstone of effective digital marketing, but do you know why simple messages outperform the rest? In this episode, I sit down with Ben Gutmann, former marketing agency owner, professor and author, to uncover the secrets behind mastering clear communication, From the psychology of fluency to designing simple, impactful messages. You'll learn actionable insights that can transform your marketing efforts. We'll also explore practical tips for leveraging AI and creating compelling customer avatars. So make sure you stay tuned to the next episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.
Speaker 2:Digital social media content, influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, vlogging, tiktok, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing there's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Schaefer is your digital marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach and this is Neil Schaefer.
Speaker 1:This is your digital marketing coach and this is Neil Schafer. Hey everybody, this is your digital marketing coach, neil Schafer. Welcome to episode number 387 of my podcast. Well, by the time you listen to this, the elections in the United States will all be over. Well, I expect that the contest will go on for probably at least a few days. We'll see what happens, but at least that is out of the way and hopefully we are at a peaceful existence, no matter who won the election. But anyway, you know, I'm not a fortune teller. I can't tell you what the future is going to be. It literally recording this the night before election day, so be interested to see what happens. All right, this is obviously not a political day, so be interested to see what happens. All right, this is obviously not a political podcast.
Speaker 1:So let's move on to the latest industry news. So there was a data study done of Gen Zers versus adults and what they look to influencers and creators for as information sources. Now it looked at a bunch of different categories media recommendations, health and wellness, news and current events, travel, lifestyle, fashion and beauty, sports, politics, finance, entrepreneurship, science, dating and relationships and with every single category this should not be any surprise, gen Z placed more trust and they seeked out information more often from influencers about these different categories than the general US adults did. Interestingly enough, when it came to media recommendations, 74% of Gen Zers seeked out recommendations from influencers and creators, versus only 49% of adults. Entrepreneurship hopefully they're listening to this podcast 40% of Gen Zers seek that information from influencers and creators, versus only 27% from adults. Obviously, things like fashion and beauty, dating and relationships these categories it was just way higher for Gen Z than US adults. So just another reminder of how much the younger the generation, the more they seem to trust influencers and creators. So some good data to take home to your management if you're trying to serve that market. Obviously, and the increasingly importance of collaborating with creators and working on influencer marketing in those companies targeting that demographic.
Speaker 1:So some more interesting data that came out Threads actually reached 275 million monthly active users. Now, to me it sounded like a lot. It was only launched in July of 2023. Obviously, it has a ways to go, because Instagram has way more users than that, but I think it is a healthy, active user base. Now, if you're curious, I did a little bit of research Things like Snapchat have 800 million monthly active users. Pinterest has more than 500 million monthly active users. X announced that they have over 600 million monthly active users. I highly doubt it. I guess it's possible, but I don't think that Threads 275 is nothing to laugh about. And, once again, I am on Threads every day and every day I see new brands and people send me follow requests, so I know it is growing in its user base and in its activity.
Speaker 1:So if you haven't been on Threads yet, I highly recommend you check it out. And, by the way, you can manage your Threadsnet account from your PC or desktop. It is not mobile only like Instagram has been, and you can even use tools like I use Social B to actually post to Threads like I do any other network. So there's really no reason. If you're posting to other networks, there's really no reason why you shouldn't be on Thread threads today, as we close 2024 very soon.
Speaker 1:And speaking of X, I mentioned this before you can block someone, but X just started their new policy they started to implement it of even if you block someone, they can still see your content. So if your posts are set to public, accounts you have blocked will be able to view them, but they will not be able to engage, which, to me, clearly defeats the whole purpose of a block. It's not really a block, it just means they can't engage with the content. But people block people for sometimes very serious reasons. So this is another reason why it said that 500,000 X users went to Blue Sky and I expect more and more users to leave. I just don't see how it's going to get any growth going forward, but I might be wrong. I am still on X, believe it or not. In October of 2024, I actually saw a slight increase in traffic from X. So maybe my people are still there from heck. So maybe my people are still there, but I do think, compared to other networks, it has lost a lot of its unique energy that it used to have because of its active user base.
Speaker 1:On other news, well, I couldn't give you any news updates without talking about AI, and TechCrunch had a really, really interesting article talking about how OpenAI released its chat GPT search to take on Google. Yet it still has a long way to go, meaning that specifically, it said, for very, very short searches. So if you use chat GPT and you type in like a long sentence or a paragraph, you ask for instructions, it's really good. Right, it can be Google. But on the flip side, when it comes to very, very short prompts like Celtic score these are examples actually in the post Celtic score cotton socks, library hours these are things that ChatGPD search just did not perform nearly well on traditional search engine like Google. And when we want to use something for more long tail searches or searches where we want to write complete sentences, where we might want to use something like ChatGPT search. So, nothing that I recommend you do immediately, but, once again, we need to understand the nuances and how the technologies differ and how we might use them in the future so that we can better optimize our sites for SEO. I think, whether it comes to chat GPT and chat GPT search or even voice search, just being able to respond to more long-term or long tail, I should say questions is a best practice in your SEO, and this could come in the form of headings, it could come in the form of FAQ schema, but I think it's going to be something that, increasingly, we need to do more of, if we have not already been doing that in our web content.
Speaker 1:All right, as for personal updates, well, it's now been six weeks and four weeks respectively, since maximizing LinkedIn for business growth and digital threads went on sale, and now I enter what I am calling the N plus one period. I think with any launch and I don't like to say launch, because I think they're all experiments I took a month by month approach. So three months before publication, I wanted to do this two months before this, one month before this, and I think, whether you're starting a new company, launching a new product, I think we should be taking the same approach. So obviously, the first month, you know, n plus zero, or the first month of publication, it kept me really, really busy and I'm finally able to sort of make more time to strategize on other parts of my business, develop other content, and now the promotion shifts into a new phase. So, excited for what the future will bring, continue to get great reviews and if you are someone that has read either of those books, I would be really honored if you took a minute to review it and literally send me the screenshot to my email or anywhere on social. My email, by the way, is neilneilschafercom and I would love to thank you for that.
Speaker 1:On other personal updates, I am now seriously considering the importance of email and it is in my SCS framework and digital threads. It is equally important as it is to search and social. Considering how important it is, I am seriously right now in a test to see if I want to migrate from a traditional email marketing platform ie ConvertKit to a newsletter-based platform ie Beehive and it's been a really, really interesting time I've spent in Beehive and really understanding not only its differences but re-imagining email content, web content, building relationships, monetizing content. It's really sparked a lot of imagination and creativity and I can't wait to share this with you on a new episode in the not so distant future. I do plan over the next few days to make my final decision and I'm really curious if any of you are using a Beehive or a Substack. I would love to hear from you and hear your experiences and, in fact, if you're a Beehive user and I end up using Beehive, we and hear your experiences and, in fact, if you're a Beehive user and I end up using Beehive, we can recommend each other's newsletters, which would be pretty cool. So feel free to reach out to me. We'd love to hear from you.
Speaker 1:And now I want to move on to today's interview. So I have Ben Gutman. He is the author of a fantastic book called Simply Put why Clear Messages Win and how to Design them. He is a former agency owner professor at Baruch University in New York City. Really great guy. We had a really fantastic conversation, which also included the topic of artificial intelligence, as you can imagine. So without further ado, here's my interview with Ben Gutmann.
Speaker 2:You're listening to your digital marketing coach. This is Neil Schaefer, listening to your digital marketing coach.
Speaker 1:This is Neil Schaefer. Hey everybody, this is Neil Schaefer. Welcome to another live stream episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. Today we're going to be talking about communication. I like to say that content is the currency of social media, really of digital media, but within the content. How are we communicating that content? How are we getting our message over to the other person?
Speaker 1:When I was a freshman in high school, my English professor, mr Poe who has no relation to Edgar Allen Poe but who I still fondly remember to this day always said and he would use the S word it Schaefer, vigorous writing is concise, and as I write books, prepare speeches, I always try to pare things down and I realized that the fewer words that I can use, the more powerful and the easier it is to really convey what I want to talk about. So we're going to get really deep into this with the pro at this, mr Ben Gutman. He's actually the author of this book called Simply Put, and I'd say prepare for the launch of my own digital threads behind me. I've been on a number of book award sites looking to actually apply for a book award for that book, and I see that Simply Put has already won gazillion awards.
Speaker 1:Ben used to have his own marketing agency, so he's going to be right at home here with all the listeners of your Digital Marketing Coach. And he also is a professor of digital marketing at Baruch College in New York. So always an honor to have a fellow professor, a fellow author, fellow marketer on the podcast. So, ben, welcome to the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.
Speaker 3:Thanks so much for having me, neil Great, to be here. What a wonderful introduction.
Speaker 1:I'm really excited for this conversation, so let's just get right into it. Digital marketing agency. Teaching digital marketing at Brute College. You mentioned that you're doing various gigs across the country consulting what have you and I assume it's all around this topic of communicating clearly, Simply put, why clear messages win and how to design them. So, Ben, how did you get to this point where you decided to write a book on clear messaging?
Speaker 3:Oh yeah. So I mean you mentioned a lot of the kind of biographical outlines there, but basically right out of college I ended up starting a marketing agency. I was a big student government nerd when I was there and I had a professor who was, you know, thankfully somebody who you know was kind of in the model for what I ended up doing. He ran a marketing agency and he ended up teaching part-time also at Baruch College where I was going as a student, and he basically comes up to me one day after class and says I know you're looking to maybe start your own thing at some point. We need some help with digital, maybe we can figure something out. And so that was back in like 2011.
Speaker 3:And shortly after that I piled in my old like 1994 Honda Accord, drove to their office, slapped our logo on the wall, grabbed a couple of friends and we ran that agency for 10 years. We started with a local ice cream shop and the local camera shop and bit by bit we ended up working our way to the NFL and Isle of New York and Comcast all these really wonderful clients that we've had over the years. It's been a ton of fun and about two years ago, a little bit more than that. Now we decided to sell it. We said you know it was a great run, it was a great opportunity of it. Now we decided to sell it. We said you know it was a great run, it was a great opportunity. And you know we were looking at kind of the next stage of everything. Luckily was able to, you know, find a couple of deals that we're very happy with and all of our employees had jobs and all of our clients had homes. That was really important. But sold that and kind of went out and started to focus on a few other things, including teaching, including writing and doing some independent consulting work in the last few years.
Speaker 3:But what's interesting is when you're doing that, when you're in the kind of trenches of running the agency, you don't have the time as much to think about why the things that you're doing work or you know the kind of the psychology behind them, the you know the science behind what you're doing. You kind of are just there and you're doing it and you're kind of going through straightforward. But when you have the moment to step back a little bit, I didn't have to do as much day to day of managing the team and dealing with all of the different projects we had, I kept kind of thinking about well, what is it that makes something work in terms of marketing context, in terms of communication context? And this also, coincidentally, is the same question that was coming up again and again for my students, which is how do you, what's the difference between a message that works and a message that doesn't right? And it turns out that the answer, appropriately, is simple.
Speaker 3:You know that the messages, the communicators that are effective are simple, they're easily understood. The communicators that are effective are simple, they're easily understood, they're easily perceived and they're easily acted upon. And the ones that aren't tend to be the ones that miss. The advertisements that fall flat, the emails that get ignored, the proposals that lose All of those things are often the ones that are the more complicated, harder to understand ones. Now, that's not a particularly revelatory fact, but what is interesting is that the why behind that is surprisingly deep and the how is also pretty difficult. So that's what simply put why clear messages win and how to design them. My book that's what it ended up being about was looking into why that's the case and then what we can do to be better at communicating in a marketing context and beyond.
Speaker 1:So I'm assuming and thank you for that story that really was concise and wrapped up 15 years in a few minutes. Thank you for that. So I think that drew a very clear path. So as you began writing your book then I'm assuming that maybe you did some research, some interviews, to try to create more of like a formula, understand patterns. I'm assuming maybe this goes into things like human psychology. I think of Dr Gialdini's book Influence. What were some of the directions that your research pulled you in as you were trying to better understand and find some data to support why simple messages win in marketing?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you mentioned Influence by Robert Gialdini. I actually I read that book when I was in college and it became one of the most foundational books for everything I did in terms of working and teaching and beyond that, and that was one of the books I looked at as a model when I was putting this together. The reason I respect that book and Dr Cialdini's work so much is that it's science-based, there is research behind it. It's not just a bunch of war stories, it's not just kind of like. You know, here's a cool case study and then we're going to extrapolate a thousand times from it. It is well what, what is the mechanisms going on in our head that's causing us to behave in a certain way and to make certain decisions? And you know a little bit of like peeling back the the curtain in terms of like when you're writing a book. You know what, what terms of like when you're writing a book. You know what, what, what goes for your head on this. You know a little bit. Actually, one step further.
Speaker 3:My background is part of our business. At our previous agency we had a division where we did a lot of work with public, with authors and publishers, and we helped them. You know, kind of sell their books and go through and so, and you know, I ended up reading a lot of books as part of that in terms of business books, health books, everything else. There's basically three categories that business books fall into. You have the ones that are the executives and founders that often end up being kind of war stories A lot of times. You have the ones that are the journalists, and they often end up being really good stories, but maybe a little bit light on what the content is. And then you have the ones by academics that end up being really kind of dense in terms of what the content is, but also dense in terms of what the writing is right. So the ones that end up being really good books a lot of times, the ones that can pull the best from all three of those, and that's what I tried to do in terms of the style of writing this and the act of writing this book. But going back to what the meat of the research is is, when I was able to take a look at this, I was able to really narrow in on this one mechanism that ends up being the, the differentiator between something being effective and something not being as effective.
Speaker 3:And that's this idea of fluency. Right? And so we know the word fluency. Right, you can be fluent in English or Spanish or Mandarin. Where we're fluent, things are easy. Right, you can be fluent in chess or cheese or checkers or whatever. It is like the, what we're interested in, what we're fluent in, it just comes like flowing. It flows. That's actually the Latin root of the word fluence, the word flow, and that's what it feels like.
Speaker 3:But if you ask cognitive scientists about the word fluency, they're going to say this describes how easy is it for you to take something from out in the world, stick it in your head and make sense of it? Right, how easy is for you to see the advertisement, to read the advertisement and to understand what it means? And that is in a whole host of different cat arenas, that is, some associated with all sorts of positive stuff. When something is more fluent, we are more likely to like it, we are more likely to buy it and we are more likely to trust it All the things that we want from a marketing perspective and from just general communication perspective. When something's less fluent, the opposite's true. The inverse happens we don't like it, we don't trust it and we don't buy it. All the stuff that we don't want to happen. We don't trust it and we don't buy it. All the stuff that we don't want to happen.
Speaker 3:So that's what we're trying to get to here is the state of fluency, and what the problem is is that, while we want something to be fluent, when we're receiving communication, when we are sending communication, we are the advertiser, the speaker, the person writing that email. We are pulled in the opposite direction. We are pulled towards complicated. There's internal incentives, like our additive bias and complexity bias, that push us to add, add, add instead of cut things down, make things simpler. And there's external factors in terms of what the demands of the marketplace are. Right, the boss wants to have more of their stuff in there. Your resume needs to have these extra bullets, the news cycle needs these things, and all of a sudden you end up at this point where the receiver wants something over here. Sender can only really get something over here, and then everything else. Everything kind of falls into the middle.
Speaker 1:Gotcha. So that you know, I'm just thinking like TikTok and you want to post something that's very well received on TikTok, but unless you yourself understand getting back to the language of fluency unless you really understand what user expectations are on that network, when you create something, it's based on your own biases, the way you think things are going to be well-received, without really putting yourself in the feet of that user, which requires, like you, reading a lot of business books, time spent on the platform in order to gain that fluency. So what you say makes a heck of a lot of sense. So, with all that in mind, you know, and not to give away everything from your book of how to design simple messages, because we want everyone to go out and buy the book, you know what? What is one or two principle things that we should understand about how to design the simple message.
Speaker 1:And I think, ben, you know, maybe at the end we could talk a little bit about generative AI and messaging, something I'm sure you get asked a lot about, because I find whenever I go to a chat GPT asking for messaging, it is always a long message. It is the opposite of something that is very, very simple and obviously for other reasons. I don't think it's good messaging. It's very robotic, not human, not emotional, what have you? But taking that aside, how do we simple messages that that get through to our target?
Speaker 3:audience. Yeah, absolutely yeah, I'm glad. I'm glad we'll talk about some ai stuff later, because I've been I've been doing a lot of work adjacent to that recently. But getting back to how do we bridge that gap and I look at this as a design problem, because that's actually my functional background is in design I say, well, how do we, how do we deal with the constraints, how do we deal with the resources we have? And I look at this for the lens of five principles. The science will tell us that there's kind of five main principles about how we can be more fluent and, ultimately, simpler.
Speaker 3:And this is not a checklist, it's not a step-by-step plan. It is in five kind of values that the more we think about them, the better we're going to be at getting there. And so the first one is beneficial. What does it matter to the receiver? What's in it for them? You know, this is something that is kind of sales 101, right, we buy benefits, we don't buy features. But it's also one of those things that we forget all the time when we're doing any sort of communication.
Speaker 3:The second one is focused. Are you trying to say one thing or multiple things at once? Is this one idea you're trying to communicate or is it three ideas in a trench coat? The third is salient. Does your message stand out from the noise? And talk a little bit about Tik TOK a moment ago. Tik TOK, instagram, twitter, all these different platforms endless scroll for the past 15 years or so, but endless growth. How do we do something that scroll stopping? That's often what we're looking at when we talk about salience. Salience is something that's contrasting, that stands out, that's noticeable. We have lots and lots of noise in the environment. How do we stand out from it? We only notice the contrast, by the way.
Speaker 3:The fourth one is empathetic. Are you speaking in a language that the audience understands? Are you meeting them where they are? Is this the language that they literally understand? Is this where they are emotionally? Is this where they are in terms of their motivations? All of these things are important for us to be able to actually connect with the audience using speaking in the same language in all contexts.
Speaker 3:And then, finally, it's minimal. Have you cut out everything that isn't important and left only what is and what we're talking about? Minimal is not about necessarily the fewest number of words, the fewest number of paragraphs or pages or megabytes or whatever, it is, the least amount of friction, the least amount of friction. If you look from a user experience perspective, what you measure is friction. You're saying, okay, well, you put friction between the things you know in front of the thing you don't want somebody to do. You remove friction from the thing that you want somebody to do. But we're talking about minimals. We're trying to reduce the amount of friction that there is between what you're trying to communicate and what the receiver is able to understand.
Speaker 1:So, ben, when you put together or when you work with teams or based on your recommendations, if I'm a marketer and I'm putting together an email sequence, I'm putting up a Facebook ad caption, I'm putting up a social media marketing caption, whatever it is, are you saying that? Would your recommendation be, with every piece of content, before you approve it, to go through the list of is it beneficial, is it focused, is it salient, is it empathetic and is it minimal? Would you recommend that process and I'm assuming at first, it is very hard to decipher and, just like anything, it's muscle memory the more you do, the better you get at it. But would that be your recommendation of designing a simple message, of really taking it through? And obviously, if you want to know more about each one of those five things, you should be buying the book. Simply put, but is that sort of the process that you do that you recommend your clients?
Speaker 3:I would say in a way, yes, Right, and I don't like to frame it as like you kind of go for each step and think of it. But if you, you know, you take these and you almost jot them on a post-it note and stick it on the side of your monitor, you stick it up on the bulletin board, you just drill it into your brain and it becomes something that you think about as part of it. Not everything has to be all of these all the time, but the more you activate on these values, the better you're going to be in terms of achieving that state of fluency. It's not necessarily that there's a hard word count here. It's not that there's something where you have to say this magic piece.
Speaker 3:There are lots of little tactics and tools I have in the book which help us kind of work on each one of these values. But I would say the answer is a sort of yes on that, which is if you have these as something that you think about that as you're going through, if it's an email, if it's a piece of the social calendar, if it's your pitch deck and you're thinking is this beneficial? Is this something that's empathetic? Is it minimal? All the stuff that you want to make sure you hit. That's going to be the most important thing. It's kind of that foundational mindset shift instead of just saying there's a magic word here or there.
Speaker 1:And if you were to develop a mini GPT for that, I think you could become very profitable. But anyway, I'm sure we'll talk about it.
Speaker 3:Funny enough, and I'll spoil a bit later a friend of mine who is also an author has a podcast that was on his show and he was saying that he took my book, he took part of the lessons from it and he fed it into. He made a GPT model of it and he did an A-B test between one email that he sent and another email that he sent, and the email had a 40% better click-through rate for the one that was simply putified, I guess, versus the one that's not and so unscientific sample. But it was something that made me very proud.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Get a hundred of those samples, then it becomes a little bit more scientific. But that's very, very cool. I can see how that happens. So you know, we talk about the message, but the core of marketing, whether we like it or not, is also persuasion, right, so now we know how to simplify Well and it's not a simple process, but obviously the concept of simplifying our message. How then do we come more of a persuasive communicator? Now that we have and I'm assuming, the simple message is going to help us become more persuasive what else can we do to really increase that level of persuasion in our messaging?
Speaker 3:So you hit it on the nail. I mean, when I look at what the goals of communication are, they're in the marketing or leadership context. They're often basically two which persuasion and information. So is this persuasive, is this informational? And I think this is something that's obviously impactful for both. If you are in a marketing context, you're doing a lot more persuasive communication and it's very important.
Speaker 3:I'll dive in a little bit on the first one. Beneficial, because I lied actually before when I said this isn't in a particular order. Beneficial first for a reason because I think it's the most important one and it's the most overlooked one. It's what does it matter to the receiver? Right, if you were ever in sales, you're in marketing copywriting you often hear the first week of training people buy benefits, they don't buy features. We don't buy the thing, we buy what the thing does for us. This is something that is so often forgotten by people who are doing marketing copy, by people who are, who are giving a speech, a sales pitch, because the benefits aren't always visible. We crack open our five senses and we look at something and we say well, it has this color, it has this many battery milliamps, it has this many pixels on the screen. It comes in these different finishes and we say these are all these great things go, you know, buy it Right. But that's not why we, that's not why we buy things Right. You know, there's a great sentence that I tell my students every semester. Well, frankly, I'll tell them, if you don't remember anything else from this course, or even this entire degree, if you remember this, you're going to be in a better situation than most other people who are marketing, which is it's not for me. By the way, it's from theodore levin, who taught at harvard in the 60s. It's people don't want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole. Right, people don't want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole. Brilliant, we don't want the thing, we want the thing does for us, right. And there's a lot of other ways to look at this. You know, nobody wants a mousetrap, they want dead mice. Right, we buy through a product to a solution, right, we want the state that we are in because we have that product, because we have that service. We don't necessarily want that thing always. And just by asking yourself a simple question appropriately, you can start to get from the features to the benefits. You can start to get through there. And that question is so what? So what? Let me give you an example.
Speaker 3:The one I love to talk about is mint toothpaste. So mint flavor on your toothpaste, that is a feature. Right, you can crack open your senses, you can smell it. You can smell it, you can taste it, you can see the color for it, but that's not what we're buying. We don't really want mint flavor on our toothpastes. Well, so what about that? Well, that means I have fresh breath, right, okay? Well, that starts to be something that jives a little bit more of what I actually want.
Speaker 3:I don't want mint toothpaste, I want fresh breath, and we can call that the functional benefit. Right, that's the first level. That's a change in the real world that you get because of the feature. But that's not where we have to stop. We have to go two more times. So we say fresh breath.
Speaker 3:So what?
Speaker 3:Okay?
Speaker 3:Well, what does that mean?
Speaker 3:That means that I'm going to have a more successful date tonight, no-transcript.
Speaker 3:And we can all of a sudden we've just asking a very simple question three times get from a feature that exists in the real world mint flavor in your toothpaste to something as deep as love and belonging needs.
Speaker 3:And then we can stand there we kind of hit bedrock, basically, and we can turn around and say, okay, well, we want to message accordingly, going outwards, and every situation is going to be different. You want to maybe invest a little bit more in features or functional benefit, emotional benefit. But if we're able to stand in that framework and say, okay, well, the reason people are actually doing this is for love and belonging, that kind of sets our direction, and then we can start talking about the emotional benefit, maybe in our headline or the first part of our website or whatever it is, and then we talk about functional benefits and then we talk about the features. If you layer things that way, it starts to connect a lot deeper in terms of how we actually make our decisions it starts to connect a lot deeper in terms of how we actually make our decisions.
Speaker 1:And as you were speaking, I'm thinking of that Holiday Inn Express TV commercial that it wasn't about the fact that the room was cheaper, quiet, what have you. It was the fact that the next day, whoever stayed in there is going to do great in their business meeting because they stayed at that hotel. Just getting to that one of those cores, it wasn't like going out on a date and those physiological needs and I'm glad you brought up Maslow's hierarchy of needs because it comes up in almost every conversation on this podcast. But I thought that's where you're going, so simplified message, persuasive message, and that's a really, really easy concept. So what the repetition to sort of unpeel those layers of benefits?
Speaker 1:One other thing that I want to talk about, since you work with a lot of authors, and it's funny because I have people reaching out to me saying, neil, I want to sell this product or this course and they don't have an audience. And it's like, dude, you have to build an audience. It's like if I come out with a new ebook and I send it to my mailing list, I'm going to get incredible response. Put it up on a website, I'm still going to get a response. Do a Facebook cold ad and I'll get some response, but those people are off my list a month later. So it's this cold, warm, hot audience.
Speaker 1:So how does one go about better connecting with their audiences through messaging? Everybody here probably has a social media profile at least a LinkedIn profile, if not Instagram, facebook and they want to be able and obviously, if you're a company, they want to be able to build not just a bigger audience, but, I would argue that, more likely to act upon when you need that help, when you have a product, people that are going to be out there to support you or your company. So how do we go about connecting with our audience through everything you've been talking about today?
Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely, and I mean to be to be frank. I don't have a million people in my audience. I have a small audience, but there's the old adage, though, which is it's better to have 1000 people who will buy everything you do than to have, you know, a million people that don't really give a hoot. Amen is probably empathy. So many people. They think that I'm writing an email that's going out to a hundred thousand people or whatever it is, and they think that they're speaking to a hundred thousand people, but they're really not. They're speaking to one person a hundred thousand different times. Every bit of communication you've ever had has been one-to-one, right. Crowds don't really exist, right? It doesn't matter to the. You know, we saw at the political conventions last couple of weeks, people getting up on stage in front of thousands of people in the audience and millions of people at home. Every single person there was still in their own minds making their determination, their decision about how they felt, about a certain you know, political speech or sales pitch or whatever it is, Every commercial that goes to the Superbowl. A hundred million people still. Ultimately, it's 100 million people in their own heads that are making that decision, that are hearing that commercial and deciding if they want to buy it, which it X, Y, Z or not.
Speaker 3:And so that, I think, is one of the biggest pitfalls people fall into is speaking to a crowd and not an individual person. Just by kind of changing your perspective on that, you're going to start to produce content. That's going to be a lot better if it's in your emails or on your website. You're going to give better speeches. You're going to give better sales pitches when you're speaking to one person and you can go through and do a whole big marketing research thing and get customer avatars and personas, and that certainly is worthwhile for a lot of companies. Know the customer avatars and personas, and that certainly is worthwhile for a lot of companies. But at the very least, you can take out a little post-it note and draw a stick figure on it Again, slap it to the other side of your monitor and say, oh, this is who my email's for right, and I'm just writing to this person. Every single time I write that newsletter, every single time I write that blog post, every single time I send an ad out into the universe, it's to this person.
Speaker 1:Ben, thank you and it's advice. I've heard a lot. If you're writing a book, think of that one person. So do you recommend? I mean, the challenge is that companies often have multiple target audiences, multiple avatars, but do you recommend, at a minimum, that we all create an avatar of who we think our perfect follower, our perfect potential client, perfect partner? Do you recommend that we all sort of draw that up and be as specific as possible and then put that in front of our monitor? Is that like an exercise you would recommend we all go through?
Speaker 3:That's a great exercise. You can go very deep on this stuff, right. You can say this is the person's name and this is the photo composite of them and they're wearing this clothing, they listen to this music. But you can also just say you know who my audience is? It's this one friend that I have, like that's the prototype of it. It's the.
Speaker 3:It's me in the past, right, like I'll tell you, my own writing for this is I wrote the book that I wanted to read 10 years prior, right, and so that's who I was talking to.
Speaker 3:Was okay, the, the 20year-old me that was starting an agency. What book would I have really valued at that time in terms of I didn't really know my stuff, I didn't know what I was doing as much, and that helped me frame every single thing that I wanted to do was okay. Well, this is somebody who's interested in this topic but maybe doesn't always know everything they want to know, and that helps shape everything else that you do. You can go and you can go out and hire. I have friends that run marketing research firms and they will do that persona work for a lot of money for very big companies. If you can do it, it's often worth it right If you can go out and pay a bunch of money to get your targeting 100% right. But with a lot of things there's a pretty steep kind of benefits curve here where you can do a little bit of work and you can go a lot further than if you did no work.
Speaker 1:So, as we near the end of our conversation and thank you for all, this has been amazing advice. You know, generative AI is something that I tend to ask all my guests and I think that everybody listening is probably using ai, whether they know it or not. They've been using it on a daily basis, but I think we're more proactively going to chat, gpt or whatever, claude, whatever tool you use having conversations, and how much that content is being published in various formats, as is is up to debate, obviously, but is there any advice that you can give? I don't know how much, I assume, because it's communication, it's going to apply to AI as well, but I just want to hear your thoughts on best practices or no, this isn't going to work with AI, or? I think you already gave an example of how putting your formula into creating a mini GPT, creating custom prompts, can get you a better response. So really curious to hear, from a communicator's perspective, your thoughts on generative AI and how it can be useful and in what way.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, obviously it's the most kind of buzzworthy thing in our field, and really every field, for the past couple of years, for the last year or so. It's funny, I just put together a South by Southwest panel proposal called Enough with the Delving right, and we have a few really interesting folks who have worked in AI and in marketing otherwise, because the word delve is a great example here. You could use the word delve like humans have used it for a long time. But if you look at this statistical kind of probability of the use of the word delve and how much it's used over the last year and a half, it has shot up, right. If you look at the numbers in terms of academic papers, if you look at in terms of blog post, you know google trends, all these, everything the word delve has been, has been, you know, skyrocketing. If you look at the word innovative, or you know revolutionary or paradigms, all these different kind of buzzy words. If you look at studies of the kind of like meta studies of other academic papers that have been submitted to journals over the last two years, the use of these words has skyrocketed because chachi, pt and bar, everybody, they love those words.
Speaker 3:Yeah, those are the type of words that when you are a, you know like a 11th grader, like trying to pad out your essay because you know you have to hit some limit. Those are the kind of words you drop in. Those are also the kind of words that ChatGPT and other AIs love to drop in, and so what you come up with is a lot of these platforms. They give you a lot of fluff. Give you a lot of fluff. They don't really know and it comes back to the fundamental piece of this year they don't really know how, like the truth behind the words that they're they're they're giving you large language models, give you words that look like the right answer. That's, that's the a hundred percent, how these things work right now. They don't fundamentally understand, like, the truth behind the facts that they're spitting out. They just took all the written words that they've been able to gobble up and put them into a blender and said, okay, when somebody's asking for thing X a recipe for key lime pie, I'm going to. This is what a recipe tends to look like for key lime pie. It doesn't understand that this is actually too much sugar, too much flour, whatever it is. They just says these are the words that tend to be on a recipe for key lime pie. So that doesn't mean that there's no use cases for AI.
Speaker 3:But I think that at this current moment there tends to be a little bit of over-enthusiasm for saying this can write everything for me, this can replace everything for me, because what you get is just kind of a big word salad a lot of times for it. What it can help you with is to improve the thing that you've already written. That is actually the best use case right now, for it is if you take something that you wrote and if it's a blog post or an email and you say how can we make this simpler? And there's a tool in the book I talk about called the thousand most common words. And basically, if you, if you look at how English is distributed, the thousand most common words account for about 75 percent of the language as it's used. And so if you go and you test something against the thousand most common words and actually I wrote a, put together a little piece of software to test this If you go to bengutmancom, gutman's, two Ts and two Ns, slash the word thousand, just thousand, you'll see a little tool there. You can take your blog post or whatever, paste it in and press a button and it will highlight in red all the different words that are not part of the thousand most commonly used words. And so you can use this as a way to kind of reach kind of lowest you know, lowest common denominator of of language that most people understand without going too crazy.
Speaker 3:Going back to this thing, the thousand I've seen people who have read my book have told me that they take, they take their blog posts, they put it into chat, gpt and they say, hey, rewrite this blog post using the thousand most common words plus up to 20 additional words.
Speaker 3:Right, because if you just limit yourself to the thousand, you know you start. For instance, the word thousand is not one of them, right? So it's the 10 hundred most common words. So you do. You do have some kind of limitations which ended up being very restrictive, so you don't want to write everything that way. But if you use that as the baseline and then you say, hey, here's permission to use another 20 words or 50 words or whatever it is, you get to a point where it's a lot easier for people to read and understand across all sorts of different audiences, instead of just being kind of the specialized, narrow focus that your thing might have been from before and thus that's how you avoid the word salad, and it sounds more human and connects because it's based on those common words and and is that something that ChatGPT understands?
Speaker 1:Do you like send a link to? Hey, here's a list of the thousand most common words. Please use these, and I'm going to define these as that Is that sort of the way it would work in a prompt.
Speaker 3:I'm sure that there are prompt engineers that can include some of that stuff. Some people I know that have just kind of just asked ChatGPT for that, the tool that I used. I was able to find a pretty good source of data that I've linked to on there. Depending on who you ask, the list changes right. You know there's lots of data sources and you can get kind of into the weeds on this. It's like the Oxford English Corpus, yada yada.
Speaker 3:But the general principle still holds true, which is that the thousand most commonly used words are representative of about 75% of the languages we speak. You can go very far just using them. In fact, the guy named Randall Monroe, who's an author web comic, wrote a whole book called Thing Explainer where he explains things like nuclear bombs and the color spectrum and all sorts of other stuff. Using the thousand most common words Ends up being kind of humorous in many ways, but also a very easy to understand explainer of very complicated subjects. So that's a good stress test for people to use and that's one of the tools we talked about in the book.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting and in fact I'm sure you've had the same experience where you know if you're going to write a book, write it for a seventh grader. There are blog tools that say hey, you're. You know, the Fleischman reading level is like 11th grade. Dumb it down. And in some ways I think maybe that that's what they mean to use this language that's most commonly used and I studied Mandarin Chinese. They have a concept of 2000 common Chinese characters. If you can understand these, then you'll be able to read the newspaper, be fluent and it's great that English. So for me that's really really easy to understand and it's great to know I'd never heard of that concept, great to know that English has this.
Speaker 1:And I guess you know I always like to think the more that I use chat, gpt, the more and I also play the drums I almost feel like a studio session and I'm riffing with another musician and if they're not a songwriter, I would never say, hey, write me up a song. But it's like hey, here's a really good drum rhythm that I have. Can you match it with a bass in this style or a combination of these styles, and continue to riff. And I think that what you're saying is start with something you already have, and I've had that same experience where it's been really good. Or, hey, I listened to a webinar that Jasper, who are one of the leaders in enterprise marketing, ai. They were saying one of the ways that they use their own product is hey, here's a blog post I have targeting these keywords. Here are the top search results. What am I missing? How can I better flesh out the content or add sections, delete sections? And once again, it's based off of something you already have. So that was a great confirmation that hopefully. I know you weren't listening for AI advice, but hopefully you listened to the end and got that advice.
Speaker 1:Ben, this has been amazing. Obviously, people should stop what they're doing right now and go and buy this book. Simply put, why clear messages win, how to design them. It's a really great looking book, great feel, and it's not, as the message should be, simple. It's not like a three 400 page book. It's a quick, concise read, very actionable, very tactical. I think you all get a lot out of it, ben. Any last thoughts and where can people go? You already said bengutmancom slash thousand. Anywhere else we can send our listeners to find out more about you.
Speaker 3:I really appreciate it. This has been a ton of fun, Neil. Yeah, please go grab the book. Simply Put why Clear Messages Win and how to Design them. Amazon, Barnes, Noble everywhere books are sold. And if you want more, check me out. Bengutmancom, B-E-N-G-U-T-T-M-A-N-N, and there's blogs, there's emails, there's different resources, there's a thousand word checker there. And I'll give you one more thing too.
Speaker 3:I have a kind of new consulting offering that I'm working on that's related to this, that I call it Fluency Shop. If you go to fluencyshopcom, it is a offering where we package up your messaging in the form of a website. Website is the biggest single place that you communicate for most brands, and so I like to talk about it as it's your message. We have a website on the side right, and so you know, most time these days, the technical part is the easy part, but it's the communication part that's hard, and so a lot of people have been asking, you know, through the book here, how can we kind of work together on something, and this is something that I'm excited to put out there. So love to hear your thoughts on it. If it's interesting, love to team up on something, but otherwise, you know. Thanks again, Neil, for having me. This has been a ton of fun.
Speaker 1:Very cool, love the innovative service offering. And Ben, thanks again, and we will definitely be keeping in touch and see how all this evolves. All right, hope you enjoyed that interview. Ben is a really great guy and I highly recommend you check out his book Once again. His book is called Simply Put and it has, as you can imagine, a very simplistic cover, which is very appropriate.
Speaker 1:And I forgot to mention before the interview. I was talking about this potential move from ConvertKit to Beehive and there's a quote. Now it's been attributed to Albert Einstein and actually, more recently they're saying maybe it shouldn't be attributed to him but nevertheless the quote is doing the same thing every day and expecting different results is the definition of insanity, or something along those lines. And it's really at some point, if we're doing something in our marketing and we don't feel it's growing, we need to do something different. We need to push ourself out of our comfort zone and, to me, pushing myself out of a traditional email marketing solution to a more innovative and I think Beehive and Substack really are innovative in their own way innovative new solution to try to jumpstart new growth is something we should all be doing in our marketing, and really in our marketing and really in our lives. So that is another thing that really pushed me to want to do this. You know, self-publishing two books recently was another move to push me out of my comfort zone. Do something new, because I hadn't self-published since 2011. A lot of things have changed since then. Launching a Shopify store and I'm still in the midst of developing it is a similar thing of just pushing myself out there and a TikTok shop, by the way, is not that far behind. So I think this is the type of marketing that we should be engaging in. We should always be challenging ourselves and our organizations to do new things, because through new things we have growth and through new things we have growth and through new things we can innovate. And through new things and new initiatives we can see everything that we've been doing very, very crystal clear. It's almost like when you leave whatever country you're listening to this podcast in. Whenever you leave your country, you like on a trip right, or like when I studied abroad in Beijing, china you then, once you're outside of your country, you can look back at what it means to be a citizen of your country and your lifestyle and everything a lot clearer. You can look at your work situation and understand it a lot clearer when you're in a different foreign environment. At least, that's what I've always thought. So these are things that, like I said, we should regularly be doing, and I look at my work on a quarter to quarter basisquarter basis, on a quarter-to-quarter basis. Am I pushing forward on all these initiatives? Am I doing new initiatives right? Am I continuing to push the ball forward on all of those strategic areas where I need to be pushing it forward. So these are just reminders from your digital marketing coach, from my experience, and I would love to hear from you If you have any feedback on this podcast, if you want to recommend guests that you'd like me to interview, or if you think that I should shake up the way I record it.
Speaker 1:I'd love to hear from you. Let's have a two-way conversation. My email once again is neil at neilschafercom. I am the real Neil, so it is spelled N-E-A-L, and obviously you can find me on the socials and DM me wherever you like. But hey, that's it for another what I hope you thought was an exciting episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. This is Neil Schafer, your digital marketing coach, signing off.
Speaker 2:You've been listening to your Digital Marketing Coach. Questions, comments, requests, links go to podcastneilschafercom. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilschafercom to tap into the 400 plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.