Don’t market yourself, market your message.
Sounds nice, but how do you identify what your message even is.
The first thing is to understand what a message is, know why it’s important and what kinds of messages there are.
Then you need to do some inner reflection. The questions below are meant to help you with that.
This is all a new idea for me, this idea of marketing your message, but here are my initial thoughts on how you identify your message.
I strongly recommend that you do this both on your own but also with a friend who’s willing to interview you on each of these questions. I’d recommend they ask you each question at least five times to go deeper and deeper into what’s true for you.
1. Directional Messages – What You Should Do:
Fill in the blanks: “The best way to achieve ______ (goal) is _________ (approach).”
What matters most when working to achieve the result your clients are craving?
If you could just say three words to the people you most want to help and they’d instantly ‘get it’ – what would those three words be?
2. Messages of Possibility:
What do you see as possible that others don’t? What do your people see as impossible that isn’t?
__________ can be ____________ (e.g. niching can be easy, marketing can be warm and honest)
__________ doesn’t need to be ____________ (it doesn’t need to be this way, relationships don’t need to painful)
3. Messages of Reality:
What’s the tough love, ‘real talk’, wake up call that your people need to hear to snap them out of it?
Where are you people’s expectations wildly out of whack with reality? What are the expectations they should just let go of entirely.
What are your people missing that prevents them from succeeding?
4. Messages of Necessity: “We need to . . .”
What do you think is required of your people, or the world, to really create what we want?
What’s the work that hasn’t been done that needs to be done?
5. New Idea Messages:
What’s the new, contrarian, out of the box idea you have that might blow people’s minds if they heard it?
6. Reframing Messages:
What’s something that your people are most ashamed of that you actually see as a potential strength or resource for them?
7. Other questions to ask yourself to identify your message:
If you could go back in time, what’s the message you want to give the earlier version of yourself – what’s the message that would have made the biggest difference for you to hear?
What do you know about being human that, once you really understood it, made it easier?
What are you daring your clients to try?
Having lived through your story, and knowing the issues you most want to help these people with – what is the one message you MOST want the world to hear?
What are your favourite proverbs, maxims and aphorisms and quotes? Which ones do you keep coming back to that most deeply resonate with you? Might these hold a key to your message?
What’s the truth about the nature of the problems they currently face?
What’s the truth about what it will take to get what they want?