2 piece-of-cake ways to help customers adore you

4-minute read • 554 words

If you follow the hill behind Sheffield train station to South Street, then look up, you’ll see a blank bridge that won’t stay blank forever.

As I write this, that bridge, on the Park Hill estate, is being renovated. But the developers have promised to refill the blank space on the side of it with the words that were graffitied there before:

I love you will u marry me

Jason Lowe spray-painted his powerful message in 2001 to woo his girlfriend Clare Middleton. Clare and Jason sadly didn’t end up staying together, but there’s a reason these words have become iconic in the Steel City…

Jason could’ve written: “I adore you; will you do me the honour of giving me your hand in marriage?” But he chose something shorter, simpler, impossible to misunderstand, and that’s the key:

Clarity.

What Jason wrote was clear. Fuss-free. Straight to the point. Would you follow his example?

You should. Not the graffiti, necessarily, or the marriage proposal, or the missing question mark. But if you want people to really take on board something you’re saying, you should say it clearly, and these piece-of-cake tips will help…

1. Use bullets

Most, maybe all, of the marketing you do now will be online, where attention spans are shorter. Research by NNG says people read just 20% of a webpage on average, but bullet points can help them to read more, and here’s why:

Instead of giving readers lots of information in one long sentence, breaking it up into short bullet points makes it easier for people to ‘scan’. So, for example:

You could tell customers that your new t-shirts are made from 100% organic cotton, hand-printed in Sheffield, and available exclusively from yourwebsite.com…

…or you could tell customers that your new t-shirts are:

• Made from 100% organic cotton

• Hand-printed in Sheffield

• Available exclusively from yourwebsite.com

I’ll bet those customers would prefer the second version, and I’ll bet you could easily start using this technique in your marketing straight away. But this next tip is even simpler to do…

2. More full stops

When most sentences in a piece of writing are 14 words long, readers understand 90% of what you’re saying, according to research by PRSA. But when most sentences are 43 words long, people only understand 10% of the writing, so what should you do?

Short sentences are best, and there’s a little trick to help you write them that needs almost no effort at all…

It might seem weird, at least at first, but writing shorter sentences will make your message easier to follow and it’s easy to do because all it takes is to put full stops wherever you’d take a breath if you were reading out loud.

Look:

It might seem weird. At least at first. But writing shorter sentences will make your message easier to follow. And it’s easy to do. Because all it takes is to put full stops wherever you’d take a breath if you were reading out loud.

See?

So next time you’re telling a story about your business, remember Jason Lowe, and the short, unforgettable sentence he used to get his message across. Guess what happened when he took Clare to Arundel Gate, and asked her to look up the hill behind the cinema at what he’d written?

She said yes.

Until next time,

Adam