Why the Law of Focus Works 📡🛰️ EBH

How do you build a filter?

Continued from Monday’s email

You can use any tool or tactic to attempt to talk to pretty much anyone. The internet has broken down the barriers and gatekeepers to people, expanding our reach to the near-infinite. But just because you can reach someone doesn’t mean your message will be valued (or responded to) by that person. There will always be people who want to hear what you have to say more than others. 

Thinking about your brand as a filter demands that you create focus. Focus of what you value, focus of what you think about, focus of what kind of person is going to be successful, focus of who you are and who you aren’t.

Who do you want and who don’t you want? What does your target audience care about that your non-target audience does not?

Seth Godin says the core of a brand is, “People like us do things like this.” If you are like us, make these choices. And these choices signal that you’re part of our group. Those choices are specific, subtle, imbued with a secret meaning only the tribe members understand.

This is the power of focus: The more you focus, the better you get at the thing you focus on and the more clear you are to your audience, the more believable you are, and the cheaper it is to support that message.

Why this works

As you create more of a focus on the kinds of people you want to hire (by temperament, skill set, location, ambition, motivation, etc), you will become better at communicating that idea. Talk about the ins and outs of modern nursing every day for three months and you will realize you’re peeling the onion of a nurse’s work experience. You’re getting past the obvious platitudes into the stuff only nurses say to each other. 

You aren’t talking to “health care professional types,” but “nurses working in small hospitals in  North Florida.” You aren’t talking to “new nurses,” but the “nurses who just graduated from Loyola in the middle of their class: the kind who didn’t get great grades because nursing wasn’t something that just made sense, but a craft, something that needed to be worked at every day.” 

Think of how the greatest writers write. A Farewell To Arms starts, “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.” Not, “It was pretty hot that summer we lived near a river.” The first paints a picture in specifics. The second conveys only broad strokes.

The more you write, the deeper you dig towards something more meaningful. Something more real. You write your way into their world, creating an audience that sees you not as an interloper looking to sell something, but as a member of the community. This creates credibility you cannot buy.

Where this falls apart

The value and power of the filter only come into play when the brand is clear on who or what it wants to filter in and who or what it wants to filter out. Arbitrary focus isn’t useful. It starts when you truly understand what your company is all about, the attributes and behaviors it rewards, and who it simply isn’t built for.

Examples

The Ritz-Carlton hotel has one of my favorite employer brand/consumer marketing messages: We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. They aren’t looking to hire “experienced hospitality staff” or “maids with a can-do attitude” or “housekeepers with 3-5 years experience.” They know who they are, why they are, and how they are. They are drawing a very clear line between people who would be good fits and people who would not, all in one line.

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Reminder, my next $25 webinar, where content maven Rachel Kennedy and I build a July calendar right in front of you, is filling up.

***This Newsletter Contains No ChatGPT***

-James Ellis [LinkedIn] [Website]

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