“Simplicity has never been more powerful,” reads a subhead on Jeff Hoffman’s Inc. article.
Boy, is he right.
Market research firms estimate that we see about 5,000 ads daily. That doesn’t even include the real-time updates from our friends on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Google+.
With all these instant updates and thousands of ads we take in daily, it’s easy to agree with Hoffman: Simplicity has never been more powerful, especially when it comes to your marketing strategy.
Benefits of A Simple Message
Conveying your company’s message in as few words as possible does a couple things:
- It strengthens your message because you’re cutting out unnecessary words.
- It makes your message easier for your audience to take in.
Take a billboard, for instance. Marketers have a set amount of space to work with, but some still try to cram as much as possible onto it. The more words they put on it, the harder it is to read because they have to decrease the font size of every message.
What does this clutter do to the billboard’s effectiveness? It decreases it.
When you’re driving 60 mph to 70 mph on the highway, which billboard are you more likely to read – one with five words or one with 15 words? You’ll probably favor the one with five words because it will take much less time to read.
How To Simplify Your Marketing Message
I work with a colleague who regularly cuts the excess out of all marketing messages. Here’s how he does it:
- Decide on the message you want to share with your customers. This can be a sentence, two ideas, etc. If it’s two ideas, combine them into one sentence.
- Take out any unnecessary words to condense your message. This includes the words of, a, an, etc. Sometimes prepositional phrases will be unnecessary, too.
- Play with the remaining words. Does the phrase become more powerful when you switch the order of words? Is there a synonym that packs more punch or has a better connotation for the message you want to convey?
One iconic example of a simple message that comes to mind is Apple’s “Think Different” campaign. These two words defined Apple’s brand during the time but conveyed what the company wanted to communicate at the time – thinking differently isn’t wrong, stupid, or crazy; it’s what allows people to change the world.
With this two-word campaign, Apple became a source of inspiration for customers that desired to do more than the average person.
Even if you don’t want to send the same message as Apple, you can still use simplicity to create a powerful message to your customers.
And remember this time tested acronym when it comes your marketing strategy: K.I.S.S. = Keep It Seriously Simple!
What are some ways you distill your company’s message to the bare necessities?
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