I recently wrote about a client of mine who felt caught between what I taught her about marketing with Potent Expression and a more traditional marketing mentor who was concerned that what my client wanted to offer wasn’t marketable.
If you missed that, you can read it here:
https://isabelparlett.com/the-limits-of-traditional-marketing-part-1/
Specifically, the more traditional mentor was concerned that my client wanted to help her clients live radiant lives. She was concerned about “radiance” and the fact that my client might need to define what radiance was so her clients could understand what she was offering.
It’s not bad to create your own words, or define what the words you are using mean. Often, in the course of our marketing, we write and speak in contexts where it’s easy to share a definition and people may be moved by what we share.
My client talks about radiance in terms of “nurturing and expanding your rich inner-life, creating your own future by the power of heart energy, and being in full alignment with your inner-light which has the power to change the world around you in positive and calming ways, bringing the world back into balance and bringing the medicine it needs to heal.”
I don’t know about you, but that makes me feel something! It makes me want to live a more radiant life!
The whole point of creating Personal Definitions (something we do in my Words on Fire training) is that we don’t assume that people know what we mean. We help them see the world through our eyes. We don’t leave them hanging or make them try to figure out what we are saying.
Even when you invent your own words or phrases, people often feel there is something special, something intriguing about what you are offering.
When I use my original terms (like Potent Expression or Sacred Yearning or True Spirit or Fierce Self-love) and help people understand what I mean, people start to say those words back to me: “I want to develop more Potent Expression. I am so inspired knowing my Sacred Yearning. What I need is a Book of Language.” Seeing my own words, my own expressions coming back to me is part of the fun of marketing!
If you are communicating with your audience only through direct mail strategies (snail mail, postcards, classified ads, unsolicited promo emails, search engine optimization), then getting the message across immediately, with no explanation and no frills, matters. You want and need your audience to decide in an instant if they want to take the next action because you may have just that one shot.
But if you are using more relational strategies, and are in communication with people over time, it’s less critical.
When you have an ongoing relationship with people, they learn and start to use your language. And they see you as the source and solution for anything related to that.
In the world of transformation, being able to talk about what you know is possible for people in vivid, visceral, sensory ways is key. When what we sell is intangible, the sell is our ability to paint a picture, create a feeling of what we know others can feel and experience so that they spontaneously respond “ooh, I want that!”.
It is more work, to some degree, but I don’t see it as a problem.
If we want to bring original, out of the box, transformational work into the world, we do take on the responsibility of working harder to tell the story of what we do.
My clients are usually up for that, because they want to do their purposeful work in the world, not just sell widgets. They are tired of trying to mold themselves into something they are not. They are ready to do their work their way, or not at all.
Ideally, having a Book of Language supports you in creating not just a roster of paying clients, but a roster of ideal paying clients that want you to do the work you most desire to do.
Your Book of Language creates alignment and consistency between who you are, what you say, and what you actually do.
It lets you communicate in a way that inspires people to buy.