Clarity communicates and the first person to benefit from clarity is you! If you are clear, then your message shall be clear to everyone who hears it. This takes time and so I’ve devoted this and the next 2 posts to the benefits of slow marketing.
(This is the seventh of 12 posts based on my new website, Market Together. Go there to find previous posts.)
Who else benefits from clarity?
- First and foremost, your market. They need to know you are speaking to them, understand their problem and have a credible solution to it. If you are not clear, you are likely to switch them off. Once off, it will be hard to switch them on again.
- Your customers, past and present, may be able to promote your business but they need something clear to help them. Clarity helps them write testimonials or speak about your business. Don’t assume they understand your offer, you must do the thinking and share it with them.
- Other businesses, especially where there is scope for collaboration. If your partners struggle to understand your business, the chances are they will be unable to help you.
- Other people who ask about your business. Not everyone who asks about your business will be in your target market or a business collaborator. But if you have a brief account of what you do they can understand and remember, then they may occasionally put you in touch with people in your market. They won’t totally get what you are about but sometimes the random connection pays off.
What Do You Need Clarity About?
You need to be clear about your business and to do that you need to validate it. Validation is where you systematically, review the main elements of your business. The circuit questionnaire is one way to do this and helps to clarify 5 elements of all businesses.
Many business owners do not really think about their business as it is and embark upon marketing something they do not themselves understand. Taking the time to really get to grips with your business “as-is” is valuable time spent; time often swallowed up with the day-to-day pressures of running a business.
It is likely you know more about your business than you realise. To take time to think about your business systematically, will help you bring aspects of it to your conscious mind that otherwise pass unnoticed.
Using the Circuit Questionaire
The circuit questionnaire covers five elements:
- Your brand
- Your products and services
- The problem your market experiences
- Your solution to this problem
- Your market
If you are clear about all five, you have a viable business. You may be able to improve on one or all of them. You cannot improve on these aspects unless you know what they are now! To improve one element is likely to improve the others.
You may be able to introduce improvements without validation but you are likely to add random bits on. Bricolage is the word used for art created from whatever is to hand. Without validation, you are likely to build a monstrous business that makes little sense to the onlooker. With validation, your bricolage shall be more coherent and make sense to others. There is virtue using what comes to hand but the key to success is being able to integrate new ideas into your business, not just add on another bit for the hell of it.
Clarity is empowering and so in my next post I shall explore what you can do with that clarity.
In these posts and emails I am forging a new approach to marketing. Please comment and let me know what you think, whether you agree or disagree.
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