What we think of as knowledge is connections in our brains called synapses which develop over time. Remember your brain is not smart, it’s a big ball of goop and electrical pulses, which means when you connect with a potential client over a marketing campaign, sales outreach, or even a conversation, you are building that connection in their brain.
When your messaging is confusing, incorrect, inaccurate, or misleading, you are carving those pathways.
Now, I understand most websites and initial messages are going to be messy, it's part of starting a business, and you have to figure out the kinks. But it is important to stop and evaluate to make changes around your product language.
A good product language fit should highlight two things - the problem you solve, and you solve it.
This is an example of that clarity from a project I am working on with Vijesh Sharma of Merca.ai and you can see the initial messaging is specific to the product they are selling.
Now that we have made some initial changes to his product language and a bit of a website freshening, this is his new clear messaging.
The risk of not updating your product language promptly is that you create a culture of confused customers, possibly even ones that you have never spoken to but just visited your website. If those confused customers formulate an opinion about your product, they will influence someone who might be considering trying your product, even if that potential client does not agree with the assessment of your product.
The Asch conformity experiment aimed to test a parallel idea of groups influencing individuals, even when the individual knows they are correct. Swarthmore College hired 7 actors and 1 participant. They each viewed a card with a line on it and were shown another car with 3 options on it, the actors were instructed to answer the line that matched correctly two times out loud, and incorrectly the third time. Even though when interviewed after, the participant admitted they knew the answer was wrong, but went with the crowd.
This is an effect that has only enhanced with the presence of social media.
Here is your reminder to get your social media up and running with an accurate message.
A study called The Three Degrees of Influence highlights how social influence does not end with the people to whom a person is directly connected. People influence their friends, who in turn influence their friends, and so on; hence, a person's beliefs and actions can influence people they have never met, to whom they are only indirectly tied.
So to run through how this can go bad if your potential customer lands on your site looking for X, but your message does not explain that you can handle X, you have lost that customer. In our example here, that same potential customer hops online and asks for a recommendation to fix X, when the audience references your product, the potential customer explains that you do not solve for X, essentially influencing the entire conversation online.
Then a week later potential customer has a colleague come to his office and mention they are going to use your product to solve for X, your initial potential client explains their experience and that you do not solve for X, and the comment section from that social media post is brought in as an example. Even though this colleague has their mind made up about using your product as the solution, you can see how they would consider elsewhere or have already mentally abandoned you as the solution altogether.
Grow your business and grow your product language at the same time.
According to science, it can be the influence that makes or breaks your success.
Cheers
-Zach
"Why reselling someone is so much harder than getting them the first time."
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