How a Clear Method of Delivery can Improve Even the Best Message: WMFTM – Tamsen Webster

Sometimes what's missing from your message is not much. That's certainly the case with this next episode of What's Missing from This Message, where all that's missing is a clear preference for method of delivery. I was so excited to get a submission from Summer Jelinek. Oh my gosh, I hope I'm saying that right. Who asked me if I could red thread her website, which I have to say was recently redesigned, I think, by Loudmouse, who was a previous submission on What's Missing from This Message. So it's a very small world here, and I'm super excited to show you what Summer and Loudmouse have done, because I have to tell you right up front, it's pretty darn good. Actually, there's really only one or two little things at a high level that I would say would make it even stronger. So let's take a look. Okay, this is Summer's website, and you've got a great picture of Summer. I love the gray and the purple and the taupe, by the way. Just love the color scheme. Uh, and I love how she's got this rotating frame here of, is your event, association, organization missing the magic? And that's clearly an acronym because she's got dots in between it. And then underneath that, learn to unify teams and drive progress by finding a purpose that matters. Okay, a lot to like here. So first thing, if we're putting it to a test of is this answering a question that my organization or her audience might have, I'd say yeah, actually it probably is. And there's a kind of a cool play on words there with the acronym and magic. Now we all may have a different definition of magic, and I'm gonna talk about that later, but I think there's a really interesting thing where she's really snagging people with this question of is your association or event or organization missing the magic? Magic, then you can kind of say, yeah, there is something missing, or we're missing a sparkle or whatever. Great. And then I love that she gives an answer to that right off the bat. Learn to unify teams and drive progress by finding a purpose that matters. So, like, I'm gonna get back to the question in just a second, but that little subtitle, mwah, chef's kiss. It is a really great example of what I talk about all the time, how a one-sentence summary of what you do needs to combine what's desired by your audience and what's different to them. So, to unify teams and drive progress. Okay, that's what I want. I want to unify teams and drive progress by how? Finding a purpose that matters. So it's a really good answer to the question she poses. So if someone says, okay, is your association event organization missing the magic? She's defining what she means by magic in the next line and giving an unexpected and attractive answer to how she solves that. And then she goes into Meet Summer. Okay, so that's what we see above the fold. This is stylistically very similar to what Loudmouse did on their own site, but I really like what it's doing. I think it's capturing exactly who she's talking to by rotating between event, organization, association. She's capturing kind of the spirit of how those people talk. Oh, we're just missing the magic here. And she's giving a really clear and I think differentiated answer. 2 thumbs up to above the fold. All right, so once we scroll down, we get to this next section. So this is clearly the call to action. This is a good way to get people onto her newsletter. So great, we always want to have something like that. And this one says, "Want a more engaged team? Ask them better questions." And then kind of goes in and explains how she's going to give you an ebook of 20 questions every leader should be asking their teams if you sign up. Assuming all of these things, the one little thing, and I do think it's little, is that right above this, she talks about learning to unify teams and driving progress, and then now it's about wanting a more engaged team as the next question. That, I think, is just a little bit of dissonance there, like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, I thought we were going to unify teams and drive progress in order to get the magic back. Where did engagement come in?" I would just love this section to link to the first one a little bit more. The first step to a unified team, you know, or a unified team is an engaged team, or an engaged team is a unified team. How do you get there? Ask better questions. Just something that connects it so this doesn't feel like all of a sudden now you're saying, you know, hey, I slice, I dice, and I fold your laundry. You're basically saying, I slice, I dice, and I— this is the way you can do it too. Second point here, if this is in fact a way to sign up to the newsletter, I like a little bit more transparency about that where you say, when you sign up for my newsletter, you can download this ebook. Unless it truly is just sign up, you're gonna get a series of nurturing messages, welcome, whatever. Again, I just— a little bit of transparency there would make that a little bit stronger. Partial client list, always useful there. My story, lovely picture of Summer, and I just love this little personal Insight of how she wanted to be in charge. The other thing I think is interesting here, and I don't know legally whether or not she can play it up a little bit more, is now we start to understand a little bit of where the magic piece that she talks about above the fold when you first land on the page comes in, because she clearly has worked for a number of years for Walt Disney World and the Disney Institute. So I'm assuming that's kind of where the magic piece comes in. I'd love to see in this bio something that ties it in. Again, I know she's not, I know she has to avoid really, really carefully any impression that this is endorsed by Disney, but I think she can start to say, you know, bring in this being in charge, there's kind of magical experiences, that's what inspired my pursuit of this model that she's gonna introduce now just below the page. So I like this little bit, I like how it introduces Summer, I like how it introduces additional credibility in addition to her partial client list. And then now we've got to explore Summer Summer's Magic Model. Now we get the explanation of what the acronym up top was standing for. I feel like this is a little long to wait for it. I'd love a— I'd love this to be up a little further, frankly. Um, I know what we would try to want to do is get people to sign up for a newsletter right away, but when you clearly have introduced an acronym, you introduce this curiosity gap of what does that acronym mean, and you really don't want to wait too long before telling people what it is. Now I like that she has it. I love that she's explained it. I would want one other little piece of copy underneath this magic model thing that again ties it back to what you've told me about so far. How does it unify teams and drive progress? How is it part of engagement? Is the magic model the key to doing that? All you need to do is tell me that. The other thing is, A, I love how she introduces all of these pieces, but B, do you see it when you're sliding through? Naturally you would kind of go, across these 3 and then down. And— but actually the way that it's drawn is that it kind of bounces up and down. This is the M and then the A and then the G comes down and then the I is down and then the C is back up. I don't think that's how people read it normally. I don't think that's how people would interact with it. So I would suggest maybe just reorganizing so you have the M, the A, and the G across the top and the I and the C at the bottom. Okay, last piece, and this is really where I think the biggest piece of feedback I have comes in, is that now she's introducing herself as a speaker, where that hasn't been clear up to this point. I would say up to this point, I really would have thought that this was a consultant's page, not a speaker's page. So I love that she's talking about, and really, you know, she's, I think by the time you get here, She says she's engaging, she looks engaging, and I like how she's kind of connected some of what she's talked about before here. But this is the place where if this is for her as a speaker, then I think a lot of the language throughout earlier should talk about it as getting a speaker for your event is the first step to doing this, and this is what she talks about. 'Cause otherwise we come to the bottom and we're like, oh wait, where did the speaker piece come in? This is kind of where I wanted just a little bit more connection or a little bit more continuity around, okay, I like what you're saying. I love your approach. I think it's really differentiated. What's your method of delivery? Oh, it's speaking. I think that needs to be clear, or at least not confined to this section right at the bottom. One other little note here. Again, tie in the language here. So she's got— she talks about her lifelong connection to great stories. How does that connect to her bio? How does that connect to magic? Just tie it all together so it doesn't feel like we've got separate chunks going on. I mean, it's not, and let me be clear, it's not that this is like a super separated webpage. I think she's doing a really good job here. This is really fine-tuning it so that she takes what's already really, really strong and powerful and just makes it a little bit stronger. So this next piece is Weekly Wisdom. So I think she's introducing some content that she's got here. There's a big block of content that comes underneath that, so I'd like to see her break that up a little bit, just so that we get a better sense of what it is and how it connects to everything else. I also question whether or not this is homepage-worthy, because there's a lot going on now on the homepage. If you think about it, we've got the landing, kind of where you are, you've got the call to action for the newsletter, you've got Summer's bio, you've got an explanation of the, of the magic model, you've got her introduction as a speaker, then you have this. And then there's the contact at the bottom. So I think there's probably, you know, if I were to just say one thing I would do just to simplify this is that I would, I would probably take the Weekly Wisdom and the speaker focus piece off of this main page and move it someplace else just so that the kind of core of the message is a little bit stronger, as long as she puts in the kind of the method of delivery piece and keeps that there. So I think the only piece that I'd say really doesn't make sense to me on this homepage is the Weekly Wisdom piece. And maybe if it were just introduced differently, it would fit better. But otherwise, this, all in all, I think this is a really good example, not only of what makes Summer really stand out, but what a really strong message-driven website could look like. So coming back to you, what are some of the lessons you can learn from Summer's site? Well, This is really, I'd say, in a lot of ways, a model for how to do things super, super well. She's engaging with the question right at the beginning. She's answering it in a way that's different and differentiated. She's giving people clear steps to take, and she's also making a really interesting connection between her approach and her background and how all of that ties together in her. The one thing that can make this message stronger for her is potentially the thing that could make a message stronger for you too, is to make it really clear how you do what you do. Once you've gotten people really interested in what you do and the nature of it, make it clear how you do that so that it's even more clear how they can hire you and get that big idea to work for them. If you want me to take a look at your message and red thread it like this, send it to me at redthreadme@tamsenwebster.com.