Adam Kay - startwithadam.com

The secret to getting your business recognised:

You know your customers better than anyone, so you’ll know the best way to speak to them. The trick is to talk the same way consistently, with a distinctive ‘tone of voice’.

To get one, just think about these 4 things.

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I hadn’t long since moved to the S8 postcode area when I saw one.

Me and Francesca had gone for a walk around nearby Graves Park. It was her who spotted it first:

A flash of vivid green, speeding through the air. What on earth was it?

Later, a quick Google search gave the answer:

It was a parakeet. An Indian rose-ringed parakeet, to be exact, although perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised to see it…

Turns out parakeets are found all over Britain, not just south Sheffield. And there are a few curious theories why…

Some say the UK’s first wild parakeets escaped from a London film studio during production of ‘The African Queen’, starring Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart. Others think the country’s parakeets are descended from a pair released by legendary guitarist Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s. Here’s the thing, though:

With its dazzling colours and long, thin tail, the parakeet I saw in Graves Park that afternoon stood out a mile as it flew between the trees. I’d expected to see nothing but fat, grey pigeons, and there’s a lesson in that for small business owners and startups:

Sometimes, people will notice your service or product more if you show it off in an unexpected place.

An advertising legend agrees…

Paul Arden was creative director at the famous agency Saatchi & Saatchi. In his bestselling book ‘It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be’, he said:

“Putting a motorbike ad in a ladies’ fashion magazine or even an ad for lingerie in a motorbike magazine may not be such a silly idea.”
Paul Arden, advertising legend

Some thoughts:

• An accountant could post videos on the social media platform TikTok that’s used mostly by younger people, teaching little-known money-saving tips

• Rather than setting up a stall at a food festival surrounded by competitors, street food vendors could book a place at an engineering convention, where there’ll be loads of hungry customers

• Instead of advertising in the back of the city newspaper, a gardener could stick up some posters in local chip shops over the summer, when people are more likely to be eating outside in their (messy) gardens

When I first saw a parakeet in Graves Park, flying alongside all the other boring birds, I was gobsmacked. If I’d seen it in its native Asia, I might not have blinked an eye, and that’s worth remembering…

Next time you need to advertise your products or services, consider whether you’ll make more sales by promoting them somewhere unexpected. Or to put it another way:

If you want to succeed in business, don’t be a pigeon. Be a parakeet.

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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 dot 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 dot 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.

To get simple, practical content marketing and copywriting tips straight to your inbox each month, totally free, subscribe today at the link in the bio.

I’ve always loved writing, but it was only when I moved into digital marketing that I saw how words can transform a business.

After helping some friends build their passions into something bigger, I wanted to share that same guidance with small business owners and startups across Sheffield.

Now I’m on a mission to help businesses to start telling better stories and building a personality to be proud of.

Through the Adam website, I share tips for small business owners and startups in Sheffield. If you want to know how to write words customers can’t ignore, this is the right place to begin.

To get simple, practical content marketing and copywriting tips straight to your inbox each month, totally free, subscribe today at the link in the bio.