Category: Marketing Thoughts

When I speak to some of my marketing consulting clients, especially when they are first getting started, I find many of them trying to drown their potential clients in options. “Look at all the things I can do! I can help you in a hundred ways!”

It’s a fear response—the fear of missing a sale because a potential customer didn’t realize that you can also do that one thing they needed doing.

So, you end up becoming a Generalist—pretty good at everything, extraordinary at nothing. I like Generalists; they usually come cheap, and most of the time, they give me a pretty adequate result.

But when adequate won’t cut it and I need excellence, I look for the Experts—those who have a niche and do one thing better than everyone else. I always pay more for Experts, but then, you should always pay more for excellence.

So how does your value proposition to potential clients come across? Do you do a little bit of everything? Do you specialize in anything? Are you a multi-page diner menu, or do you offer a single page of exquisitely prepared cuisine?

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*The above quote came from an excellent Seth Godin blog post here: https://seths.blog/2020/09/who-is-good-at-discovery/

I taught myself how to read when I was 3. Like most self-taught readers I learned pictographically – instead of breaking words down letter by letter, or phonically by sound, each word has its own shape and has its own meaning (think hieroglyphics or Chinese).

It turns out that many people read shape-wise, even those who learned to read in a more traditional manner. If it is a word our brain recognizes, it won’t bother to break it down into letters – it will just code it as its meaning and move on to the next word… unless your brain can’t translate the shape.

TOO MUCH CAPITALIZATION MAKES IT VERY HARD FOR THE BRAIN TO TRANSLATE QUICKLY!

When you use all capital letters the brain loses the ability to see the shape of the word and has to slow down and parse each letter separately.

Sometimes you want to do this – to break out a word or phrase and make sure people are paying attention. But you better make sure what you are capitalizing is worth the effort – because in this day of reading posts at a glance, anything that makes your message “difficult and slow” is likely to be passed over as not worth the effort.

Graphic designers and typographers have known about the “all caps trap” for decades. One of the ways they use them is for blocks of text that they don’t want people to read. Think legal notices and the “fine print” on pharmaceutical ads. The law says the information has to be there – it doesn’t say it has to be easy to read.

On social media, it’s also been generally agreed that all caps mean yelling. So now your message comes across as “loud, difficult, and slow”. 

There is so much content out there, all struggling to gain attention. Don’t sabotage yourself by making your message hard to read. Because most people won’t bother.