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Hey there - it's Brian 👋

I met with a business owner this week with a gut-wrenching fear that customers won’t feel as excited about their offer as she is.

If this is you, you’re not alone.

But there’s a cure to give you confidence your message will resonate:

Text-based social media (even if you don’t have an audience).

So today, I’ll guide you through:

• How to combine text-based platforms to get a more accurate view of which message resonates with customers

• Give you a peek behind the curtain at my own message test

• Show you examples of others who’ve tested messaging

Stay to the end to vote on what 13,500+ business owners learn next week.

Let’s make your business an outlier: 👇

Find the right words to make customers as excited as you

Last night, I had dinner at a with a business owner who runs a film school.

She believes traditional film school leads students to focus on things that don’t matter, and her approach makes viewers obsess about the content.

Amazing.

She has 250 students across multiple offers. But she needs to align to offers to help her scale.

We find out she drives so much traffic that it hides her low conversion rate. So a simple tweak to her messaging would 2x her income!

Yet funny enough… my own messaging with her wasn’t resonating.

“2x your income!” - her eyes gloss over.

“Align your solutions to get 3,000 students!” - she plays her salad.

I was using words that work for me. Not her.

So I changed the approach.

“We set up your business to grow with your passion. It shouldn’t feel like work. It should feel like building your dream.”

Her eyes light up. She grabs my arm.

“What should I do to scale my dream?”

All I did was use different words to explain the same idea. She went from twirling her fork to shoving rice bowls aside to make room for her laptop.

So how do we know which words make customers shove their rice bowls aside and buy?

We test which words resonate with text-based social platforms.

Text-based social platforms are the best way to get rapid feedback

Text-based social platforms are the best way to get rapid feedback on your messaging because there’s fewer variables (no visuals or audio). Which means 2 things:

1. More confident results are actually the message. You don’t have to worry about if it’s visuals or audio that’s skewing your data

2. You can create tests much faster when you don’t have to also consider visuals + audio. This leads to more tests + more confidence

My favorite place to test is LinkedIn and Twitter so I’ll show you use the two together:

LinkedIn

💎 Benefit: Demographic data.

LinkedIn is great at letting you see who engages with your message.

You can see who your post reached by:
• Job title
• Location
• Industries
• Company size

❌ Drawback: Fake engagement.

People on LinkedIn are afraid their boss will see their real opinions. So they put on a “perfect” persona.

This makes the qualitative data (comment section) useless.

Twitter

💎 Benefit: Twitter people tell it like it is.

If they don’t like your messaging, they’ll tell you it’s stupid.

Comments like that hurt your ego, but it’s great feedback to tailor your solution to your customer.

❌ Drawback: It’s hard to tell who is engaging with your content.

You can scan individual profiles, but it doesn’t aggregate the insight like LinkedIn does.

So here’s the trick: get the best from LinkedIn + Twitter

Here’s what you do: post your message on Twitter to read through people’s thoughts. Then post your messaging on LinkedIn to see who is engaging.

Let’s look at an example from Dave Kline.

Dave starts by posting a thread on Twitter: 8 management skills people need to master.

Look through the comments:

Then we look at the “likes” on each tweet to see which skill people think is the most important. He wrote 8 skills, but the most engagement comes from 2:

1. Setting clear employee expectations

2. Holding effective one-on-one meetings

Then he posts similar content on LinkedIn and gets access to who is engaging:

Based on which topic and message resonates (Twitter), and with who (LinkedIn), he can choose how to phrase the message and who to target the message to.

PAQs (Probably Asked Questions)

But Brian… my customers aren’t on LinkedIn or Twitter

I hear you.

These are the best text-based platforms to run message tests. But… if your audience is on other platforms, you’ll get more accurate results by running message tests on where your audience is.

I can show you how to replicate these tests on other platforms, but that’s for another time.

Vote at the end if you want to learn to run these tests on other platforms. 🙋‍♂️

But Brian… I don’t have an audience to engage with my message

You can pay to boost your message. It can have the same impact as having a big audience.

Check the link section at the end for the guides.

Boom! That’s it.

If you found this helpful, please forward this email to 1 friend or colleague. They'll appreciate you and you'll help grow the community.

See you next Thursday 👋

Brian
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1. Feel stuck? Grab time with me to help make your business stand out.

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🛠️ Outlier Links

Here’s the best content and tools I came across this week to help you grow and run your business.

📈 Growth:

Find out how many people visit your Twitter profile (link)

No audience? How to pay to boost Twitter posts (link)

How to pay to boost LinkedIn posts (link)

Why LinkedIn’s business model makes the content feel fake (link)

🏎️ Running your business:

How to know if you’re overpaying your accountant (link)

34 ways to improve your SEO (so customers find your site) (link)

How to deal with a client who asks you to do something unethical (link)

Financial modeling templates (link)

🎓 Learning:

How ByteDance crowdsourced problem-solving to grow to $220B (link)

How different business models create more wealth (link)

🙋‍♂️ Vote: Next Week’s Topic

People like you make this community amazing.

So I want to give you the opportunity to pick the topic that will help you grow your business the most (vote to choose next week’s topic below):