How to Clarify Your Brand Marketing Message: The 1-4-1 Method

Step 1

So, step 1 is to write basically a single page outline of who it is that you help in your business and how you help them achieve the outcomes that you achieve. And we’re going to break this page down into 4 main paragraphs. So, for the first paragraph you’re going to just offload everything that you can write about your audience. The first paragraph is all about really getting clear and specific on who your ideal audience, your ideal customer actually is. And here we’re not going to be writing about loose demographics, like a 30 to 40-year-old male who lives in a particular geographical region.

You need to get specific so that you can almost paint a picture of a single person who is your ideal customer, your ideal client. And it’s valuable here to potentially even describe a day in their life. Example:

• What do they do when they get up?
• How do they live their life?
• What they are going through in their life?
• What does their life look like?

Because when you can picture that person that you are able to help, then you can get really clear on the language that you need to use in order to reach that person correctly in your marketing and communications. So, your first brain dump of a paragraph on the page is going to be about who you help.

For the second paragraph, you’re going to write down as much as you can to get clear about what the problems are that that person faces.

So, what are they like before they ever come do business with you, use your products or your services? And importantly here, we want to be focusing on both the internal and external problems that they face. So internal problems are:

• What’s going through their heads and their hearts.
• How are they feeling?
• What keeps them up at night?
• What are the day to day thoughts that they’re having around the problem that they have, which you can help solve?
• How are they feeling internally about that?

And then the external problems could be:

• How do those internal problems show up in their real life?
• What are the current, physical real world things that are happening in their lives that are causing dissatisfaction?

When we get really clear on these and we emphasise what the problem is that they’re facing, we can start to contrast this against the next paragraph. Next we’re going to write about the outcome.

• What does life look like after they’ve done business with you, or they’ve worked with you, or they’ve had your product in their hands?

Brainstorm here the outcome of doing business with you. You want to focus on both the internal and the external. Internally:

• How are they feeling about their life now?
• What does their new normal look like?

Externally:

• How’s that showing up in their day to day life?
• What do they have?
• What are they surrounded by?
• Who are the people that they’re engaging with?

These are external things. You want to be super clear here. Take some time to picture what your ideal customer’s life looks like now, after they’ve done business with you. And it’s also helpful here to consider future pacing as well, which means painting a picture of what their future might hold now and contrast it to what their future potentially held prior to doing business with you. So, what’s the cost potentially of not doing business with you, or not working with your brand or business? It’s a really powerful thought experiment to go through on this page and write down what does the future hold now that they’ve done business with you.

And then the fourth paragraph or section of this page of brain dumping is all about how you actually help them. So what’s the process of transformation that you take them through? So, what I mean by that is:

• What’s your process?
• What’s your framework or your superpower in business?
• How do you actually work with your clients to get that result – the outcome that we’ve just gained clarity on?
• How does that transformation actually take place?

You can think of the transformation as like the vehicle that allows people to get from A to B from that point of dissatisfaction that we outlined earlier to the satisfaction or the positive outcome that we outlined earlier.  The transformation becomes the vehicle that gets them from one place to the other, and that’s the way that you help them do that. So, get really clear here in this 4th paragraph of how you actually help your clients. That’s step 1 of the 1-4-1 method. You should now have a full page, at least with some pretty clear information written down around those 4 key aspects of your messaging. So, if you really want to get results from this article and clarify your message, I encourage you right now to grab that template HERE.