261 | Develop Effective Messaging for Your Impact Business with Paul Zelizer

This week on the pod is our montly solo episode with Paul Zelizer.  Paul is the Founder & CEO of Awarepreneurs and the host of the popular Awarepreneurs podcast.  He's also been a coach for social entrepreneurs and conscious business owners for more than 15 years.

• Black Girl Sunscreen site

• Article on building Black Girl Sunscreen

• Hubspot article on messaging

• Market research episode

• Paul's Strategy Sessions

Effective Messaging for Social Entrepreneurs: Interview with Paul Zelizer, Founder and CEO of Awarepreneurs

NOTE: While it’s not perfect, we offer this transcription by Otter.ai for those who are hearing impaired or who don’t find listening to a podcast enjoyable or possible.


SPEAKERS

Paul Zelizer

Paul Zelizer  00:02

Hi, this is Paul Zelizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help you increase your positive impact in your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have positive impact through values based business. Thanks so much!

Today, your guest is me. Paul Zelizer, the founder of Awarepreneurs and the host of this podcast, and our topic is Develop Effective messaging for Your Impact Business. So let's talk about why this topic. There's a challenge out there for Social Entrepreneurs, you know, if you're a single bottom line business, all you care about is making money. Like you don't want to hurt anybody. But you're basically in business to provide a product or service and take care of your family. And that's what your goal is. In many ways, it's simpler and easier than a social entrepreneur who both is trying to meet that goal, to pay your bills, to have a good quality of life, take care of your family, and to make the world a better place. And that and that, having those two goals, it's more complicated. And therefore sometimes we're less effective social entrepreneurs, we can oftentimes struggle to communicate in a way that both educates about our impact and contributes to a thriving business. And I've been talking to some of you lately who are struggling with that one way or another, and thus, this episode. So a little bit of language I like to talk about sometimes, people are doing business business first. In other words, it's all about getting good business results. But the impact is less of a priority. For many people who listen to this podcast, impact is very important to us. It's towards the top if not one of the primary things that we're thinking about when we launched our businesses, myself included. But sometimes we struggle with underwhelming revenue and business result. I think that a really skillful social entrepreneur is able to do both these things. And one of the things that really contributes to this is having effective messaging. So that's what we're going to talk about today. In this episode, I want to do three things. First of all, I want to help you understand what messaging is and why it's so important. Secondly, I want to give you a real world example of a business. I think that's doing this well. It's doing messaging while both in terms of their impact goals. And it's really thriving as a business. And three, I want to offer you some tools that I use with my clients to help you increase the effectiveness of your messaging and your social impact business. So let's start with an example. I'll put a link to this in the show notes. But there is a brand of sunscreen called Black Girl sunscreen. And the founder, the founder of that Shante long day, she created this brand of sunscreen because you know the myth out there, there are a couple of things going on the myth out there is that black women, which is her target audience, don't need sunscreen, because you know, darker skin is automatically protected from the sun and the negative consequences of too much sun exposure. Now it does seem to be true, the research does seem to suggest that having darker skin is more protective than somebody like myself who's really really, really pale and I live in New Mexico, right? Sunscreen is a part of life out here when you have skin like mine. But that doesn't mean that somebody with darker skin can't get skin cancer or have other issues related to a lot of exposure to the sun. So what Shante Lundy came up with black girl sunscreen is she was addressing a challenge here a couple challenges. One is this turned out to be not fully true, not evidence based idea that black people don't need some protection from the sun if they're getting a lot of exposure to number G one of the things that she's talking about the languaging from the site, there's both the adult product line and BGS kids, black girl sunscreen for kids. And here's an example the messaging they talk about leave behind the white cast. Now, I don't know if you're a sunscreen user again because I'm so pale and I live in a very sunny place. I'm quite familiar with sunscreen, right? It oftentimes uses different kinds of products. Except it's very white with something like zinc oxide, which is one of the active ingredients in a lot of sunscreens. And it literally is a very white pigment, right? Now imagine what that would look like you have, this is from the BGS kids part of the site, this beautiful black child with this white, this pigment that you're putting on right, it looks really weird. And that's where the messaging comes up, leave behind the white cast. So you can see that she's speaking to a very particular audience. Here's a quote from an article that I will put in the show notes Shante Lundy explains that the intentional inclusion of the word girl right black girl sunscreen is intended to establish the brand as accessible, friendly and relatable. When I say Hey, girl, it's a term of endearment. And it's how I dress and speak with my peers. Does this work? Well, black girl sunscreen was launched in 2016. Four years later, by 2020, the company was valued at $5 million. They sell at Target, Walgreens, CVS and Ultra. And what's really interesting to me from an impact entrepreneur perspective, is that their products are vegan, and they use a lot of environmentally conscious sourcing for the ingredients that they put into their products. So what I love about this example Shante Lundy has, has these vegan ingredients and environmentally conscious brand. But there's so much of that out there in the beauty space and in the you know, different kinds of wellness products like sunscreen if she came out and said, you know, we have this vegan and environmentally conscious sunscreen, I'm not sure that they would be at the kind of revenue growth that they've seen over the past six years, right being targeted at Walgreens. What she's done from my perspective is really understood her audience and create messaging that's very dialed in to their audience. And it's gotten a growth trajectory that's much more robust than many other environmentally conscious and vegan type brands. So I thought that was a an example that might help us wrap our heads around somebody who's very much working towards having positive impact and a community that's marginalized, historically, that's underserved, and also is really doing well as a business. So that's our example. Lots more out there. I'd love to hear your thoughts. What are some examples you think of people who are doing messaging Well, in an impact business? Hello, let's talk about what exactly is messaging anyway. So this is from a HubSpot article. HubSpot is a wonderful marketing resource. I like their articles a lot. It's fairly traditional. But I'm somebody who believes like, Well, before we talked about how we might adopt or change something, and let's at least understand how language that we use in business, what does it even mean? And then we can decide, are there changes or other ways or some throw it out totally, and go in a different direction. So HubSpot says, a marketing message is the words you use to communicate with your audience to convince them to do business with you. Your message is extremely influential in helping you meet your business goals, as it can be the difference between a new acquisition or sending a customer onto your competitor. I would agree with them extremely influential in helping to meet your business goals. If we have messaging that feels fuzzy, or it's just not engaging our audience in a really meaningful, I'm speaking to you kind of a way it's much, much, much harder to meet our business goals. And I think this is a place as a space of social impact businesses that we lot of us can get better at. And that's today's episode. So again, I will put a link to that HubSpot article. You can check that out in the show notes. But now we have a definition. And basically, it's still the words that we're using the frames that we're sharing with people who are prospective clients or customers. And are they really speaking to them and engaging them or not? Is the fundamental question. And when we're doing messaging Well, we're going to see people like Wow, really kind of pause and learn more about our product, ask questions. Have a sense of like, well, you I see you have different products. Oh, be just kids. It's for kids, right? Oh, this is more for adult women. What's the difference? And when we're in those conversation means people are paying attention. They're much more likely to buy than just like Oh, there's another environmentally conscious wellness product and there's a gazillion out there. So there's a couple different ways of How people traditionally go about developing a marketing message. And I don't want to get too deep into this. It's in that same HubSpot article. So you can read more. But one of the things that I think are problematic with marketing messaging, as it's oftentimes taught is one is, there's three one is that it's oftentimes singular. It's like the thing at the top of the website that you see. And it's engaging, or it's cute, or it's funny, or it's impactful. And it just singular, it's static, you repeat it over and over with slight variations, whether it's on Instagram, or you're doing a video on your YouTube channel, or you're speaking about it on your podcast. And the third issue that I have messaging is it's oftentimes taught in traditional businesses, there's no social context whatsoever. So Black Girls sunscreen, and the fact that like, just think all the implications, not only does it look funny, for your beautiful black child to have this, like white pigment on their skin, but also just like, gosh, talk about the social context of what's happening there. Be really hard to like, imagine pretending there's no history that is showing up in that conversation. Or if you if you didn't pay attention to it, and you're trying to sell to the black community in your sunscreen brand, you know, you're missing a really important social context cue in most business myths that don't even ask us to pay attention or inquire what are the social context issues, given who we want to serve. So you can read more about traditional marketing message. But the fundamental thing I want to stay here is I think a messaging is really, really, really important. And I think it's a place where sometimes as impact entrepreneurs were like, but you know, if I was the sunscreen brand, I might say, but it's vegan. And it's environmentally conscious, how come people are buying it. And I think there's ways in which we can move our business more in the direction of having something really compelling. And I'm going to talk to you about that next. But when we just dive deeply into messaging, and how it's oftentimes taught the fact that it's singular, it's static, and there's no social context, we may not get the result, even if we do roll up our sleeves and get to work about messaging. So what I want to do is give you four questions to help develop resonant messaging. And I use these four questions with my individual clients. And I think they can really help you find much more of a significant empathy, like heart to heart connection, even if you're not like sitting there having a cup of tea or a glass of wine or going for a walk with somebody that kind of really personal conversation, they can feel like that. Just like the way the founder of Black girls on screen is saying the word girl like she's using that language to really cue that I care about you. And we're like, part of the same communities and their sense of empathy and pay attention here, people like us want to have a conversation about these kinds of issues. And it comes across differently than the way a lot of businesses speak these four questions can help you find your version of that. So I'm going to tell you about what these questions are. And then we'll dive into each one. So the first question is, who are they? In other words, who is your ideal client or customer? The second one is, what are their challenges? The third one is, what's the context, the social context of the conversations that are relevant to your business in the community, or communities that you want to serve? And then the fourth question is, how can you help them? So let's take them one by one. The first question, who are they? So there's a saying in the conscious business world that people don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care. Let me say that, again. People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care. And if you're going to care with nuance and communicate that you care with nuance, you need to know who they are with Nuance. Over and over and over again, I see social entrepreneurs really excited about making a difference around a particular impact area and an issue. But their way they're communicating. They're just like everybody should care about right or many, many people a huge portion of the population but a mentor of mine says when we try to help everybody we oftentimes Things wind up helping nobody. There's a way in which black girls on screen, like by leaning into a particular community and understanding what the challenges are, what the issues are with Nuance. It sets them up for a kind of traction in their business that many social entrepreneurs would really like but don't get because they're not really bringing a nuanced attention to who they want to help. So, specifically, what I would encourage you to do is, and this can be super simple, right? Don't overcomplicate it, what I say to my clients, I want a list of a half a dozen bullet points. What goes on in those bullet points, at least a half dozen, you can do a dozen or a dozen and a half and two things in those bullet points. Number one, the demographics. The demographics are things like on a census, your age, your gender, occupation, zip code, these tends to be more external things that go into a checkbox, right. I was born in such and such a year, my occupation is I Transat, right. I live in such and such a zip code, income, things like that. One of the thing that I am really excited about is that over the past, certainly 10 years, but even more so like in the past five years, there's been an increasing awareness of psychographics. And these are more inequalities were like values, attitudes, hobbies, mindset, things that wouldn't show up on a census, but in many ways, can help us create more diverse, like, it's not just, you know, such and such a gender, you know, under 35, who tend to work in such and such occupations, like, if that works for you, and you've got a half a dozen bullet points, great. Many of my clients, many of them people in my network, like how people approach the world and, you know, creativity and innovation, and a sense of being willing to have conversations about important and oftentimes challenging issues, right? People, I tend to most connect with our, you know, active people, you all, if you listen to this podcast, know, I'm a trail runner I like those kinds of things can transcend some of the census, you know, checkbox kind of issues, right. And they can help build some people who are very diverse, and some of those external factors can find similarities and can build more diverse communities with those psychographics. So I'm really thrilled that they're being more paid attention to in business. So bringing a awareness of just making a, literally a list of six or eight or 10 of these things, right combination of psychographics and demographics. Don't worry about what to do with them right now. But just like before you go out and spend months of years of your life and 1000s and 1000s of dollars, or sweat equity to build a website and get branding, and what should I do on LinkedIn, or Twitter or Instagram or Tiktok and marketing strategies, please just spend a little bit of time on Who are your ideal client, both on the inside psychographics and more on the outside as they're showing up in the world called demographics. So that's question number one. Question number two is what are their challenges? Again, black girl sunscreen, we have a sense that they really understood like, the black community might not be understanding what some of the health concerns have exposure to the sun without any protection. Or if they do know about that research, then they might feel really weird to put on this sunscreen that has this white cast on it right. So understanding what some of the challenges are, that the people you want to serve now that you know who they are, when it comes to the issue that you're passionate about helping them. What I would say is that in the attention economy, one of the fastest ways to help somebody slow down and hear what you have to say is empathy. And this is in fact one of the biggest challenges that I think impact entrepreneurs and all kinds of business owners face is to get people to actually hear and begin to care slowed down enough to care about what you're starting to say. Because we said earlier, people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care about when They feel you caring about their lives, their challenges, their kids, their financial well being their health, their career success, whatever it is that you help people with, when they feel you caring about the nuances of their lives, and using cues and languages and frames early on in the conversation, then they're much, much, much more likely to start listening to what you have to say. And if you can't get them to listen to what you have to say, you're really going to struggle to sell them anything. So what do you do with this? Okay, that makes sense, Paul, what are their challenges, just like I had the recommendation of six bullet points on Who are they the recommendation here is, make a list of at least six, I'm more bad if you can get to 10 Empathy statements about what your ideal client is feeling right now, about your topic. So you can the empathy statement might be in the form of like when it comes to blank comes to financial well, being somebody from a marginalized community, one of the things that concerns you is blank, when it comes to blank, one of the things that concern too, is blank. Well, another way you might think about it is you feel blank, about blank part of your life. Social Entrepreneur, you feel confused about messaging, and how to talk about your business. Don't talk about how you're going to solve it right here, right now. You're just meeting them, you're just empathizing, you're sharing the language that says, I feel you I have a sense of what your challenges are, and those empathy statements, you can leverage them a little bit further down the line into, you know, what goes on to your homepage and a website, or what are the titles you use for your blog post or your podcast episodes. But just take a moment, again, I'm not asking for you to write a book, take a moment to write six, or eight or 10 Empathy statements. When it comes to blank, one of the things that concerns you is blank, or you feel blank, about blank part of your life, that as a social entrepreneur, I want to help you. So that's the second question. The third question is, what is the context. And again, I'm specifically talking about the social context. So much harm has been done by like, trying to treat individuals, we call it rugged individualism. And some people refer to the US that way, a mindset that like this individual isn't, you know, yeah, you care about your family, but we treat people as individuals almost to an extreme degree. Compared to many other cultures, throughout history, think of indigenous cultures, or how much community matters in Japan, or many cultures in Asia. And the dominant business culture, we get really focused on an individual out of context of what's happening in their family, their community, what's going on in the culture, in their workplace, etc, right? The way I'm might encourage you to think about is that your ideal client, they deal with these issues that you care about want to help in the context of the entire rest of their lives. than just like, if we were talking about sunscreen, we don't understand what just the physical whiteness of the main pigments that are used in sunscreen, what that yields like what that history might evoke in the black community, you're gonna have a harder time selling sunscreen to the black community. Right? So what are the contexts? And what's happening? Here's two questions that I would invite you to ask. Number one, what are the communities that are important to them? And that might be like a smaller community, like their nuclear family or maybe their extended family. Maybe they have a church, maybe their neighborhood is a city, they feel a lot of connection and a lot of spend a lot of time doing volunteer work. Maybe there are social or like, political causes. They're part of right, just what communities tend to be important to the people that you're passionate about helping. And then the second question is, where do they live and what's happening there regarding your topic and adjacent issue? I live in New Mexico has a different place than where I was born in the suburbs of New York City. It looks different, that economics are different. The climate is different diversity As different cultures are in a food is different, there's so much. That's just a simple example. But they're like the context and what's happening in the relational network. And the places that your ideal client or customer feels a lot of just like heart connection and feels like it's a safe place for them what's happening there matters. And if you don't understand it, or never thought about it, you're likely to have a harder time meeting your business goal. So what is the context and specifically the context that your ideal client or customer lives in works in? makes decisions in? Lastly, fourth question is, how can you help them? So by now we know a little bit about who they are, we know a little bit about their challenges. We know about the context, or at least we're thinking about the context that they live their lives and what kind of social networks and what kind of ecosystems? Are they moving through in their daily lives? Now, I want you to speak with empathy, and find language that says, you know, my sense is you're dealing with blank. And after you brought the empathy part of the conversation in, right, hey, social entrepreneurs, it's a little bit more complicated, sometimes a lot more complicated how to speak directly to, you want to have an impact. And you also want to live a good quality of life with plenty of resources, including money to buy what you need to and have what you need to do for yourself and your family. And that's more complicated than just somebody who's doing single bottom line business, it just is, it's totally doable. Without this, I'm here to help as best I know, right? And it's harder, and it's frustrating sometimes, you know, lead with empathy, when you start to bring your message into the marketplace. And then I want you to start to speak directly to how your product or service addresses real challenges that your ideal client has. And this is coming directly out of some of the work you might want to do. And I'll talk about that last, to help you with some of those earlier steps. Who are they? What are their challenges? What are some of their demographics and psychographics. If you already know that, if you already have a great sense of that, you might already you just need to sit down and write it down. These are my six bullet points of who they are. These are, you know, my 10 Empathy statements or my eight empathy statements about what challenges you're facing? What do you do? If you're not sure yet? So great question. And it's okay, to be honest. Matter of fact, I would love for you to be honest. Let me give you an example. Two examples of people who, you know, when they honestly, that question came to them. All right, it turns out I don't have as much nuanced information, Paul, as you would like me to have. What do I do about that? Well, let me give you two examples. And I would encourage you to be person number one and not person number two, social entrepreneur number one recently, I met with him, and he was he called it a listening tour. A more technical name is called market research. And I will put a link to an episode I did a while back on how to do market research for entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs. He was doing a listening tour, and he was working to find 50 people, I was one of them that he was going around spending about 20 minutes. What you might ask, it was very similar to what I'm suggesting, I think he did a fabulous job. I was person number 10, if I remember correctly. And his goal is to get to 15. He's a really smart guy, that all kinds of ideas about how to create a product that would be super helpful for positive impact. But before he created that product, he knew he didn't he had great professional experience, but not in this area. And not the kind of people that he wanted to build this product for. So he was doing a listening tour or some market research and he was asking some simple questions. And again, that episode will help you if you want to do a listening tour, some market research of your own. I'll put that in there. Contrast that recently with somebody else that I talked to who is building again a product to help people both of them equally passionate about but the way she was talking about her product. I asked her I said you know how have a sense, there's some nuances here that they weren't clear, I think you would have a much harder time much easier time moving forward with developing this product and making certain decisions about, you know, a website and how to market this product. And I said, How many people do you know that actually fit this ideal client? She knew who ideal client was, but how many of them have you actually talk to? And she thought about, and she said, One, I know one person like this? And I said before, can we just pause some of these decisions you're trying to make about? How to build a website, how to develop a marketing campaign? All the branding decision, all these things that one does to get a product or service out there in the world? Can you go talk to a few more people I knew someone I offered to introduce her right? But who do you want to be the person who knows 50 people and has really gone deeper, really looked at what their challenges are who they are, understand that and can use language that really says with nuance, hey, this is informed by a whole bunch of people and understanding what it's like for them. And what this challenge means in the daily reality of their life. Would you rather be the person who knows one, many times when social entrepreneurs are struggling or like really in analysis paralysis. Like if we can help you get into some more nuanced questions with people who are either spot on or very, very close to who you want to help give you a chance to hear the language, their words, and understand the challenges what it really means for them with more detail. And the messaging just gets so much more easier. And people stop, like outsourcing it so much, yeah, it might be super helpful to have a thought partner to come to that messaging. But it's not so much like, I'm gonna go hire a person who's going to give me my messaging, especially if that person doesn't understand your ideal client, or hasn't done this work any more than you have. And I see a lot of stuff that just misses. And people who spend time to understand who their client is what the challenges are. And they actually, I've had real conversations with real live humans, that are the ideal client, or customer. All this gets so much easier. There's so much more that I could say about this. But for now, I think that's enough. Before you go, I do want to say all the links will be in the show notes that I mentioned. And I also want to remind you, I do this work a lot. I'm here to help social entrepreneurs, really move the needle and to make this process a whole lot easier. So if you could use some thought partnership about developing messaging that really works really speaks to your ideal client or customer. I have a strategy session, you know, to sign up for months and months of coaching. Oftentimes, we can move the needle in a very robust way to help with your messaging, and help you get much clearer and have much more resonant messaging in 190 minute session. It's called My strategy session package. I have some questionnaires that help you like, get clear about what you already know, where some of the big questions are, we'll meet for 90 minutes. I do these two weeks of email support after the session can really workshop things right? really help you dive deep into something like you're messaging. Somebody has a lot of experience in this space. So if you would like more information, the link is in the show notes. For now, I just want to say thank you so much for listening. Please take really good care and these intense times in thank you for all the positive impact that you're working for in our world.