Unlock the secrets to mastering clear communication in digital marketing with insights from my guest, Ben Gutmann, a former marketing agency owner and professor. Ben shares his journey from leading a successful agency to penning his book "Simply Put: Why Clear Messages Win and How to Design Them," emphasizing the profound impact of simplicity in messaging. Discover how clear and fluent messages not only resonate with audiences but also drive successful marketing campaigns.
Explore the art of crafting simple yet powerful messages, as we dissect the common traps of overcomplicating communication and the science behind why simplicity prevails. Ben and I discuss the pivotal role of focusing on benefits over features, using relatable examples like mint toothpaste to illustrate how emotional benefits can transform your marketing approach. Learn practical strategies to connect with your audience on a personal level, whether through creating customer avatars or tailoring messages across platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram. We’ll also touch on the impact of AI on messaging and the delicate balance between information and persuasion.
Whether you're crafting an advertisement, an email, or a proposal, this episode is packed with wisdom to help you communicate more effectively. So, tune in as we unravel the secrets behind clear and compelling communication with Ben Guttmann.
Guest Links
Learn More:
- Buy Digital Threads: https://nealschaffer.com/digitalthreads
- Buy Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth: https://nealschaffer.com/maximizinglinkedinforgrowth
- Join My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/
- Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmo
- Download My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/freebies/
- Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschaffer
- All My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com
Speaker 1: Clear communication is the cornerstone of effective
00:00:03
digital marketing, but do you know why simple messages
00:00:06
outperform the rest?
00:00:07
In this episode, I sit down with Ben Gutmann, former
00:00:11
marketing agency owner, professor and author, to uncover
00:00:15
the secrets behind mastering clear communication, From the
00:00:18
psychology of fluency to designing simple, impactful
00:00:21
messages.
00:00:22
You'll learn actionable insights that can transform your
00:00:25
marketing efforts.
00:00:26
We'll also explore practical tips for leveraging AI and
00:00:29
creating compelling customer avatars.
00:00:31
So make sure you stay tuned to the next episode of the your
00:00:35
Digital Marketing Coach podcast.
00:00:38
Speaker 2: Digital social media content, influencer marketing,
00:00:42
blogging, podcasting, vlogging, tiktok, linkedin, twitter,
00:00:45
facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing
00:00:53
there's a lot to cover.
00:00:54
Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or
00:00:58
business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert
00:01:01
advice.
00:01:02
Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Schaefer
00:01:07
is your digital marketing coach , helping you grow your business
00:01:15
with digital first marketing, one episode at a time.
00:01:19
This is your digital marketing coach and this is Neil Schaefer.
00:01:27
Speaker 1: This is your digital marketing coach and this is Neil
00:01:29
Schafer.
00:01:29
Hey everybody, this is your digital marketing coach, neil
00:01:32
Schafer.
00:01:32
Welcome to episode number 387 of my podcast.
00:01:34
Well, by the time you listen to this, the elections in the
00:01:38
United States will all be over.
00:01:39
Well, I expect that the contest will go on for probably at
00:01:45
least a few days.
00:01:46
We'll see what happens, but at least that is out of the way and
00:01:49
hopefully we are at a peaceful existence, no matter who won the
00:01:53
election.
00:01:54
But anyway, you know, I'm not a fortune teller.
00:01:56
I can't tell you what the future is going to be.
00:01:57
It literally recording this the night before election day, so
00:02:02
be interested to see what happens.
00:02:02
All right, this is obviously not a political day, so be
00:02:04
interested to see what happens.
00:02:04
All right, this is obviously not a political podcast.
00:02:06
So let's move on to the latest industry news.
00:02:09
So there was a data study done of Gen Zers versus adults and
00:02:20
what they look to influencers and creators for as information
00:02:25
sources.
00:02:25
Now it looked at a bunch of different categories media
00:02:29
recommendations, health and wellness, news and current
00:02:32
events, travel, lifestyle, fashion and beauty, sports,
00:02:35
politics, finance, entrepreneurship, science,
00:02:38
dating and relationships and with every single category this
00:02:41
should not be any surprise, gen Z placed more trust and they
00:02:46
seeked out information more often from influencers about
00:02:49
these different categories than the general US adults did.
00:02:53
Interestingly enough, when it came to media recommendations,
00:02:58
74% of Gen Zers seeked out recommendations from influencers
00:03:02
and creators, versus only 49% of adults.
00:03:05
Entrepreneurship hopefully they're listening to this
00:03:08
podcast 40% of Gen Zers seek that information from
00:03:12
influencers and creators, versus only 27% from adults.
00:03:16
Obviously, things like fashion and beauty, dating and
00:03:19
relationships these categories it was just way higher for Gen Z
00:03:23
than US adults.
00:03:25
So just another reminder of how much the younger the generation
00:03:29
, the more they seem to trust influencers and creators.
00:03:33
So some good data to take home to your management if you're
00:03:37
trying to serve that market.
00:03:38
Obviously, and the increasingly importance of collaborating
00:03:41
with creators and working on influencer marketing in those
00:03:44
companies targeting that demographic.
00:03:46
So some more interesting data that came out Threads actually
00:03:50
reached 275 million monthly active users.
00:03:54
Now, to me it sounded like a lot.
00:03:56
It was only launched in July of 2023.
00:03:59
Obviously, it has a ways to go, because Instagram has way more
00:04:02
users than that, but I think it is a healthy, active user base.
00:04:06
Now, if you're curious, I did a little bit of research Things
00:04:08
like Snapchat have 800 million monthly active users.
00:04:11
Pinterest has more than 500 million monthly active users.
00:04:15
X announced that they have over 600 million monthly active
00:04:18
users.
00:04:19
I highly doubt it.
00:04:20
I guess it's possible, but I don't think that Threads 275 is
00:04:25
nothing to laugh about.
00:04:26
And, once again, I am on Threads every day and every day
00:04:31
I see new brands and people send me follow requests, so I know
00:04:35
it is growing in its user base and in its activity.
00:04:39
So if you haven't been on Threads yet, I highly recommend
00:04:42
you check it out.
00:04:43
And, by the way, you can manage your Threadsnet account from
00:04:47
your PC or desktop.
00:04:48
It is not mobile only like Instagram has been, and you can
00:04:52
even use tools like I use Social B to actually post to Threads
00:04:55
like I do any other network.
00:04:57
So there's really no reason.
00:04:58
If you're posting to other networks, there's really no
00:05:01
reason why you shouldn't be on Thread threads today, as we
00:05:04
close 2024 very soon.
00:05:06
And speaking of X, I mentioned this before you can block
00:05:09
someone, but X just started their new policy they started to
00:05:15
implement it of even if you block someone, they can still
00:05:20
see your content.
00:05:21
So if your posts are set to public, accounts you have
00:05:25
blocked will be able to view them, but they will not be able
00:05:28
to engage, which, to me, clearly defeats the whole purpose of a
00:05:31
block.
00:05:32
It's not really a block, it just means they can't engage
00:05:34
with the content.
00:05:35
But people block people for sometimes very serious reasons.
00:05:39
So this is another reason why it said that 500 X users
00:05:43
went to Blue Sky and I expect more and more users to leave.
00:05:47
I just don't see how it's going to get any growth going forward
00:05:51
, but I might be wrong.
00:05:52
I am still on X, believe it or not.
00:05:55
In October of 2024, I actually saw a slight increase in traffic
00:06:00
from X.
00:06:00
So maybe my people are still there from heck.
00:06:02
So maybe my people are still there, but I do think, compared
00:06:04
to other networks, it has lost a lot of its unique energy that
00:06:08
it used to have because of its active user base.
00:06:18
On other news, well, I couldn't give you any news updates
00:06:19
without talking about AI, and TechCrunch had a really, really
00:06:22
interesting article talking about how OpenAI released its
00:06:23
chat GPT search to take on Google.
00:06:25
Yet it still has a long way to go, meaning that specifically,
00:06:30
it said, for very, very short searches.
00:06:33
So if you use chat GPT and you type in like a long sentence or
00:06:36
a paragraph, you ask for instructions, it's really good.
00:06:38
Right, it can be Google.
00:06:40
But on the flip side, when it comes to very, very short
00:06:43
prompts like Celtic score these are examples actually in the
00:06:46
post Celtic score cotton socks, library hours these are things
00:06:50
that ChatGPD search just did not perform nearly well on
00:06:55
traditional search engine like Google.
00:07:01
And when we want to use something for more long tail
00:07:05
searches or searches where we want to write complete sentences
00:07:08
, where we might want to use something like ChatGPT search.
00:07:11
So, nothing that I recommend you do immediately, but, once
00:07:15
again, we need to understand the nuances and how the
00:07:17
technologies differ and how we might use them in the future so
00:07:21
that we can better optimize our sites for SEO.
00:07:23
I think, whether it comes to chat GPT and chat GPT search or
00:07:27
even voice search, just being able to respond to more
00:07:30
long-term or long tail, I should say questions is a best
00:07:35
practice in your SEO, and this could come in the form of
00:07:38
headings, it could come in the form of FAQ schema, but I think
00:07:41
it's going to be something that, increasingly, we need to do
00:07:44
more of, if we have not already been doing that in our web
00:07:47
content.
00:07:51
All right, as for personal updates, well, it's now been six
00:07:54
weeks and four weeks respectively, since maximizing
00:07:58
LinkedIn for business growth and digital threads went on sale,
00:08:00
and now I enter what I am calling the N plus one period.
00:08:06
I think with any launch and I don't like to say launch,
00:08:09
because I think they're all experiments I took a month by
00:08:12
month approach.
00:08:13
So three months before publication, I wanted to do this
00:08:16
two months before this, one month before this, and I think,
00:08:19
whether you're starting a new company, launching a new product
00:08:21
, I think we should be taking the same approach.
00:08:24
So obviously, the first month, you know, n plus zero, or the
00:08:27
first month of publication, it kept me really, really busy and
00:08:31
I'm finally able to sort of make more time to strategize on
00:08:36
other parts of my business, develop other content, and now
00:08:39
the promotion shifts into a new phase.
00:08:41
So, excited for what the future will bring, continue to get
00:08:45
great reviews and if you are someone that has read either of
00:08:48
those books, I would be really honored if you took a minute to
00:08:51
review it and literally send me the screenshot to my email or
00:08:54
anywhere on social.
00:08:55
My email, by the way, is neilneilschafercom and I would
00:08:58
love to thank you for that.
00:08:59
On other personal updates, I am now seriously considering the
00:09:04
importance of email and it is in my SCS framework and digital
00:09:08
threads.
00:09:09
It is equally important as it is to search and social.
00:09:11
Considering how important it is , I am seriously right now in a
00:09:16
test to see if I want to migrate from a traditional email
00:09:20
marketing platform ie ConvertKit to a newsletter-based platform
00:09:25
ie Beehive and it's been a really, really interesting time
00:09:30
I've spent in Beehive and really understanding not only its
00:09:34
differences but re-imagining email content, web content,
00:09:39
building relationships, monetizing content.
00:09:42
It's really sparked a lot of imagination and creativity and I
00:09:46
can't wait to share this with you on a new episode in the not
00:09:50
so distant future.
00:09:51
I do plan over the next few days to make my final decision
00:09:55
and I'm really curious if any of you are using a Beehive or a
00:09:57
Substack.
00:09:58
I would love to hear from you and hear your experiences and,
00:10:01
in fact, if you're a Beehive user and I end up using Beehive,
00:10:03
we and hear your experiences and, in fact, if you're a
00:10:04
Beehive user and I end up using Beehive, we can recommend each
00:10:05
other's newsletters, which would be pretty cool.
00:10:07
So feel free to reach out to me .
00:10:08
We'd love to hear from you.
00:10:09
And now I want to move on to today's interview.
00:10:11
So I have Ben Gutman.
00:10:14
He is the author of a fantastic book called Simply Put why
00:10:19
Clear Messages Win and how to Design them.
00:10:22
He is a former agency owner professor at Baruch University
00:10:28
in New York City.
00:10:29
Really great guy.
00:10:29
We had a really fantastic conversation, which also
00:10:32
included the topic of artificial intelligence, as you can
00:10:35
imagine.
00:10:35
So without further ado, here's my interview with Ben Gutmann.
00:10:39
Speaker 2: You're listening to your digital marketing coach.
00:10:42
This is Neil Schaefer, listening to your digital
00:10:48
marketing coach.
00:10:48
Speaker 1: This is Neil Schaefer .
00:10:49
Hey everybody, this is Neil Schaefer.
00:10:53
Welcome to another live stream episode of the your Digital
00:10:54
Marketing Coach podcast.
00:10:55
Today we're going to be talking about communication.
00:10:57
I like to say that content is the currency of social media,
00:11:02
really of digital media, but within the content.
00:11:05
How are we communicating that content?
00:11:08
How are we getting our message over to the other person?
00:11:12
When I was a freshman in high school, my English professor, mr
00:11:16
Poe who has no relation to Edgar Allen Poe but who I still
00:11:19
fondly remember to this day always said and he would use the
00:11:22
S word it Schaefer, vigorous writing is concise, and as I
00:11:27
write books, prepare speeches, I always try to pare things down
00:11:32
and I realized that the fewer words that I can use, the more
00:11:35
powerful and the easier it is to really convey what I want to
00:11:40
talk about.
00:11:40
So we're going to get really deep into this with the pro at
00:11:43
this, mr Ben Gutman.
00:11:45
He's actually the author of this book called Simply Put, and
00:11:49
I'd say prepare for the launch of my own digital threads behind
00:11:52
me.
00:11:52
I've been on a number of book award sites looking to actually
00:11:57
apply for a book award for that book, and I see that Simply Put
00:12:00
has already won gazillion awards .
00:12:03
Ben used to have his own marketing agency, so he's going
00:12:05
to be right at home here with all the listeners of your
00:12:08
Digital Marketing Coach.
00:12:09
And he also is a professor of digital marketing at Baruch
00:12:14
College in New York.
00:12:15
So always an honor to have a fellow professor, a fellow
00:12:19
author, fellow marketer on the podcast.
00:12:21
So, ben, welcome to the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.
00:12:24
Speaker 3: Thanks so much for having me, neil Great, to be
00:12:26
here.
00:12:26
What a wonderful introduction.
00:12:28
Speaker 1: I'm really excited for this conversation, so let's
00:12:30
just get right into it.
00:12:31
Digital marketing agency.
00:12:33
Teaching digital marketing at Brute College.
00:12:35
You mentioned that you're doing various gigs across the country
00:12:38
consulting what have you and I assume it's all around this
00:12:41
topic of communicating clearly, Simply put, why clear messages
00:12:46
win and how to design them.
00:12:47
So, Ben, how did you get to this point where you decided to
00:12:51
write a book on clear messaging?
00:12:54
Speaker 3: Oh yeah.
00:12:55
So I mean you mentioned a lot of the kind of biographical
00:12:58
outlines there, but basically right out of college I ended up
00:13:01
starting a marketing agency.
00:13:02
I was a big student government nerd when I was there and I had
00:13:06
a professor who was, you know, thankfully somebody who you know
00:13:11
was kind of in the model for what I ended up doing.
00:13:14
He ran a marketing agency and he ended up teaching part-time
00:13:17
also at Baruch College where I was going as a student, and he
00:13:22
basically comes up to me one day after class and says I know
00:13:24
you're looking to maybe start your own thing at some point.
00:13:26
We need some help with digital, maybe we can figure something
00:13:29
out.
00:13:29
And so that was back in like 2011.
00:13:33
And shortly after that I piled in my old like 1994 Honda Accord
00:13:38
, drove to their office, slapped our logo on the wall, grabbed a
00:13:41
couple of friends and we ran that agency for 10 years.
00:13:44
We started with a local ice cream shop and the local camera
00:13:47
shop and bit by bit we ended up working our way to the NFL and
00:13:52
Isle of New York and Comcast all these really wonderful clients
00:13:55
that we've had over the years.
00:13:56
It's been a ton of fun and about two years ago, a little
00:13:59
bit more than that.
00:14:00
Now we decided to sell it.
00:14:01
We said you know it was a great run, it was a great opportunity
00:14:04
of it.
00:14:04
Now we decided to sell it.
00:14:05
We said you know it was a great run, it was a great opportunity
00:14:07
.
00:14:07
And you know we were looking at kind of the next stage of
00:14:11
everything.
00:14:11
Luckily was able to, you know, find a couple of deals that
00:14:13
we're very happy with and all of our employees had jobs and all
00:14:15
of our clients had homes.
00:14:17
That was really important.
00:14:18
But sold that and kind of went out and started to focus on a
00:14:22
few other things, including teaching, including writing and
00:14:26
doing some independent consulting work in the last few
00:14:28
years.
00:14:29
But what's interesting is when you're doing that, when you're
00:14:32
in the kind of trenches of running the agency, you don't
00:14:36
have the time as much to think about why the things that you're
00:14:39
doing work or you know the kind of the psychology behind them,
00:14:44
the you know the science behind what you're doing.
00:14:46
You kind of are just there and you're doing it and you're kind
00:14:49
of going through straightforward .
00:14:50
But when you have the moment to step back a little bit, I
00:14:53
didn't have to do as much day to day of managing the team and
00:14:56
dealing with all of the different projects we had, I
00:14:58
kept kind of thinking about well , what is it that makes
00:15:01
something work in terms of marketing context, in terms of
00:15:04
communication context?
00:15:05
And this also, coincidentally, is the same question that was
00:15:08
coming up again and again for my students, which is how do you,
00:15:11
what's the difference between a message that works and a message
00:15:13
that doesn't right?
00:15:14
And it turns out that the answer, appropriately, is simple
00:15:18
.
00:15:19
You know that the messages, the communicators that are effective
00:15:22
are simple, they're easily understood.
00:15:23
The communicators that are effective are simple, they're
00:15:24
easily understood, they're easily perceived and they're
00:15:26
easily acted upon.
00:15:27
And the ones that aren't tend to be the ones that miss.
00:15:31
The advertisements that fall flat, the emails that get
00:15:33
ignored, the proposals that lose All of those things are often
00:15:36
the ones that are the more complicated, harder to
00:15:39
understand ones.
00:15:39
Now, that's not a particularly revelatory fact, but what is
00:15:44
interesting is that the why behind that is surprisingly deep
00:15:48
and the how is also pretty difficult.
00:15:51
So that's what simply put why clear messages win and how to
00:15:54
design them.
00:15:55
My book that's what it ended up being about was looking into
00:15:58
why that's the case and then what we can do to be better at
00:16:02
communicating in a marketing context and beyond.
00:16:04
Speaker 1: So I'm assuming and thank you for that story that
00:16:07
really was concise and wrapped up 15 years in a few minutes.
00:16:11
Thank you for that.
00:16:12
So I think that drew a very clear path.
00:16:15
So as you began writing your book then I'm assuming that
00:16:19
maybe you did some research, some interviews, to try to
00:16:22
create more of like a formula, understand patterns.
00:16:26
I'm assuming maybe this goes into things like human
00:16:28
psychology.
00:16:29
I think of Dr Gialdini's book Influence.
00:16:31
What were some of the directions that your research
00:16:33
pulled you in as you were trying to better understand and find
00:16:37
some data to support why simple messages win in marketing?
00:16:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, you mentioned Influence by Robert Gialdini.
00:16:43
I actually I read that book when I was in college and it
00:16:46
became one of the most foundational books for
00:16:48
everything I did in terms of working and teaching and beyond
00:16:51
that, and that was one of the books I looked at as a model
00:16:54
when I was putting this together .
00:16:55
The reason I respect that book and Dr Cialdini's work so much
00:16:59
is that it's science-based, there is research behind it.
00:17:02
It's not just a bunch of war stories, it's not just kind of
00:17:09
like.
00:17:09
You know, here's a cool case study and then we're going to
00:17:10
extrapolate a thousand times from it.
00:17:11
It is well what, what is the mechanisms going on in our head
00:17:12
that's causing us to behave in a certain way and to make certain
00:17:15
decisions?
00:17:16
And you know a little bit of like peeling back the the
00:17:19
curtain in terms of like when you're writing a book.
00:17:21
You know what, what terms of like when you're writing a book.
00:17:24
You know what, what, what goes for your head on this.
00:17:26
You know a little bit.
00:17:30
Actually, one step further.
00:17:30
My background is part of our business.
00:17:31
At our previous agency we had a division where we did a lot of
00:17:32
work with public, with authors and publishers, and we helped
00:17:35
them.
00:17:35
You know, kind of sell their books and go through and so, and
00:17:38
you know, I ended up reading a lot of books as part of that in
00:17:41
terms of business books, health books, everything else.
00:17:43
There's basically three categories that business books
00:17:47
fall into.
00:17:47
You have the ones that are the executives and founders that
00:17:50
often end up being kind of war stories A lot of times.
00:17:52
You have the ones that are the journalists, and they often end
00:17:55
up being really good stories, but maybe a little bit light on
00:17:58
what the content is.
00:17:59
And then you have the ones by academics that end up being
00:18:08
really kind of dense in terms of what the content is, but also
00:18:09
dense in terms of what the writing is right.
00:18:10
So the ones that end up being really good books a lot of times
00:18:10
, the ones that can pull the best from all three of those,
00:18:11
and that's what I tried to do in terms of the style of writing
00:18:15
this and the act of writing this book.
00:18:16
But going back to what the meat of the research is is, when I
00:18:22
was able to take a look at this, I was able to really narrow in
00:18:27
on this one mechanism that ends up being the, the differentiator
00:18:31
between something being effective and something not
00:18:33
being as effective.
00:18:34
And that's this idea of fluency.
00:18:35
Right?
00:18:36
And so we know the word fluency .
00:18:38
Right, you can be fluent in English or Spanish or Mandarin.
00:18:40
Where we're fluent, things are easy.
00:18:42
Right, you can be fluent in chess or cheese or checkers or
00:18:45
whatever.
00:18:45
It is like the, what we're interested in, what we're fluent
00:18:49
in, it just comes like flowing.
00:18:52
It flows.
00:18:52
That's actually the Latin root of the word fluence, the word
00:18:55
flow, and that's what it feels like.
00:18:57
But if you ask cognitive scientists about the word
00:18:59
fluency, they're going to say this describes how easy is it
00:19:04
for you to take something from out in the world, stick it in
00:19:06
your head and make sense of it?
00:19:07
Right, how easy is for you to see the advertisement, to read
00:19:11
the advertisement and to understand what it means?
00:19:13
And that is in a whole host of different cat arenas, that is,
00:19:19
some associated with all sorts of positive stuff.
00:19:22
When something is more fluent, we are more likely to like it,
00:19:26
we are more likely to buy it and we are more likely to trust it
00:19:29
All the things that we want from a marketing perspective and
00:19:32
from just general communication perspective.
00:19:34
When something's less fluent, the opposite's true.
00:19:37
The inverse happens we don't like it, we don't trust it and
00:19:40
we don't buy it.
00:19:40
All the stuff that we don't want to happen.
00:19:42
We don't trust it and we don't buy it.
00:19:43
All the stuff that we don't want to happen.
00:19:44
So that's what we're trying to get to here is the state of
00:19:47
fluency, and what the problem is is that, while we want
00:19:51
something to be fluent, when we're receiving communication,
00:19:55
when we are sending communication, we are the
00:19:57
advertiser, the speaker, the person writing that email.
00:20:00
We are pulled in the opposite direction.
00:20:02
We are pulled towards complicated.
00:20:04
There's internal incentives, like our additive bias and
00:20:07
complexity bias, that push us to add, add, add instead of cut
00:20:12
things down, make things simpler .
00:20:13
And there's external factors in terms of what the demands of
00:20:16
the marketplace are.
00:20:17
Right, the boss wants to have more of their stuff in there.
00:20:20
Your resume needs to have these extra bullets, the news cycle
00:20:23
needs these things, and all of a sudden you end up at this point
00:20:25
where the receiver wants something over here.
00:20:26
Sender can only really get something over here, and then
00:20:29
everything else.
00:20:29
Everything kind of falls into the middle.
00:20:32
Speaker 1: Gotcha.
00:20:32
So that you know, I'm just thinking like TikTok and you
00:20:37
want to post something that's very well received on TikTok,
00:20:39
but unless you yourself understand getting back to the
00:20:42
language of fluency unless you really understand what user
00:20:45
expectations are on that network , when you create something,
00:20:48
it's based on your own biases, the way you think things are
00:20:51
going to be well-received, without really putting yourself
00:20:53
in the feet of that user, which requires, like you, reading a
00:20:57
lot of business books, time spent on the platform in order
00:20:59
to gain that fluency.
00:21:00
So what you say makes a heck of a lot of sense.
00:21:03
So, with all that in mind, you know, and not to give away
00:21:06
everything from your book of how to design simple messages,
00:21:09
because we want everyone to go out and buy the book, you know
00:21:11
what?
00:21:11
What is one or two principle things that we should understand
00:21:15
about how to design the simple message.
00:21:16
And I think, ben, you know, maybe at the end we could talk a
00:21:18
little bit about generative AI and messaging, something I'm
00:21:29
sure you get asked a lot about, because I find whenever I go to
00:21:31
a chat GPT asking for messaging, it is always a long message.
00:21:32
It is the opposite of something that is very, very simple and
00:21:33
obviously for other reasons.
00:21:34
I don't think it's good messaging.
00:21:35
It's very robotic, not human, not emotional, what have you?
00:21:38
But taking that aside, how do we simple messages that that get
00:21:43
through to our target?
00:21:44
Speaker 3: audience.
00:21:45
Yeah, absolutely yeah, I'm glad .
00:21:47
I'm glad we'll talk about some ai stuff later, because I've
00:21:49
been I've been doing a lot of work adjacent to that recently.
00:21:52
But getting back to how do we bridge that gap and I look at
00:21:56
this as a design problem, because that's actually my
00:21:59
functional background is in design I say, well, how do we,
00:22:02
how do we deal with the constraints, how do we deal with
00:22:04
the resources we have?
00:22:05
And I look at this for the lens of five principles.
00:22:08
The science will tell us that there's kind of five main
00:22:11
principles about how we can be more fluent and, ultimately,
00:22:15
simpler.
00:22:16
And this is not a checklist, it's not a step-by-step plan.
00:22:19
It is in five kind of values that the more we think about
00:22:23
them, the better we're going to be at getting there.
00:22:25
And so the first one is beneficial.
00:22:27
What does it matter to the receiver?
00:22:30
What's in it for them?
00:22:31
You know, this is something that is kind of sales 101, right
00:22:35
, we buy benefits, we don't buy features.
00:22:37
But it's also one of those things that we forget all the
00:22:40
time when we're doing any sort of communication.
00:22:43
The second one is focused.
00:22:45
Are you trying to say one thing or multiple things at once?
00:22:50
Is this one idea you're trying to communicate or is it three
00:22:53
ideas in a trench coat?
00:22:54
The third is salient.
00:22:56
Does your message stand out from the noise?
00:22:59
And talk a little bit about Tik TOK a moment ago.
00:23:02
Tik TOK, instagram, twitter, all these different platforms
00:23:05
endless scroll for the past 15 years or so, but endless growth.
00:23:08
How do we do something that scroll stopping?
00:23:09
That's often what we're looking at when we talk about salience.
00:23:11
Salience is something that's contrasting, that stands out,
00:23:14
that's noticeable.
00:23:15
We have lots and lots of noise in the environment.
00:23:18
How do we stand out from it?
00:23:19
We only notice the contrast, by the way.
00:23:26
The fourth one is empathetic.
00:23:27
Are you speaking in a language that the audience understands?
00:23:29
Are you meeting them where they are?
00:23:30
Is this the language that they literally understand?
00:23:32
Is this where they are emotionally?
00:23:34
Is this where they are in terms of their motivations?
00:23:36
All of these things are important for us to be able to
00:23:39
actually connect with the audience using speaking in the
00:23:42
same language in all contexts.
00:23:44
And then, finally, it's minimal.
00:23:45
Have you cut out everything that isn't important and left
00:23:49
only what is and what we're talking about?
00:23:51
Minimal is not about necessarily the fewest number of
00:23:55
words, the fewest number of paragraphs or pages or megabytes
00:23:59
or whatever, it is, the least amount of friction, the least
00:24:03
amount of friction.
00:24:03
If you look from a user experience perspective, what you
00:24:06
measure is friction.
00:24:07
You're saying, okay, well, you put friction between the things
00:24:10
you know in front of the thing you don't want somebody to do.
00:24:11
You remove friction from the thing that you want somebody to
00:24:14
do.
00:24:14
But we're talking about minimals.
00:24:15
We're trying to reduce the amount of friction that there is
00:24:18
between what you're trying to communicate and what the
00:24:21
receiver is able to understand.
00:24:23
Speaker 1: So, ben, when you put together or when you work with
00:24:25
teams or based on your recommendations, if I'm a
00:24:28
marketer and I'm putting together an email sequence, I'm
00:24:31
putting up a Facebook ad caption , I'm putting up a social media
00:24:34
marketing caption, whatever it is, are you saying that?
00:24:37
Would your recommendation be, with every piece of content,
00:24:41
before you approve it, to go through the list of is it
00:24:44
beneficial, is it focused, is it salient, is it empathetic and
00:24:48
is it minimal?
00:24:49
Would you recommend that process and I'm assuming at
00:24:52
first, it is very hard to decipher and, just like anything
00:24:56
, it's muscle memory the more you do, the better you get at it
00:24:58
.
00:24:58
But would that be your recommendation of designing a
00:25:02
simple message, of really taking it through?
00:25:03
And obviously, if you want to know more about each one of
00:25:06
those five things, you should be buying the book.
00:25:07
Simply put, but is that sort of the process that you do that
00:25:10
you recommend your clients?
00:25:12
Speaker 3: I would say in a way, yes, Right, and I don't like to
00:25:15
frame it as like you kind of go for each step and think of it.
00:25:18
But if you, you know, you take these and you almost jot them on
00:25:22
a post-it note and stick it on the side of your monitor, you
00:25:24
stick it up on the bulletin board, you just drill it into
00:25:27
your brain and it becomes something that you think about
00:25:30
as part of it.
00:25:31
Not everything has to be all of these all the time, but the
00:25:35
more you activate on these values, the better you're going
00:25:40
to be in terms of achieving that state of fluency.
00:25:43
It's not necessarily that there's a hard word count here.
00:25:47
It's not that there's something where you have to say this
00:25:50
magic piece.
00:25:51
There are lots of little tactics and tools I have in the book
00:25:54
which help us kind of work on each one of these values.
00:25:56
But I would say the answer is a sort of yes on that, which is
00:26:01
if you have these as something that you think about that as
00:26:04
you're going through, if it's an email, if it's a piece of the
00:26:07
social calendar, if it's your pitch deck and you're thinking
00:26:11
is this beneficial?
00:26:12
Is this something that's empathetic?
00:26:14
Is it minimal?
00:26:15
All the stuff that you want to make sure you hit.
00:26:16
That's going to be the most important thing.
00:26:19
It's kind of that foundational mindset shift instead of just
00:26:21
saying there's a magic word here or there.
00:26:23
Speaker 1: And if you were to develop a mini GPT for that, I
00:26:26
think you could become very profitable.
00:26:27
But anyway, I'm sure we'll talk about it.
00:26:29
Speaker 3: Funny enough, and I'll spoil a bit later a friend
00:26:32
of mine who is also an author has a podcast that was on his
00:26:35
show and he was saying that he took my book, he took part of
00:26:39
the lessons from it and he fed it into.
00:26:41
He made a GPT model of it and he did an A-B test between one
00:26:46
email that he sent and another email that he sent, and the
00:26:49
email had a 40% better click-through rate for the one
00:26:53
that was simply putified, I guess, versus the one that's not
00:26:56
and so unscientific sample.
00:26:57
But it was something that made me very proud.
00:26:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, Get a hundred of those samples, then it
00:27:00
becomes a little bit more scientific.
00:27:02
But that's very, very cool.
00:27:03
I can see how that happens.
00:27:04
So you know, we talk about the message, but the core of
00:27:08
marketing, whether we like it or not, is also persuasion, right,
00:27:12
so now we know how to simplify Well and it's not a simple
00:27:15
process, but obviously the concept of simplifying our
00:27:18
message.
00:27:19
How then do we come more of a persuasive communicator?
00:27:23
Now that we have and I'm assuming, the simple message is
00:27:26
going to help us become more persuasive what else can we do
00:27:28
to really increase that level of persuasion in our messaging?
00:27:32
Speaker 3: So you hit it on the nail.
00:27:33
I mean, when I look at what the goals of communication are,
00:27:36
they're in the marketing or leadership context.
00:27:39
They're often basically two which persuasion and information
00:27:42
.
00:27:42
So is this persuasive, is this informational?
00:27:45
And I think this is something that's obviously impactful for
00:27:49
both.
00:27:49
If you are in a marketing context, you're doing a lot more
00:27:51
persuasive communication and it's very important.
00:27:54
I'll dive in a little bit on the first one.
00:27:56
Beneficial, because I lied actually before when I said this
00:28:01
isn't in a particular order.
00:28:02
Beneficial first for a reason because I think it's the most
00:28:05
important one and it's the most overlooked one.
00:28:07
It's what does it matter to the receiver?
00:28:09
Right, if you were ever in sales, you're in marketing
00:28:11
copywriting you often hear the first week of training people
00:28:15
buy benefits, they don't buy features.
00:28:16
We don't buy the thing, we buy what the thing does for us.
00:28:19
This is something that is so often forgotten by people who
00:28:25
are doing marketing copy, by people who are, who are giving a
00:28:28
speech, a sales pitch, because the benefits aren't always
00:28:32
visible.
00:28:33
We crack open our five senses and we look at something and we
00:28:36
say well, it has this color, it has this many battery milliamps,
00:28:39
it has this many pixels on the screen.
00:28:41
It comes in these different finishes and we say these are
00:28:45
all these great things go, you know, buy it Right.
00:28:49
But that's not why we, that's not why we buy things Right.
00:28:52
You know, there's a great sentence that I tell my students
00:28:55
every semester.
00:28:56
Well, frankly, I'll tell them, if you don't remember anything
00:28:59
else from this course, or even this entire degree, if you
00:29:02
remember this, you're going to be in a better situation than
00:29:04
most other people who are marketing, which is it's not for
00:29:07
me.
00:29:07
By the way, it's from theodore levin, who taught at harvard in
00:29:09
the 60s.
00:29:10
It's people don't want a quarter inch drill, they want a
00:29:13
quarter inch hole.
00:29:14
Right, people don't want a quarter inch drill, they want a
00:29:17
quarter inch hole.
00:29:18
Brilliant, we don't want the thing, we want the thing does
00:29:20
for us, right.
00:29:21
And there's a lot of other ways to look at this.
00:29:23
You know, nobody wants a mousetrap, they want dead mice.
00:29:25
Right, we buy through a product to a solution, right, we want
00:29:31
the state that we are in because we have that product, because
00:29:35
we have that service.
00:29:36
We don't necessarily want that thing always.
00:29:38
And just by asking yourself a simple question appropriately,
00:29:45
you can start to get from the features to the benefits.
00:29:49
You can start to get through there.
00:29:50
And that question is so what?
00:29:53
So what?
00:29:54
Let me give you an example.
00:29:56
The one I love to talk about is mint toothpaste.
00:29:59
So mint flavor on your toothpaste, that is a feature.
00:30:01
Right, you can crack open your senses, you can smell it.
00:30:04
You can smell it, you can taste it, you can see the color for
00:30:07
it, but that's not what we're buying.
00:30:10
We don't really want mint flavor on our toothpastes.
00:30:13
Well, so what about that?
00:30:14
Well, that means I have fresh breath, right, okay?
00:30:18
Well, that starts to be something that jives a little
00:30:22
bit more of what I actually want .
00:30:23
I don't want mint toothpaste, I want fresh breath, and we can
00:30:26
call that the functional benefit .
00:30:27
Right, that's the first level.
00:30:28
That's a change in the real world that you get because of
00:30:32
the feature.
00:30:33
But that's not where we have to stop.
00:30:35
We have to go two more times.
00:30:36
So we say fresh breath.
00:30:38
So what?
00:30:39
Okay?
00:30:40
Well, what does that mean?
00:30:40
That means that I'm going to have a more successful date
00:30:44
tonight, no-transcript.
00:31:14
And we can all of a sudden we've just asking a very simple
00:31:17
question three times get from a feature that exists in the real
00:31:21
world mint flavor in your toothpaste to something as deep
00:31:24
as love and belonging needs.
00:31:26
And then we can stand there we kind of hit bedrock, basically,
00:31:29
and we can turn around and say, okay, well, we want to message
00:31:32
accordingly, going outwards, and every situation is going to be
00:31:35
different.
00:31:35
You want to maybe invest a little bit more in features or
00:31:38
functional benefit, emotional benefit.
00:31:39
But if we're able to stand in that framework and say, okay,
00:31:42
well, the reason people are actually doing this is for love
00:31:43
and belonging, that kind of sets our direction, and then we can
00:31:46
start talking about the emotional benefit, maybe in our
00:31:48
headline or the first part of our website or whatever it is,
00:31:54
and then we talk about functional benefits and then we
00:31:56
talk about the features.
00:31:57
If you layer things that way, it starts to connect a lot
00:32:01
deeper in terms of how we actually make our decisions it
00:32:04
starts to connect a lot deeper in terms of how we actually make
00:32:06
our decisions.
00:32:08
Speaker 1: And as you were speaking, I'm thinking of that
00:32:09
Holiday Inn Express TV commercial that it wasn't about
00:32:11
the fact that the room was cheaper, quiet, what have you.
00:32:12
It was the fact that the next day, whoever stayed in there is
00:32:15
going to do great in their business meeting because they
00:32:17
stayed at that hotel.
00:32:18
Just getting to that one of those cores, it wasn't like
00:32:20
going out on a date and those physiological needs and I'm glad
00:32:23
you brought up Maslow's hierarchy of needs because it
00:32:25
comes up in almost every conversation on this podcast.
00:32:28
But I thought that's where you're going, so simplified
00:32:30
message, persuasive message, and that's a really, really easy
00:32:33
concept.
00:32:34
So what the repetition to sort of unpeel those layers of
00:32:38
benefits?
00:32:39
One other thing that I want to talk about, since you work with
00:32:42
a lot of authors, and it's funny because I have people reaching
00:32:44
out to me saying, neil, I want to sell this product or this
00:32:47
course and they don't have an audience.
00:32:49
And it's like, dude, you have to build an audience.
00:32:52
It's like if I come out with a new ebook and I send it to my
00:32:56
mailing list, I'm going to get incredible response.
00:32:58
Put it up on a website, I'm still going to get a response.
00:33:01
Do a Facebook cold ad and I'll get some response, but those
00:33:04
people are off my list a month later.
00:33:06
So it's this cold, warm, hot audience.
00:33:09
So how does one go about better connecting with their audiences
00:33:14
through messaging?
00:33:14
Everybody here probably has a social media profile at least a
00:33:17
LinkedIn profile, if not Instagram, facebook and they
00:33:20
want to be able and obviously, if you're a company, they want
00:33:22
to be able to build not just a bigger audience, but, I would
00:33:25
argue that, more likely to act upon when you need that help,
00:33:29
when you have a product, people that are going to be out there
00:33:32
to support you or your company.
00:33:33
So how do we go about connecting with our audience
00:33:36
through everything you've been talking about today?
00:33:38
Speaker 3: Oh, absolutely, and I mean to be to be frank.
00:33:40
I don't have a million people in my audience.
00:33:42
I have a small audience, but there's the old adage, though,
00:33:45
which is it's better to have 1000 people who will buy
00:33:47
everything you do than to have, you know, a million people that
00:33:50
don't really give a hoot.
00:33:51
Amen is probably empathy.
00:33:58
So many people.
00:34:00
They think that I'm writing an email that's going out to a
00:34:04
hundred thousand people or whatever it is, and they think
00:34:07
that they're speaking to a hundred thousand people, but
00:34:10
they're really not.
00:34:10
They're speaking to one person a hundred thousand different
00:34:13
times.
00:34:14
Every bit of communication you've ever had has been
00:34:16
one-to-one, right.
00:34:17
Crowds don't really exist, right?
00:34:19
It doesn't matter to the.
00:34:20
You know, we saw at the political conventions last
00:34:23
couple of weeks, people getting up on stage in front of
00:34:25
thousands of people in the audience and millions of people
00:34:27
at home.
00:34:28
Every single person there was still in their own minds making
00:34:32
their determination, their decision about how they felt,
00:34:34
about a certain you know, political speech or sales pitch
00:34:37
or whatever it is, Every commercial that goes to the
00:34:39
Superbowl.
00:34:40
A hundred million people still.
00:34:41
Ultimately, it's 100 million people in their own heads that
00:34:44
are making that decision, that are hearing that commercial and
00:34:47
deciding if they want to buy it, which it X, Y, Z or not.
00:34:50
And so that, I think, is one of the biggest pitfalls people fall
00:34:55
into is speaking to a crowd and not an individual person.
00:34:57
Just by kind of changing your perspective on that, you're
00:35:02
going to start to produce content.
00:35:03
That's going to be a lot better if it's in your emails or on
00:35:05
your website.
00:35:06
You're going to give better speeches.
00:35:08
You're going to give better sales pitches when you're
00:35:11
speaking to one person and you can go through and do a whole
00:35:14
big marketing research thing and get customer avatars and
00:35:19
personas, and that certainly is worthwhile for a lot of
00:35:22
companies.
00:35:22
Know the customer avatars and personas, and that certainly is
00:35:25
worthwhile for a lot of companies.
00:35:27
But at the very least, you can take out a little post-it note
00:35:29
and draw a stick figure on it Again, slap it to the other side
00:35:34
of your monitor and say, oh, this is who my email's for right
00:35:35
, and I'm just writing to this person.
00:35:36
Every single time I write that newsletter, every single time I
00:35:37
write that blog post, every single time I send an ad out
00:35:40
into the universe, it's to this person.
00:35:43
Speaker 1: Ben, thank you and it's advice.
00:35:44
I've heard a lot.
00:35:45
If you're writing a book, think of that one person.
00:35:48
So do you recommend?
00:35:49
I mean, the challenge is that companies often have multiple
00:35:53
target audiences, multiple avatars, but do you recommend,
00:35:56
at a minimum, that we all create an avatar of who we think our
00:35:59
perfect follower, our perfect potential client, perfect
00:36:03
partner?
00:36:04
Do you recommend that we all sort of draw that up and be as
00:36:07
specific as possible and then put that in front of our monitor
00:36:09
?
00:36:09
Is that like an exercise you would recommend we all go
00:36:12
through?
00:36:13
Speaker 3: That's a great exercise.
00:36:14
You can go very deep on this stuff, right.
00:36:16
You can say this is the person's name and this is the
00:36:19
photo composite of them and they're wearing this clothing,
00:36:21
they listen to this music.
00:36:22
But you can also just say you know who my audience is?
00:36:26
It's this one friend that I have, like that's the prototype
00:36:29
of it.
00:36:29
It's the.
00:36:30
It's me in the past, right, like I'll tell you, my own writing
00:36:34
for this is I wrote the book that I wanted to read 10 years
00:36:37
prior, right, and so that's who I was talking to.
00:36:40
Was okay, the, the 20year-old me that was starting an agency.
00:36:44
What book would I have really valued at that time in terms of
00:36:49
I didn't really know my stuff, I didn't know what I was doing as
00:36:52
much, and that helped me frame every single thing that I wanted
00:36:57
to do was okay.
00:36:59
Well, this is somebody who's interested in this topic but
00:37:03
maybe doesn't always know everything they want to know,
00:37:06
and that helps shape everything else that you do.
00:37:08
You can go and you can go out and hire.
00:37:11
I have friends that run marketing research firms and
00:37:13
they will do that persona work for a lot of money for very big
00:37:17
companies.
00:37:17
If you can do it, it's often worth it right If you can go out
00:37:21
and pay a bunch of money to get your targeting 100% right.
00:37:24
But with a lot of things there's a pretty steep kind of
00:37:28
benefits curve here where you can do a little bit of work and
00:37:32
you can go a lot further than if you did no work.
00:37:36
Speaker 1: So, as we near the end of our conversation and
00:37:39
thank you for all, this has been amazing advice.
00:37:40
You know, generative AI is something that I tend to ask all
00:37:43
my guests and I think that everybody listening is probably
00:37:47
using ai, whether they know it or not.
00:37:49
They've been using it on a daily basis, but I think we're
00:37:51
more proactively going to chat, gpt or whatever, claude,
00:37:54
whatever tool you use having conversations, and how much that
00:37:58
content is being published in various formats, as is is up to
00:38:02
debate, obviously, but is there any advice that you can give?
00:38:05
I don't know how much, I assume , because it's communication,
00:38:09
it's going to apply to AI as well, but I just want to hear
00:38:11
your thoughts on best practices or no, this isn't going to work
00:38:15
with AI, or?
00:38:16
I think you already gave an example of how putting your
00:38:18
formula into creating a mini GPT , creating custom prompts, can
00:38:22
get you a better response.
00:38:24
So really curious to hear, from a communicator's perspective,
00:38:27
your thoughts on generative AI and how it can be useful and in
00:38:30
what way.
00:38:31
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, obviously it's the most kind of
00:38:34
buzzworthy thing in our field, and really every field, for the
00:38:37
past couple of years, for the last year or so.
00:38:38
It's funny, I just put together a South by Southwest panel
00:38:43
proposal called Enough with the Delving right, and we have a few
00:38:45
really interesting folks who have worked in AI and in
00:38:48
marketing otherwise, because the word delve is a great example
00:38:51
here.
00:38:51
You could use the word delve like humans have used it for a
00:38:54
long time.
00:38:54
But if you look at this statistical kind of probability
00:38:59
of the use of the word delve and how much it's used over the
00:39:02
last year and a half, it has shot up, right.
00:39:04
If you look at the numbers in terms of academic papers, if you
00:39:07
look at in terms of blog post, you know google trends, all
00:39:09
these, everything the word delve has been, has been, you know,
00:39:12
skyrocketing.
00:39:13
If you look at the word innovative, or you know
00:39:17
revolutionary or paradigms, all these different kind of buzzy
00:39:20
words.
00:39:21
If you look at studies of the kind of like meta studies of
00:39:26
other academic papers that have been submitted to journals over
00:39:30
the last two years, the use of these words has skyrocketed
00:39:34
because chachi, pt and bar, everybody, they love those words
00:39:39
.
00:39:39
Yeah, those are the type of words that when you are a, you
00:39:43
know like a 11th grader, like trying to pad out your essay
00:39:46
because you know you have to hit some limit.
00:39:48
Those are the kind of words you drop in.
00:39:50
Those are also the kind of words that ChatGPT and other AIs
00:39:53
love to drop in, and so what you come up with is a lot of
00:39:56
these platforms.
00:39:57
They give you a lot of fluff.
00:39:58
Give you a lot of fluff.
00:40:04
They don't really know and it comes back to the fundamental
00:40:05
piece of this year they don't really know how, like the truth
00:40:07
behind the words that they're they're they're giving you large
00:40:11
language models, give you words that look like the right answer
00:40:15
.
00:40:15
That's, that's the a hundred percent, how these things work
00:40:18
right now.
00:40:18
They don't fundamentally understand, like, the truth
00:40:21
behind the facts that they're spitting out.
00:40:24
They just took all the written words that they've been able to
00:40:27
gobble up and put them into a blender and said, okay, when
00:40:31
somebody's asking for thing X a recipe for key lime pie, I'm
00:40:36
going to.
00:40:37
This is what a recipe tends to look like for key lime pie.
00:40:40
It doesn't understand that this is actually too much sugar, too
00:40:43
much flour, whatever it is.
00:40:44
They just says these are the words that tend to be on a
00:40:47
recipe for key lime pie.
00:40:48
So that doesn't mean that there's no use cases for AI.
00:40:53
But I think that at this current moment there tends to be a
00:40:56
little bit of over-enthusiasm for saying this can write
00:40:59
everything for me, this can replace everything for me,
00:41:01
because what you get is just kind of a big word salad a lot
00:41:04
of times for it.
00:41:05
What it can help you with is to improve the thing that you've
00:41:09
already written.
00:41:10
That is actually the best use case right now, for it is if you
00:41:14
take something that you wrote and if it's a blog post or an
00:41:19
email and you say how can we make this simpler?
00:41:22
And there's a tool in the book I talk about called the thousand
00:41:24
most common words.
00:41:25
And basically, if you, if you look at how English is
00:41:29
distributed, the thousand most common words account for about
00:41:31
75 percent of the language as it's used.
00:41:34
And so if you go and you test something against the thousand
00:41:39
most common words and actually I wrote a, put together a little
00:41:41
piece of software to test this If you go to bengutmancom,
00:41:45
gutman's, two Ts and two Ns, slash the word thousand, just
00:41:48
thousand, you'll see a little tool there.
00:41:50
You can take your blog post or whatever, paste it in and press
00:41:53
a button and it will highlight in red all the different words
00:41:56
that are not part of the thousand most commonly used
00:41:58
words.
00:41:58
And so you can use this as a way to kind of reach kind of
00:42:03
lowest you know, lowest common denominator of of language that
00:42:06
most people understand without going too crazy.
00:42:09
Going back to this thing, the thousand I've seen people who
00:42:12
have read my book have told me that they take, they take their
00:42:15
blog posts, they put it into chat, gpt and they say, hey,
00:42:17
rewrite this blog post using the thousand most common words plus
00:42:21
up to 20 additional words.
00:42:24
Right, because if you just limit yourself to the thousand, you
00:42:26
know you start.
00:42:26
For instance, the word thousand is not one of them, right?
00:42:30
So it's the 10 hundred most common words.
00:42:31
So you do.
00:42:33
You do have some kind of limitations which ended up being
00:42:35
very restrictive, so you don't want to write everything that
00:42:37
way.
00:42:37
But if you use that as the baseline and then you say, hey,
00:42:39
here's permission to use another 20 words or 50 words or
00:42:42
whatever it is, you get to a point where it's a lot easier
00:42:45
for people to read and understand across all sorts of
00:42:48
different audiences, instead of just being kind of the
00:42:51
specialized, narrow focus that your thing might have been from
00:42:54
before and thus that's how you avoid the word salad, and it
00:42:56
sounds more human and connects because it's based on those
00:43:00
common words and and is that something that ChatGPT
00:43:03
understands?
00:43:04
Speaker 1: Do you like send a link to?
00:43:05
Hey, here's a list of the thousand most common words.
00:43:07
Please use these, and I'm going to define these as that Is that
00:43:11
sort of the way it would work in a prompt.
00:43:13
Speaker 3: I'm sure that there are prompt engineers that can
00:43:15
include some of that stuff.
00:43:16
Some people I know that have just kind of just asked ChatGPT
00:43:19
for that, the tool that I used.
00:43:20
I was able to find a pretty good source of data that I've
00:43:24
linked to on there.
00:43:25
Depending on who you ask, the list changes right.
00:43:28
You know there's lots of data sources and you can get kind of
00:43:30
into the weeds on this.
00:43:31
It's like the Oxford English Corpus, yada yada.
00:43:34
But the general principle still holds true, which is that the
00:43:37
thousand most commonly used words are representative of
00:43:41
about 75% of the languages we speak.
00:43:43
You can go very far just using them.
00:43:44
In fact, the guy named Randall Monroe, who's an author web
00:43:47
comic, wrote a whole book called Thing Explainer where he
00:43:50
explains things like nuclear bombs and the color spectrum and
00:43:54
all sorts of other stuff.
00:43:55
Using the thousand most common words Ends up being kind of
00:43:58
humorous in many ways, but also a very easy to understand
00:44:02
explainer of very complicated subjects.
00:44:04
So that's a good stress test for people to use and that's one
00:44:08
of the tools we talked about in the book.
00:44:09
Speaker 1: That's really interesting and in fact I'm sure
00:44:11
you've had the same experience where you know if you're going
00:44:14
to write a book, write it for a seventh grader.
00:44:16
There are blog tools that say hey, you're.
00:44:18
You know, the Fleischman reading level is like 11th grade
00:44:20
.
00:44:20
Dumb it down.
00:44:21
And in some ways I think maybe that that's what they mean to
00:44:25
use this language that's most commonly used and I studied
00:44:33
Mandarin Chinese.
00:44:33
They have a concept of 2000 common Chinese characters.
00:44:35
If you can understand these, then you'll be able to read the
00:44:36
newspaper, be fluent and it's great that English.
00:44:37
So for me that's really really easy to understand and it's
00:44:40
great to know I'd never heard of that concept, great to know
00:44:42
that English has this.
00:44:43
And I guess you know I always like to think the more that I
00:44:46
use chat, gpt, the more and I also play the drums I almost
00:44:49
feel like a studio session and I'm riffing with another
00:44:51
musician and if they're not a songwriter, I would never say,
00:44:54
hey, write me up a song.
00:44:56
But it's like hey, here's a really good drum rhythm that I
00:44:59
have.
00:44:59
Can you match it with a bass in this style or a combination of
00:45:02
these styles, and continue to riff.
00:45:04
And I think that what you're saying is start with something
00:45:07
you already have, and I've had that same experience where it's
00:45:09
been really good.
00:45:09
Or, hey, I listened to a webinar that Jasper, who are one
00:45:13
of the leaders in enterprise marketing, ai.
00:45:15
They were saying one of the ways that they use their own
00:45:17
product is hey, here's a blog post I have targeting these
00:45:20
keywords.
00:45:21
Here are the top search results .
00:45:22
What am I missing?
00:45:23
How can I better flesh out the content or add sections, delete
00:45:27
sections?
00:45:27
And once again, it's based off of something you already have.
00:45:30
So that was a great confirmation that hopefully.
00:45:32
I know you weren't listening for AI advice, but hopefully you
00:45:35
listened to the end and got that advice.
00:45:37
Ben, this has been amazing.
00:45:38
Obviously, people should stop what they're doing right now and
00:45:49
go and buy this book.
00:45:49
Simply put, why clear messages win, how to design them.
00:45:50
It's a really great looking book, great feel, and it's not,
00:45:52
as the message should be, simple .
00:45:52
It's not like a three 400 page book.
00:45:53
It's a quick, concise read, very actionable, very tactical.
00:45:57
I think you all get a lot out of it, ben.
00:45:58
Any last thoughts and where can people go?
00:46:01
You already said bengutmancom slash thousand.
00:46:04
Anywhere else we can send our listeners to find out more about
00:46:06
you.
00:46:07
Speaker 3: I really appreciate it.
00:46:08
This has been a ton of fun, Neil.
00:46:09
Yeah, please go grab the book.
00:46:11
Simply Put why Clear Messages Win and how to Design them.
00:46:14
Amazon, Barnes, Noble everywhere books are sold.
00:46:16
And if you want more, check me out.
00:46:18
Bengutmancom, B-E-N-G-U-T-T-M-A-N-N, and
00:46:22
there's blogs, there's emails, there's different resources,
00:46:25
there's a thousand word checker there.
00:46:27
And I'll give you one more thing too.
00:46:29
I have a kind of new consulting offering that I'm working on
00:46:32
that's related to this, that I call it Fluency Shop.
00:46:36
If you go to fluencyshopcom, it is a offering where we package
00:46:41
up your messaging in the form of a website.
00:46:43
Website is the biggest single place that you communicate for
00:46:47
most brands, and so I like to talk about it as it's your
00:46:49
message.
00:46:50
We have a website on the side right, and so you know, most
00:46:53
time these days, the technical part is the easy part, but it's
00:46:56
the communication part that's hard, and so a lot of people
00:47:00
have been asking, you know, through the book here, how can
00:47:02
we kind of work together on something, and this is something
00:47:04
that I'm excited to put out there.
00:47:05
So love to hear your thoughts on it.
00:47:07
If it's interesting, love to team up on something, but
00:47:10
otherwise, you know.
00:47:11
Thanks again, Neil, for having me.
00:47:12
This has been a ton of fun.
00:47:13
Speaker 1: Very cool, love the innovative service offering.
00:47:16
And Ben, thanks again, and we will definitely be keeping in
00:47:19
touch and see how all this evolves.
00:47:20
All right, hope you enjoyed that interview.
00:47:22
Ben is a really great guy and I highly recommend you check out
00:47:25
his book Once again.
00:47:27
His book is called Simply Put and it has, as you can imagine,
00:47:30
a very simplistic cover, which is very appropriate.
00:47:33
And I forgot to mention before the interview.
00:47:36
I was talking about this potential move from ConvertKit
00:47:39
to Beehive and there's a quote.
00:47:41
Now it's been attributed to Albert Einstein and actually,
00:47:45
more recently they're saying maybe it shouldn't be attributed
00:47:48
to him but nevertheless the quote is doing the same thing
00:47:54
every day and expecting different results is the
00:47:55
definition of insanity, or something along those lines.
00:47:56
And it's really at some point, if we're doing something in our
00:48:00
marketing and we don't feel it's growing, we need to do
00:48:03
something different.
00:48:03
We need to push ourself out of our comfort zone and, to me,
00:48:07
pushing myself out of a traditional email marketing
00:48:09
solution to a more innovative and I think Beehive and Substack
00:48:14
really are innovative in their own way innovative new solution
00:48:18
to try to jumpstart new growth is something we should all be
00:48:21
doing in our marketing, and really in our marketing and
00:48:23
really in our lives.
00:48:24
So that is another thing that really pushed me to want to do
00:48:27
this.
00:48:27
You know, self-publishing two books recently was another move
00:48:33
to push me out of my comfort zone.
00:48:34
Do something new, because I hadn't self-published since 2011
00:48:37
.
00:48:37
A lot of things have changed since then.
00:48:38
Launching a Shopify store and I'm still in the midst of
00:48:41
developing it is a similar thing of just pushing myself out
00:48:47
there and a TikTok shop, by the way, is not that far behind.
00:48:50
So I think this is the type of marketing that we should be
00:48:54
engaging in.
00:48:55
We should always be challenging ourselves and our organizations
00:48:58
to do new things, because through new things we have
00:49:00
growth and through new things we have growth and through new
00:49:02
things we can innovate.
00:49:03
And through new things and new initiatives we can see
00:49:06
everything that we've been doing very, very crystal clear.
00:49:09
It's almost like when you leave whatever country you're
00:49:11
listening to this podcast in.
00:49:13
Whenever you leave your country , you like on a trip right, or
00:49:17
like when I studied abroad in Beijing, china you then, once
00:49:20
you're outside of your country, you can look back at what it
00:49:23
means to be a citizen of your country and your lifestyle and
00:49:26
everything a lot clearer.
00:49:27
You can look at your work situation and understand it a
00:49:31
lot clearer when you're in a different foreign environment.
00:49:33
At least, that's what I've always thought.
00:49:34
So these are things that, like I said, we should regularly be
00:49:37
doing, and I look at my work on a quarter to quarter
00:49:41
basisquarter basis, on a quarter-to-quarter basis.
00:49:43
Am I pushing forward on all these initiatives?
00:49:45
Am I doing new initiatives right?
00:49:46
Am I continuing to push the ball forward on all of those
00:49:51
strategic areas where I need to be pushing it forward.
00:49:53
So these are just reminders from your digital marketing
00:49:57
coach, from my experience, and I would love to hear from you If
00:50:01
you have any feedback on this podcast, if you want to
00:50:03
recommend guests that you'd like me to interview, or if you
00:50:06
think that I should shake up the way I record it.
00:50:09
I'd love to hear from you.
00:50:10
Let's have a two-way conversation.
00:50:11
My email once again is neil at neilschafercom.
00:50:14
I am the real Neil, so it is spelled N-E-A-L, and obviously
00:50:18
you can find me on the socials and DM me wherever you like.
00:50:21
But hey, that's it for another what I hope you thought was an
00:50:24
exciting episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.
00:50:27
This is Neil Schafer, your digital marketing coach, signing
00:50:30
off.
00:50:32
Speaker 2: You've been listening to your Digital Marketing Coach
00:50:34
.
00:50:34
Questions, comments, requests, links go to
00:50:39
podcastneilschafercom.
00:50:41
Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at
00:50:46
neilschafercom to tap into the 400 plus blog posts that Neil
00:50:51
has published to support your business.
00:50:53
While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group
00:50:57
coaching membership community if you or your business needs a
00:51:00
little helping hand.
00:51:01
See you next time on your digital marketing coach.
Related Episodes
Treat LinkedIn Like Instagram and Watch Your Visibility Soar
Think LinkedIn is just a network of stiff profiles? Think again!Treat it like a professional Instagram to boost your visibility.Visual content is king on LinkedIn, and I'm here to guide you on harnessing its power for maximum engagement and visibility. Learn how images can outperform other post type...
The Intersection of Marketing and Customer Experience: A Conversation with Dan Gingiss
Unlock the potential of your business as we unveil the secrets to customer experience marketing with insights from expert Dan Gingiss. Imagine transforming dissatisfied customers into loyal advocates through memorable experiences that naturally generate positive buzz. Gain exclusive access to strate...
From Google to AI: Evolving Your SEO Tactics for Maximum Visibility
SEO. You might think you know everything about search engine optimization, but AI is changing the game more rapidly than ever. The new search landscape isn't just about Google anymore—AI-driven tools like Chat GPT are redefining visibility and relevance. How can your business adapt and even thrive i...