Katie McManus uses the "everything shower" concept to explain why coded language in marketing hurts small businesses. Vague messaging excludes potential buyers and referrers, while clear language broadens who finds you and who recommends you.
Can you guys let me know what an everything shower is? I keep seeing on this app all these girls talking about, hello, Matt in.
Boston, who's curious about what an everything shower is. Hello from Cape Cod. I have the answer. And I also have a little business point to add on to the end, but really quick. And everything shower for women is where you do everything. So not all women wash their hair all the time. I do. I have to wash my hair every single day. But some women don't wash their hair every single day. So an everything shower might be where they're washing their hair and their conditioning. It's also when they are shaving. Right. I don't know about other women, but I only really have to shave my legs, like, every three days. I don't have to do it every single day. My hair just grows really slow. So that's when they're shaving all the things. And, you know, they might be doing some of their, like, skin treatment in the shower as well. Like exfoliating. It just takes a lot longer and it, like, you kind of need to devote the time and it's kind of a ritual. Right? So that's an everything shower. Now that we've covered that, let's talk about how speaking code actually hurts your business. Oh, and hi. I help ADHD business owners make more money in less time with fewer distractions by showing you how to start your business and how to market it. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist, Money mindset, coach, and yes, I am in my pajamas right now. And this is the perfect example of what you can do wrong in your marketing. Okay, so let's imagine just for a second that you have developed, second, some special exfoliant for the shower. And it's something that's really special and beautiful. It smells nice, and it's not something that you should be using every single day. Right? And so it really gets folded into this. This woman's everything shower. And for you. Research has shown that women are using it during their everything shower. And you have a choice here. You can fold the everything shower term into your marketing or not. This is what I like to call coding. And it's where the business owner, the person who's promoting the product or the service uses a code word that only their ideal clients would know. But say Matt here say he's dating someone, it's her birthday, and he wants to get her something really special, and he has no idea what an everything shower is. So he's going to go out on the market and he's going to try to find something that he thinks that she would like. Okay? Something that's like, you know, for her to take care of herself and just really to pay for herself. If you're using coded language to market your special product, she's going to be the only one who understands it. Matt, who's going to be buying gifts for her or maybe telling her about products that he sees that he thinks that she would like. He's going to have no idea that it's relevant to her. And, of course, there's an argument for using coded language to attract your ideal clients to use your service or your product. Mainly, you know, you get to develop this cult following where it's like a secret thing that people find out about, right? The only problem with that is it takes a really long time to take off unless you get in with just the right publications. All right? So for something like this, this kind of product, you'd want to get into publications like goop. But getting featured in publications like GOOP is really hard unless you have the right team that's reaching out to Gwyneth Paltrow and all her people. When you don't market encoded language, when you add other information that makes it understandable to other people who aren't your ideal client, what your product is, you open your services up to a bunch of referrals, right? People understand what you're doing, and they understand who you're useful to, and they have a chance to say, hey, hey, Tiffany, I think you should work with this person. Right? Or, hey, Bob, here's a product you're gonna love. You know, it solves the problem that you were just describing the other day, but you miss out on that when you use coded language to market. So I hope that answers everything about what an everything shower is, and I hope you enjoyed your little marketing lesson. I have to go to the gym now.
