This Common Marketing Mistake is Sabotaging Your Efforts
Does it feel like you are constantly preaching the important information about your products, brand, or services to your prospective customers and they just aren’t ✨getting it?✨ The cause of this is one of the top reasons marketing campaigns don’t hit home.
The reason? The curse of knowledge.
The curse of knowledge is the concept that we know and have learned information that our customer (or anyone we’re trying to share information with) doesn’t have. At some point, we had an a-ha moment and discovered WHY this information was important. At that point, we had a transformation in our brain that made everything about the information relevant.
But our customers haven’t had that. The knowledge we have becomes a curse because it prevents us from sharing the information our customers actually need to know, in the way they need to hear it. Sometimes this is why things that are a BIG deal to us as business owners, seem like not that big of a deal to our customers…they don’t know what we know! The curse of knowledge affects your marketing and communication with customers at every turn.
So how do we overcome this?
The first places to check for the curse of knowledge in your marketing are your:
Elevator Speech
Instagram Bio
The About page of your website.
Take a look at them with “first time glasses” on. Are they really telling your customers what you need them to know? Are there words there that don’t make sense to someone who has no background knowledge of your industry? Do you include abbreviations or acronyms that may confuse customers? These are simple fixes that can make a big difference.
Another place your marketing needs to overcome the curse of knowledge is in how you talk about your business, products, or services. Often we focus on what our business does. This is great - people have to understand what service we provide or product we make on a basic level.
But I would argue that’s not marketing.
Your marketing is what helps people understand why they should choose you for that product or service. It needs to communicate more than just what you do, but why and how. The pieces of your marketing that will help your customers understand your business and choose you are the parts that tell them
Why you do what you do
How your business will make them feel
The impact your business has had on someone’s life
How someone’s situation changed because of your business
This doesn’t have to be over the top. After all, if you offer plumbing, it’s not going to make sense to say that your business completely transformed someone’s entire world and made their life 1000% better. But it does make sense to talk about how you were able to provide expert service in a timely manner by communicating thoroughly with the client and getting to the root of the issue before their carpet was damaged and ended up costing them a huge remodeling project. It does make sense to talk about how your customers feel confident when using your products and services because of the level of detail you provide. It does make sense to show the passion behind your business.
It’s our responsibility to educate customers in a way that helps them understand the value of the benefits they receive through our product or service. If we can’t do that, it’s going to be reflected in our sales. If you feel like your message is falling on deaf ears, it may be because you aren't meeting your customer where they are at - right now, without the behind-the-scenes information and perspective you have.
