This short talk (EMS 2025 sneak peek) has Billy Broas addressing the overwhelm business owners feel about marketing and introduces his 'five light bulbs' core messaging framework. The excerpt focuses on Light Bulb 1 — the customer's status quo — advising marketers to use empathetic, customer-centered language (use 'you') and to learn customers' words by listening across social comments, sales/product calls, and direct interviews so marketing mirrors prospect language and implies solution fit.
Chapters
Marketing is overwhelming. I think it's very overwhelming. And I'm deep in the trenches of this profession. And so there's this role that I don't think is often enough appreciated. There's this role of the business owner who wears a marketing hat as well. Sales hat. Marketing hat. Yeah. Myself as well. Yeah, right back at you. And it's just, it's not appreciated. And, and I, I, and some people try to avoid it as well. And you know, look, I'm guilty as that of that as well. You know, can I just delegate this? If I build my product and it's just good enough, people will talk about it. I don't have to put on that marketing hat. People will just arrive at my door knocking to get in. I have accepted that you have to wear that hat. So it's like, okay, if you, if you accept that, that we need to do marketing to reach whatever our potential looks like for us and to hit our goals, then you have to wear that marketing hat. And then if you're going to wear that marketing hat, I ask, well, how can we make that as, as easy, pain free and as successful as possible? And that's really where the five light bulbs came from. So the five light bulbs is a, a core messaging framework. And so you create your core message and then you distribute it across your different marketing assets like your website, Facebook ads, emails, etc. Light Bulb 1 in this framework is your customer status quo. So this is where your customer is right now. This is where they're having a problem. It's a place they want to get away from. And so what you want to do in your marketing message is give voice to your light bulb one. You want to use the word you instead of we. You want to have empathy for your prospect. This light bulb 1 is the language of empathy. What I find in working with these business owners wearing a marketing hat is that the problem isn't so much that they, the problem is that they don't know their customers problems, that the words just aren't on the page. So I would encourage the person listening to this to go through and do a mental audit and ask yourself, do I know these five light bulbs for 1 and 2 are the words on the page. And I found that most business owners know the problems of their prospects or their customers, but they're just not giving voice to it on their website, emails, et cetera. So that's the first answer. If you do that and what you know is reflected in your marketing material so that you are turning on that light bulb one that then you might ask okay how can I More to your question, how can I get a better idea of these problems and learn the words that they use? And really the answer is listening. And that can take all forms through social media comments, through sales calls, through product delivery calls, coach calls, through directly reaching out to a prized client or customer and saying hey can I just talk to you I just want to learn about you and just walk me through when you use product like ours and then you just listen and hear the words that they use and where they get caught up and then all that is input Then that you can then plug back into your five light bulbs so that the next time you go to create marketing material it's improved, it's so much richer because of these new insights. If you can acknowledge and describe your prospect's problem even better than they can, they're going to naturally assume that you have the solution.
