Persuade by Decluttering Your Message

Simplicity and clarity are cornerstones of persuasive communications. To influence others, you need to have an ironclad idea of what message you want to share with your audience and then figure out the best delivery mechanism. A wobbly or complicated message is nothing more than an invitation for your listeners, readers, or viewers to tune out. That’s the last thing you want. Worse yet, your audience resents you for disrespecting them by wasting their time. A grumpy audience member is unlikely to give you a second chance. The negative result might be a lost opportunity, a missed sale, a diminished reputation, and a lowering of trust.

Differentiate Between Clear and Muddled Messaging

Think about the last conference or presentation you attended, in person or online. Did you grow increasingly annoyed at the speakers who droned on without ever emphasizing their core message? Did you draw disparaging doodles of those speakers while waiting for their programs to end? Did you go on a mental vacation until you mercifully hear, “That’s it,” grateful that you could then proceed to something more productive?

Now think about the speakers at that conference or presentation who captured your attention and held it. Did you appreciate their abilities to provide a topic road map from the outset so you were reassured that your investment of time and attention would pay off? Did they explain what concepts they were about to discuss and why you should care to know more? Was it easy for you to follow what they were saying?

Don’t Make Your Audience Wait for the Punchline

A persuasive communicator declutters their message by getting to the main point as quickly as possible. Queue research suggests that people get stressed when they don’t know what lies ahead. It’s why busy restaurants offer an estimated wait time to hungry patrons and project managers regularly give progress reports to their clients. You want to endow those who wait with some semblance of control while demonstrating you will keep your promise to deliver quality content about a specified topic.

Ways to Declutter and Reinforce Your Main Message

Declutter your message, and thereby boost your persuasion mojo, by immediately announcing the primary learning goal as if your content is a type of lesson. This makes sense since the aim of well-intentioned messengers, whether you are an executive giving a speech or a company publishing a white paper, is to empower your audience by educating them. As a former tenured professor of finance, I can vouch for the importance of creating an easy-to-follow syllabus or, in the case of thought leadership, an easy-to-follow structure. Set expectations upfront that you will travel together (absorbing the content) from point A to point Z (taking in supporting details) with every stop on your trip advancing you towards an enhanced knowledge of the subject at hand.

Reinforce your main point by including mini quizzes or callouts of salient facts. You might gamify your content to spice up the fun factor. Numerous companies are using this approach for younger audiences who are accustomed to accessing content digitally via their smart phones or game-like apps. Attorneys, auditors, financial advisors, and other professionals are familiar with the reinforcing mechanism of quizzes since they are included in mandatory continuing education courses. Even in an informal setting, you can shout out questions to an audience, offer prizes for correct answers, distribute helpful handouts, or produce short videos with case studies that exemplify your main point. When I developed a risk management training program for the Association for Financial Professionals, the Learning Director of AFP and I created materials that emphasized the main theme: Assessing risk (and managing it thereafter) is critical since not all risks are created equal. During each interactive workshop, CFOs, controllers, and treasurers would team up to analyze risk maps, measure “what if” risk scenarios, and discuss how to correctly measure risk. These actions helped to reinforce the core theme of the workshop.

Declutter Your Mind to Declutter Your Message

To facilitate clarity of message for the audience, you must have a clear vision of what you want to say. If your end goal is to sell a product or service, do you emphasize a single attribute such as excellent customer support and then discuss your 24/7 customer support line and generous return policy? If you need to recruit the most qualified and enthusiastic employees in a tough hiring environment, do you focus on upward mobility paths and then detail the HR benefits that support this positive? If you want to sell a book by speaking at an industry event, do you adequately link the audience members’ pain points to the premise of your (hopefully) bestseller? If you are pitching to a venture capitalist, do you start with a statement about how your innovation is a solution to a problem and continue with your exact plan to monetize?

In the words of David Ogilvy, advertising tycoon and founder of Ogilvy & Mather, “The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.” The same notion applies to the broader class of messaging vehicles. Why would you spend resources on creating sub-par content? You want and need content that works for you and your audience.