Lesson #7 How to Grab Attention Fast: Your Elevator Pitch
Is your message getting through to your audience?
There is a lot more information moving around in the world. As the level of “noise” increases exponentially, so does the challenge of getting your message HEARD. Therefore, captivating someone’s attention is even more critical for effecting behavior changes.
According to a report from Google, the web now hosts more information than the combined total of all digital and analog content prior to 2003. Unfortunately, the amount of time and energy we have to consume information has not grown accordingly. We can’t just create more time and effort to keep up with all of it, especially with so many confusing and conflicting messages. Simply put, attention doesn’t scale. So you need a strategy to create engagement, build awareness and recognition, and create trust over time.
You must have attention-grabbing content, and have it reverberate across all your marketing and communication channels. People need to hear your message multiple times before it will effect a behavior change.
People judge a book by its cover
When you walk in a bookstore, what would make you pick up a book or a magazine?
We have all been told not to judge a book by its cover. But the reality is, if the cover isn’t compelling enough to make someone pick it up, nobody will be able to discover what’s inside. |
This applies to marketing as well.
When someone asks you “What do you do?”, they are essentially examining the cover on the book of your business.
How do you answer?
When it comes time to describe to someone the benefits of working with you, what do you say?
When it’s time to put a summary on your website of the results that you deliver to your customers, how will you describe this?
It’s time to combine everything you have learned from the previous lessons and start communicating in a way that makes people want t buy your products and services.
First, you need to read about this advice on communicating your value instantly: How to Create Your Unforgettable Elevator Pitch. You will find tips for grabbing you prospective customer’s attention fast by crafting a magnetic elevator pitch.
Don’t just inform people, influence them
Once you have the key elements of your elevator pitch down, you can make it more persuasive and actionable for your audience.
To do that, you’ll need to use all “Five Prongs of Persuasion”:
- Word Choice: positive, specific, precise words
- Rhetoric: powerful phrasing and graceful grammar that motivates a buyer’s memory
- Emotion: expressions of pleasure, fear, safety, discomfort, pride, acceptance, rejection, or prestige
- Logic: Reasoning and conclusions drawn from facts, information, opinions, or ideas.
- Trustworthiness: confidence in the principles, values, and integrity of an individual or organization.
To persuade someone, you need to know and use the right words to establish your own and your organization’s credibility. You have to identify the best strategy for each buyer—whether it be an appeal to emotion, an appeal to logic, or both combined.
Profitable Knowledge Exercise: A cheat sheet for your 60 second sound bite
Write down these quick tips on a card or paper and keep them with you as you practice your 60 second elevator pitch.
- Know your objective. Begin by seeing the end. What do you want? What is your desired outcome? Have a single, clear-cut objective.
- Know your audience. Know what that person or group wants from you. How can you connect with the listener and get a favorable response?
- Formulate the right approach. Objective and approach are mutually dependent. Have a single, clear-cut approach based on your objective and your knowledge of the audience. Make it a simple, one-sentence approach.
- Create your hook. This is the grabber, headline, or attention-getter. A hook can be serious, humorous, or dramatic, but it must capture attention. (Review How to Create Your Unforgettable Elevator Pitch. )
- State the subject. The subject must contain all or any part of the who, what, where, when, why, and how.
- Make the close. If you don’t ask, you don’t receive. You must ask for what you want. Example: Call me now for a FREE 20-minute consultation.
This should give you plenty to practice before our next lesson.
I’ll talk to you soon.
Oh, by the way…
If you found this page via a link on the Internet, or a friend forwarded it to you, this is lesson #7 to a free online course delivered via email on how to use solid Internet marketing strategies to build a business doing what you love and make a living.
You can learn more about it HERE