Peppering Marketing Tone

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Hey, everyone, we're on Facebook Live. We finally got ourselves started here. We had that 10 minutes of, you know, zoom to Facebook glitch going on again. So we managed to make it work though, and we are now live so we can talk marketing tone.

I'm so bummed. This was like, supposed to be the first night we were going live in the mastermind for extraordinary women and we failed.

We failed. Is there any way for us to share it to that group?

We might be able to later. I'm not sure.

Okay. We might be able to share it to the group. I don't know.

Yeah, we have to have it set up to the third party provider, I think is what we have to do, so. All righty. So did you make the drink?

I did. Although not coffee. I wish I could have made coffee tonight, but I won't sleep. So I've got my hot chocolate version of it, which I think is a lot more Italian. Right. And then I didn't have gelato, but I had whipped cream.

Did you?

It all melted. Like, it's all gone now. That went off the top while we were trying to get on Facebook here.

This was actually called Affogata.

Affogata coffee. And it's got this lemon pepper. Not a little bit of lemon, but it's vanilla pepper and then lemon zest. And I have to tell you that I've been doing avocado toast as California as that sounds. Right? Like, it makes me sound so snobby. California. Like, I've been doing avocado toast every day. Like, you know, anyway. But I have been. But I had. There's this place in town that does it with this lemon pepper that's crunchy. It's like salty and peppery. And it's got lemon on it, like lemon zest on it. And they put it on top of their avocatos, so I'm totally addicted to it. And this kind of has the same taste with only a little bit of vanilla to it. So it's kind of awesome.

So what do you put on your avocado toast? I make it all the time too.

So I went to Trader Joe's. And there's this, like, already premixed zest of. It's got lemon, pepper and salt mixed together. I add a little extra salt to it because I don't think it's quite salty enough. But other than that, it's not crunchy enough, I guess, is the way that I would say it. In my salt, I use like, the Himalayan salt that's like really thick and crunchy. So I just add a few crunches of that to the top, but that's it. So I just crunch it over my avocado and that's it.

Very cool. I throw eggs over easy on mine. That's like my. When I get back from running and the cold treat.

So I'm actually allergic to eggs.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I know. It's such a. It's like one of my favorite foods and I'm allergic to them.

So you don't get flu shots either?

No, no, never. Yeah. So, yeah. So anyway, loving the coffee, loving the cocoa version of it, it's working for me. So it's probably going to help me get through the rest of the evening here because I could use a little sugar jolt.

So there you go. I didn't make any. Tomorrow it's gonna be like 22 degrees here in the morning, so I'll have it in the morning.

Well, and I think this would totally set the tone for that. Right? You know, you get this, like, warm, fuzzy feeling. You're gonna set the tone for how you're gonna feel all day even though it's cold outside. Right. I mean, we wanna match our tone. But I, you know, I kind of like the zesty, kind of over the top personality that is usually me in all of my town.

There you go. And I'm like, you know me, I'm sarcastic.

Which is harder to get across, though.

Not really.

Doesn't always read well. Right.

That's true. In fact, I just posted this thing on Facebook about texting is not really dating. Because think about that for a minute. If you have a text, like, I will do all in caps, to my kids, and my kids will be like, quit shouting at me. And I'll be shouting.

I'm absolutely not shouting. I'm fine.

Right? Yeah, There you go. So, but that is. People don't understand when you're writing, like, what is the tone of what you're really doing?

Right. They don't understand it at all. And that's always so interesting, it's confusing. So what I think is that if you're the Brand, Right. If it's really truly you, it's different when you have a corporation, right. You have to adopt a different tone for a corporation than you do for your personal brand. But if at the end of the day, sales is basically your responsibility, meaning that you do the attraction, people show up, they close because they want access to you, then your tone better match you because if it doesn't match you and then they come into your program and they go, whoa, high energy over here. And like all numbers and data over here, like, doesn't make sense to me. Right. And you will have attracted the wrong people is what really will happen. And tone does that.

Well, tone not only does that, that's where that authenticity comes in. Because people hire, for the most part, if you work for a corporation, they hire the corporation. But if you're a solopreneur or a small business, they're hiring you. So when you say that doesn't match, it's really, really disappointing to people if they want to hire an action person and you turn out to be, you know, a manzie pansy dud, that's a problem.

So let's talk a minute for about a lot of tone that goes on out there that nobody's buying into.

Well, yeah, there's a lot of that scary anger and fear based stuff.

Fear based? Yes. Like fear of missing out. You got to get this. The scarcity.

Yes. I'm not a fan of that. I am really not a fan of that kind of sales process in any way, shape or form. And I'm not a fan of doing that on your website. Now, there are some exceptions to that. Like, I think some counters help when you have a deadline. Like a true deadline, not a faux deadline. Do you have a deadline of, hey, my bootcamp is this weekend and you've got a counter up there giving them a little bit of pressure to make sure they remember and realize, oh, that is only two days away. That's okay. That's not fear of missing out. It's in a good way. Right. It's like, well, if you really want this, don't forget about it. Right? That's what you're doing. You're not scared. Scaring them into that. So there are some places where urgency matters, right? And urgency isn't fear based. That just means I have to deal with something in a timely manner.

But here's the urgency that's not working. I just tried to sell you something. It's $2,500 and we have like 10 bonuses and every day a bonus is Going away. People are so freaking over that.

Yeah, yeah, I'm not a fan of it at all. I agree with you. I don't think it works today anymore. But then again, I go to an event and I see these people march into the back of the room and I'm thinking to myself, you fools, you're going to regret this later because you just tapped into that lizard brain, right? You just tapped into that and you let them take advantage of you and you will regret it later. And what I find is that it comes out in different ways. So when people buy through those kind of programs or through that kind of process, whatever it might be, they either get passive aggressive about it where they just don't show up to stuff because if they show up and they got something back, then they'd have to admit they were wrong about it. So they get pissed at themselves and they say, well, I'm going to sabotage this. And that's what that really is. But you're only sabotaging yourself because you already paid the money. So if you can get something out of it and if you can identify that there is no value out of it because you participated in the process, you have a better likelihood of getting your money back if that's what you need than you do if you don't show up at all.

Right?

You don't participate in the process.

And you and I talk about this a lot. How many people sign up for podcast and then don't show, right?

So we started changing up our tone. We changed up our website. Everything's very different. It's a lot more. And our website has gotten more corporate. And I think this was really important, was that we pulled it more out of being all about me and Tom. And because of that, it actually has worked better and converting better. This has gotten more, A little bit more. No nonsense. And this is the process, this is how it works. And while we still have lots of one on ones and lots of high touch stuff with people, there is a larger number of people coming through it who are just like, I just want this plug and play. I just want this system. And that has helped us grow tremendously. So that's working for us. So we actually had just, if we look at the last 90 days alone, we've raised our conversion of the people who going through our setup process faster at higher speeds. And I think changing the tone of all of this has helped. So while I want to be very nurturing, we adopted a tone that's not as nurturing. That is we're not Here, whenever you get around to it. No, this is a process. This is for people who are serious. Right. A little different tone, a little much more urgent. Not a fear of missing out in any way, shape or form, but just saying that's what we're here for. So when you're ready for us, you know where we are. But we're not here to nurture you along the way. Right.

And push you into. You need to do this. You need to do this. But isn't that, I mean, people are either action takers or they're not. And the number one thing that I hear, I'm going to wag my pen because that's tone.

Is I don't have time for content. So that doesn't shock me because they've already they purchased with the absolute intent, but they're still telling themselves in their mind that I don't have time for this.

Yeah. And my answer to that is, but how many phone calls do you take in a week? And you know, so like there's a whole different model of it is like letting them understand and realize that you are actually putting those blocks and those barriers in your own way. Like. And so that's important to get across and you can do that without being pushy, angry, making them fear for what they're not doing. They need to feel good about themselves. They need to feel positive that this is going to move them in the direction that they want to go and that you're there for them and with them. Right. It's not. You're co creating and that's a tone. That's what we want to do. We're here for you, we've got your back, we've got the best systems. Like it's a very confident and reassuring tone that we've chosen to take because we know what we're doing. There's none of this making this stuff up as we go along. We've done over 300 shows, we do tens of thousands of episodes. So there's none of that here. So you can adopt a different tone for yourself and at different stages of your business too. So that's something that I just want you to kind of understand is that you can start in a certain place because you're early attracting business and it's all about you and you can shift to something else. And that's okay. You haven't left people behind because remember, most of your clients never visit your website. Like they already bought from you. Right. They're not going to go back to it. I mean, we have A dashboard like they go back to all the time. And it's no nonsense business, though, in that dashboard. And they get it. It's always been like that, right? So that's what coaching calls are for. For you being, you know, you being you and you being there to help them. And they know you're there so that, you know, tones are different in different paces of marketing too, right?

They are, but that's why people rebrand too, because their tone of marketing changes.

But what I don't love is that they rebrand too quickly. Oh, yeah, they rebrand just to rebrand, and that's not necessary. And today, if something's not working, you want to try a rebrand, right? I mean, if it's really not working for you, go ahead and rebrand. Look, we rebranded our business three times. We gave three different names, three different complete brand makeovers. We did it, but each time we were shifting that tone only a smaller amount. Right? We were going from this starter beta kind of model to going into, hey, we're startup still, but we're past that, like, figuring it out stage. We have systems, right? And now we're at this, hey, we're the best in the business. We've got you covered. And that's when it's time. Like, you know, it's time. But those that come in and they hire a new designer and they're like, oh, yeah, your stuff is ugly. Let's change it. Like, that is not a reason to rebrand. Right? But if it's not converting for you, it's a time to rebrand. Let's think about that. But we also don't want to throw everything out when we rebrand. We don't want to throw everything away and adopt something that someone says, that's you. We want to say, I know when I do one on ones, I convert. Okay, so what is that tone? That is me. What is coming across that is me. That's working. What gets them into book haul with me? Is it my LinkedIn posts, which are more businesslike, or is it my Instagram post, which is all about me and my dog or something like that? Right? You know, you don't know, thinking about the way that you approach it, start looking at what's been converting for you and say, wow, there's something to that tone. That's working. Let me try it on a grander scale. Let me try it on a landing page. Let's not redo our entire website. Let's just try a landing page with it before we go any further.

But that's how people bootstrap them with themselves to bankruptcy too, is the entire makeover without tiptoeing in and seeing what works and where they're at.

Yeah. And that's why I am not a fan of, I always call it hypothesis branding. Right. We step into our branding with spending as little money as possible to test out the market reach. And we're testing it out and we're going back and forth and it's a dialogue. When a dialogue, you have to listen at some point. You're not speaking the whole time. So you have to listen, evaluate, observe, review, and say, here's some of the things working. Let me try them purposefully, let me try them with intent and let's see what happens. Do I get greater conversion? And let's give it enough time. That's also something in our tone and experimentation. We're like, well, I put out a post on that and it didn't go over well. It could be that you put it out at 9am on a Monday morning and no one had time to look on. So you got to give stuff enough time. And that's something happens very frequently in marketing. We give up so fast because we did it once.

So I want to switch gears here with speaking the right tone with the right level of intimacy.

Right.

So what a lot of people do these days is they have a one size fits all marketing campaign and they talk to their new Facebook ad people like they're their best friends. And these people don't know you. They don't like you, they don't trust you.

They want numbers. They like numbers. Yeah.

They want the free stuff. And sometimes even then they don't read the free stuff, they just download it. It seems like a wish. So I think tone is really important there and understanding who you're talking to. Now they call those Facebook ads awareness campaigns. If I'm aware of you, I'm not going to treat you like my best friend. If you're a girl, if you're a guy, I'm not going to flirt with you. It's just like all those things, like there are boundaries to your tone.

Well, I might flirt with you if it's going to work. No.

Well, it depends on what I want.

Yeah, but you know, we won't go there. That's not the kind of sites we're building here.

No, it's not.

But here's the thing. In those awareness campaigns, so whenever we build a great product, whenever we build anything in marketing, we look at it as we have competitive edge things we need to do so we have to look at what else is out there. What is the tone of all the other gurus out there talking about podcast launching or book launching or lead generation? Right. What is it out there going at? They're yelling at you. I don't know how else to explain it. They're yelling at you. That's what it feels like. So while I want to be passionate and energetic and that's who I am, that's naturally who I am. I don't want to lecture them. I don't want to do that. I don't want to say, this is what you have to do. I want to say, this is what's working. You want to know more about it? Come see the webinar. You want stuff that works? I got stuff that works. You want to know how to do something? I'm your how to girl, right? Confident in who I am, and I've got you covered. That's my tone that I built. But I built it to contrast the tone that was out there, the tone that was. I'm giving you little teasers and look at this bomb. I'm dropping you. Aren't you impressed? Oh, if you're so impressed, you're going to buy my next thing. Oh, and I forgot I didn't give you everything. I'm going to. You're going to buy my next thing. Right. That is not who I am. That is not the building up of adrenaline, and that's what they're doing with that. And while I believe in, you know, you want adrenaline, you want someone to get out of their own head in their own way to buy what they want to buy, but we don't have to do it in a manipulative way. And tone can change that. The way that you speak to people can change that.

You can. And then the big promises people as well. Like, how many of those videos have you seen? Like, my beautiful house, my beautiful wife, my beautiful car. I think I just stole a song from. I'm not sure who's saying that.

It sounds country to me, but it's not country.

It was like talking Heads.

Talking heads, Yes. I was like, you said it, and I was like, I went to risd, right? I should know that. Talking heads, Right.

Total brain farts here. But that doesn't really work either because that's kind of that instant gratification tone.

Right?

And you can bet, number one, that that beautiful house didn't happen in the six months to six figures that that person's promising. You can probably also bet he probably.

Really doesn't live there. It's a photo shoot. It's a photo shoot. It's on Airbnb, and you can get it stayed safe.

She was a hoe I picked up on the phone.

So anyway. Yes, but, you know, speaking tone, video tone, like, all that tone is one tone. But we also have written tone. And this is where I see it go so wrong. We take templates. You know, you and I were talking about the email templates. We talked about it so many times. My friend Juliet does this right. We get so afraid of writing things that we plagiarize anything we think is working. What we don't realize is most of it's not working out there. We're plagiarizing stuff that doesn't work.

Right.

Yeah. And so that's a huge problem out there. You're plagiarizing stuff somebody chose to package up, which means that there are hundreds of other people out there utilizing it, which means it's not working. Because the minute my brain goes to pattern that there's a pattern of it, my brain knows it's not authentic.

Can I share with you my most successful webinar ever?

Please? Yes.

So we had one of those templates, one of those cute little templates, and my assistant spelled a word wrong in the header. You guys have to remember, a couple years ago, I was strictly books. I wasn't doing as much platform building with the assessment marketing. So people started sending me back nasty grams in my list, telling me that I shouldn't be in the book business because I had a typo.

And it just.

It gnawed on me. And it gnawed on me. And I got up in the middle of the night and I composed an authentically angry email.

A rant.

A rant, if you will, about how, as an author, if you don't have a platform, nobody's going to read your book. They don't care if you're a grammar Nazi and everything is perfect. They don't care about misspellings. They don't care about any of that. They have to know who you are, even if you're the best writer in the world. So I just invited them all to my webinar and said, you know what? You don't even have to register. Here's the link. We had more people show up that day than we had ever had show up. Because I was just plain like, screw you guys.

That tone worked for you.

It did. It was authentic. And it was funny because I told my coach about it, and she's like, oh my God, I can't believe you did that. And I was like, yeah. But more people showed up and bought than ever before.

So, you know, here's the thing. So written tone is harder to get across who you are. You get worried about the grammar, you get worried about everything about it. So that's why people copy so often. I'm a fan of. Okay, I get the gist. Here's like, okay, I need a opening sentence about pain that what people are suffering with what's going wrong. And maybe I need three bullet points that relate to that just in my head. And then I'm going to. Okay, now a little bit about me. No more than two sentences. Like. And so that's how I deconstruct something that works. So if I see this and I'm like, wow, that really worked. I know that they converted. I know they had a ton of people because I was on the webinar and there was 100 people there. So I'm going to go back through their emails, I'm going to deconstruct them, but I'm not going to copy a single word off of it. I'm going to just write an outline and I'm going to just put this outline out there. Then what I do is, because I'm so comfortable in front of the microphone and I'm so comfortable ad libbing and I know my business really well, I will turn my recording on and I will just start recording. So I will just start dictating a letter in a way or dictating what I want the website to say, going ahead and have it transcribed. And now I edit it because it does have to read well. So I know that. But I got an energy of who I am and my tone in that. And so I might do it two or three times and then transcribe them and like meld them together. And that's my process for doing it because otherwise you don't get who you are in it.

Interesting.

You know, and I'm comfortable writing, keep in mind, like, I'm comfortable just sitting down and writing and being my tone. So right now I'm writing your introductory chapter for you, your forward. And I'm sitting down to write it. And I was like, you know what, I need to be a little more me in this than I was. And so I actually am rewriting it right now for you because I realized, like, because you're so you in your book that I need to be so me as well. And so I immediately I changed my opening paragraph and now I'm fessing up to the fact that I have all these books on my credenza and I haven't published them because it makes sense with what you're talking about. And I wouldn't have done that if I hadn't. Like, it doesn't fit the tone of her book. Even though, yeah, this might be me, but this isn't right for her book and it isn't right for the audience that's going to read it. They need me to be a little more real me. Right?

So you guys know me now. It's sarcastic, it's direct and to the point, but I think it's much needed.

I think what you provide is a very distinct contrast to the competitors out there. And that's what we've talked about. Right. At some point, you have to set yourself apart. Now, you can do that in a really good way. You can do it in an obnoxious way. I've seen people do that. You know, you can do it in a. Like we were talking. I think maybe it was one of the very first shows we did from Marketing Monday Mixer, where we were talking about the webinars. That was someone who was inviting them to it, saying, this is not going to have any sales in this. That was their message on their post for the webinar. There will be no sales here. There isn't any of that at all. Only thing at the end, it's going to be, if you want to have a call with me, I'm going to give you a number so you can, like, that's it. There's no sale here. It's just that. And that's a contrast message, but in a good way. That makes me feel more comfortable about the fact that I might tune into this webinar. An invitation in. So him doing that was a great contrast to what else was going on in the industry. So you can still do it in a nice way. You don't have to do it in a really negative way. I've seen people do it with shock. Right. And sometimes that's okay because it's what's needed, but sometimes it's over the top. And who needs more of that, right?

Yeah, we don't need more over the top.

The only other thing I want to say is visual matters. Okay. We talked about colors and some visual things in the last. I think it was the last episode, Right. Sometime really recently, right? No, we had Sock and to him, call to action. So it was the one before that. So two ago we were talking about visuals and visual tone matters, too. If there's a contrast between the colors of your website or the colors of your landing page or the ad or all of that, that is not helping the message. Moving the message and the tone forward, then don't do it. Like, you can't have dangerous signs and symbols over everything. And then have your tone be like, well, you know, welcome. I'm so glad I'm inviting in. Right. It's not going to work.

It's the same with pictures. When you go get the images from it, don't make your images not match your personality.

Right.

So that's. I mean, if you look at my stuff, it's always kind of over the top. Like, you look at it and go, what?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is interesting. That's okay. It gets people to look. Right. But visual tone that is not synergistic with the messaging that's on the site creates this tension. And desynchronization is what it is. And so we can't reconcile that in our bodies, which give us this heightened sense of something's wrong.

Right.

So if something's wrong, I'm not going to buy. So you can immediately have that mix happen. And it's because we chose the colors we like, not necessarily the colors that were right for the messaging or the colors that were right for the audience and what they needed to receive.

That is so true. And neuroscience is actually proving that the tension, what you were saying about the patterning, if we go to a landing page and it looks like every other landing page we have seen, it's not comforting, it's boring.

It won't matter how great the message is, we'll skip it if we feel we've seen it before, read it before. We won't. We will skip it. That's another important thing is do not over brand. So you get this tone, you get this idea, and you're like, I'm going to use purple everywhere. And if you over brand that and it looks the same every time you post, it's a huge problem. So we have a rule, I've mentioned it before. We have a rule that we don't repeat our imagery more than five weeks in a row. So sooner than five weeks in a row. That's our rule of pacing of imagery, colors especially. But that's in content, because content's always changing. Right. So it's easier. We still need the tone of the content to match the colors that are chosen there. Right. There's no difference there. Right. But it means that we aren't picking the same picture again and again. The same background color, the same flat. Because when you do it, people believe that they've seen it before and they will skip it.

No, they definitely will. And you have to remember, we are not Elle from Legally Blonde. Everything does not have to be pink.

Yes. Everything does not have to be pink. Yes.

There you go.

We are not five anymore. Because at five, everything needs to be pink.

I know everything needs to be pink. It is so funny because my first brand, when I came in for a rebrand, somebody actually like. The reason I did it was because I had black and pink and it was like Pink Panther colors. And somebody came in and said, that's awfully immature. And I was like, oh, no, it might have been.

It might not have fit you. Which I bet it was more the case than it not being the right colors because I have seen pink and black work.

Right.

I've seen it work.

I'm kind of racy Pink Panther.

So my daughter, my 5 year old, got an early Christmas present jacket from my sister. And it's this fuzzy, fuzzy jacket. And it kind of a like a pale, lavendery pink color. It's got a bit of pink to it, but it's still more on the purple side. And I say, vanessa, this is gorgeous. It's such a pretty purple color. And she looks at me and she goes, it is pink. And I'm like, so how we perceive our colors matters more. It's in the eyes of the beholder. So if your tone and your audience wants pink, then give them pink.

There you go. Okay, so next week.

Yes. What are we talking about?

Next week we're gonna do serve versus sell. And I have so much to say about this, but I have even more to say about the recipe, which is gonna be caramelized bacon.

Oh, my gosh.

I might actually have to make that when I have bacon.

Please, you need to make something. But caramelized bacon? Oh, my. My kids love bacon. Yeah.

Who doesn't love bacon?

We are a serious bacon household here.

So, yeah, so am I. I even put bacon in the Brussels sp. Bacon goes in everything.

That sounds awesome. I'm definitely trying that myself.

Okay, so we'll see you next week.

That's right. Absolutely. I can't wait to talk to you all. And please share marketing Monday mixer out to everyone and remind them that we're here, we're trying to be live on Facebook, and we will make it happen. So sorry, this one isn't so live, but if you have any questions or any comments as you type them in. Of course we'll reach back and we'll make sure we answer them for you. So thanks everyone for listening. It's Tracy and Juliet live. Sort of live. On Marketing Monday Mixer.

You've been listening to the Feed you'd Brand podcast. We'd love to hear your comments on today's show, as well as suggestions for future topics and guests. Visit us online at feedyourbrand Co or on Social dyourbrand. Thanks for exploring content marketing and podcast influence with us.