The Movement: Here's How Successful Thought Leadership Happens

Great copywriters, content marketers, and digital entrepreneurs know they need to speak the language of the prospect.

Marketing is messaging, and effective communication uses the right words for the intended audience.

Beyond the words your prospects use, you need to understand the conversation happening in their heads.

In other words, you’re tuned in to how they think, feel, and behave in the context of the problem you’re solving… which is another way of saying you know their values and attitudes.

When it comes to purchasing behavior and brand connection, 74% of consumers favor feeling valued and understood as a critical factor. That means they’re downright begging you to understand the conversation already happening in their heads.

Ultimately, you can’t create desire or change minds. You have to join the conversation already happening inside your prospect’s head — speaking to what they already believe, value, and desire.

The result of getting it right is the kind of connection any marketer and entrepreneur lives and breathes for:

• This person “gets” me

• This person is one of me

• This person is different like I’m different

So, how do we make this connection happen? Before getting there, we must understand how people make decisions and how persuasion actually works.

Why You’re Not Really Convincing Anyone

You may have heard that the most powerful form of persuasion is to make someone think it’s their own idea to agree with you. This is the realm of reverse psychology, where you tell someone to do the opposite of what you want them to do to get them to do what you really want.

Reverse psychology can work, but it can also backfire spectacularly. It’s not really necessary, though, because outside of coercion, it’s always essentially their idea if someone agrees with you, whether they think about it that way or not.

Let me unpack that because it can cause some head scratching...