What Is Your Million Dollar Message?
Have you ever considered how strong your USP (unique selling proposition) or million dollar message is?
As a business owner and operator, your job really comes down to two primary functions:
- Get Customers (aka customer acquisition)
- Keep Customers (aka customer retention)
In reviewing the first function of getting customers, your million dollar message must force someone to stop what they’re doing, stop scrolling, stop reading, and pay attention now.
Yet, oddly enough, many people start their business without a strong million dollar message. Owners continue struggling for years with the same old “we’re the best” or “we’re number one” or some meaningless slogan faked in for their USP.
However, since you’re the intelligent marketer for your firm, you get that you need a strong, powerful million-dollar message that immediately separates you from the sea of Me’s, right? Here’s why…
Pure Mass
We are all exposed to a large mass of digital content daily. This has been estimated to grow by 45 to 60 percent every year. The average person in the United States spends roughly 10 hours daily with their head in front of monitors, laptops, tablets, phones, and other electronic devices.
This never-ending hum of digital dumping on all of us changes how we perceive and interact. First, it makes us keener on what is going on in advertising and promotional messaging and makes us more skeptical creatures. We immediately begin to ignore the buzz going on all around our screens. And then, there’s the attention problem for marketers.
Attention Deficit Messaging (ADM)
Attention deficit messaging means that someone or something is constantly competing for our attention, and we’re going numb to it. Balancing family, work, life, studies, church, responsibilities, and all things required of us is dulling our attention and focus. The average attention span for the notoriously ill-focused goldfish is nine seconds. Still, according to a study from Microsoft, people generally lose concentration or focus after eight seconds, highlighting the effects of an increasingly digitized lifestyle on the brain.
The Importance of Pain
Our diminishing attention spans mean that to get the prospect’s attention, we must be of importance to their pain at the moment a prospect recognizes that pain point. It’s more than at the right place, at the right time… it’s more about surfacing to the top when someone searches for and selects your particular content, advertisement, story, website, or blog because your message resonated with their specific need of importance in solving their pain point or immediate desire to solve a problem they are experiencing.
How The Million Dollar Message Works
In it’s simplest form, the million dollar message works by immediately grabbing attention through some kind of hook or headline that resonates with you on a deep enough level to stop you from what you were doing. Here’s an example:
When you opened your restaurant, did you think that “If We Make It, They Will Come…” only to find out that’s a painful LIE? Unfortunately, here’s the truth…
That’s the attention-grabbing part. After you put some more gas on the fire. You work your way to the new, unique aspect of your million dollar message: The new opportunity.
Taking cues from renowned copywriter Evaldo Albuquerque, the new opportunity makes your solution unique. Like a fresh opportunity, a brand-new path to success in a straight line. This painting-by-numbers approach results in a perfectly colored solution where only pain or disappointment had resulted beforehand.
After the new opportunity comes the pain killer or the intense desire statement. This part of the message zeros in on your prospect’s heart of the matter. You call it out like; my new opportunity is the key to painting your deck in only two hours, start to finish, or the key to unlocking the mystery of losing unwanted belly fat forever.
Finally, the last part is the new way. This method is something new… a new device, a new mechanism, a new way to make the old promise work. Often, this is a brand-new name or twist on an age-old problem. Think Tony Horton’s P90-X for example.
Constructing Your Million Dollar Message
Let’s take the framework from John Carlton that makes up many of today’s USP’s and then juice it up to create a million dollar message.
This framework goes like this:
We help (your ideal client)
Do (this benefit/results they want)
Even if (worst case believable scenario)
Now let’s take my current USP, which follows the above framework (minus the Even if scenario):
I help small business owners get and keep more customers with less stress, own their marketing system and achieve six-figure incomes.
My goal here is to blend in the new opportunity with a painkiller or intense desire, then land the new method while keeping the needed elements of the current USP.
Here goes the first draft:
Getting and keeping customers (new opportunity) is the key to longevity and a stress-free business (intense desire), and it’s only attainable through the ZWS Marketing System™ (new method).
Of course, I can continue to iterate on this first draft until I find perfection, but you get the idea.
So gather your team, spouse, kids, and favorite pet to start today by drafting your million dollar message. Get feedback from your trusted team, then adjust until you find something perfect that resonates with your target market.
I help small business owners get and keep more customers with less stress, own their marketing system and achieve six-figure incomes.
