There’s no getting around it. Modern marketing, with its ever-evolving strategies, tools and techniques, is complex. It’s a wild, restless stallion. And while there’s not much you can do about the way you deliver your marketing, you can uncomplicate your strategy, your messages and the way you think.
Make Simplicity Your Guiding Principle
Keeping things simple can be your superpower. Distill your business strategy down to a single, vivid idea and it becomes unforgettable—even inevitable. Deliver your marketing messages with simple, carefully chosen words and watch the friction melt away. Describe your services in clear, easy-to-understand language and they become more compelling.
When it comes to marketing and business development, prospective clients are repelled by complexity. They have a hard enough time distinguishing one firm in your space from another. And they have better ways to spend their time. What they want is for you to make it easy to choose your firm.
You have a magic arrow in your quiver. It’s called simplicity. Explain what you do and how you are different in minimal, straightforward language and the marketplace will reward you. While most of your competitors anxiously pile more words and charts into their PowerPoint decks, you will stand apart with stunning clarity.
Where Complexity Comes From
Most organizations naturally gravitate toward complexity. That’s because it’s hard work to reduce ideas to their essence or challenge foggy thinking. The majority of ideas, strategies and messages are born not fully formed. If they arise from a collaboration, they often lack sharpness and even internal logic. Some ideas are foggy because the people who conceive them don’t have the self-confidence to state them plainly—couching their thoughts instead in vague, confusing and passive language. Lots of writing is difficult to read because the writers didn’t take the time to go back and clearly state their ideas, write in short, easy-to-digest sentences or build a coherent argument.
Now, I want to make sure that you don’t mistake simplicity for simplistic. Simplifying doesn’t mean dumbing down. While the best ideas are usually simple ones, they are also sophisticated. They say boldly what others are reluctant to say. They take a stand, often an unexpected or contrarian one. They cut through complexity like a razor. With elegance and restraint, they get at the heart of the problem, and they inspire confidence.
How to Simplify Your Writing, Marketing and Thinking
There have been whole books written on the topic of simplicity (including this excellent one by Jack Trout). So we can only scratch the surface in this article. But let us leave you with a few practical tips you can start using today.
- Always put yourself in your audience’s shoes
- Write in simple sentences—mostly short but with some variety
- Choose simple words over fancier ones or jargon
- Revise your work. Then revise it again.
- Promote benefits over features
- Keep your calls to action clear and straightforward
- Think about what you want your audience to do next
- Ask yourself if there is a clearer, simpler, more intuitive way to state your idea
