#230: How to Avoid Tone-Deaf Marketing

Welcome back to another episode of the Course Creation Incubator podcast. I’m your host, Gina Onativia, here to hopefully get you to take action on that online course. That live workshop, your next cohort, whatever it looks like you are putting yourself out there in a bigger way. And I am here for it and hopefully encouraging you and inspiring you to go beyond the one to ones, go beyond the coaching or consulting and put yourself out there.

Now, I’ve been talking a lot about lead magnets lately. I did a three part series. We’d love for you to go back and listen to that if you haven’t already. And today I’m going to go on a bit of a rant about what it means to be tone deaf and in terms of our messaging and our communications and how as course creators and entrepreneurs and business owners, we want to avoid being tone deaf at all costs because there is a cost associated when we are tone deaf and we don’t realize the emotional nuance is that our communications or our messaging is conveying.

And I’ve got a couple of examples I want to share today how to avoid it. But then also how to improve our own communication and messaging. So this isn’t just a rant. We’re going to talk about some positive pieces, too, and some insightful tips for you to really put some great communications and messaging out there to your students, your clients and your customers.

Before we dive in, this episode is brought to you from our Deaf for You services. If you are looking for high touch custom marketing course creation website creation, we’d love to talk to you. Book a call at course creation boutique dot com slash course To learn more, we only take a few clients a quarter if you’re looking for that high touch hand-holding.

All right. Let’s talk about first and foremost what it means to be tone deaf in our communications and in our messaging. And this all came about because I was tone deaf with a colleague this week, earlier this week, when I was trying to give feedback and coaching. And I loved to call myself a coach. I coach on course creation.

I coach on development and career development. I love being a mentor to young writers and young consultants and even I have a lot to learn and I was talking to a younger colleague earlier this week giving some feedback and I didn’t catch the nuances before I started giving the feedback of what she was projecting. And also I didn’t ask how she was feeling.

I didn’t check in with her first before I started launching into coaching and feedback. Guys, I am originally from New York. This is what we do. We just go for it right? Sometimes I do want to say, Hey, how are you? How are you doing? I have to stop myself before I go into that or before going in directly.

And it’s something I’m definitely working on. So that’s what I did with this colleague. And she unfortunately burst into tears and and had a really, really emotional moment with me, which, you know, is great. Have the emotional moment, have the tears. It just I did not capture the nuance of what was happening and her face and her actions and what her body was trying to tell me.

And I was tone deaf in that moment. And I immediately apologized and I said, I’m so sorry. This coaching was very tone deaf in the moment, and I didn’t mean for it to be that way. Now, I caught myself in the moment, but and hopefully didn’t do much harm to this relationship. But when we’re tone deaf in our messaging, in our emails and our sales pages, in our social, we don’t have that opportunity to apologize or capture them in the moment and explain ourselves.

We don’t we don’t get that opportunity. So we want to be very cognizant of when we’re not capturing the nuances, when we’re not reading the signs. And by the way, being tone deaf is when your words don’t match the emotional reality of your audience. So when I was speaking to this colleague, my words definitely didn’t match what her reality was.

Her reality was overwhelm. Her reality was, how am I going to keep up? And here I am. Hey, you should take my coaching. I mean, come on. There’s a complete disconnect there. And when you miss that context, what they’re feeling, what your audience is feeling, what they’re going through, or what they need from you, it’s just it’s a huge fail.

It can be. And when we’re tone deaf, we lose that connection, like I mentioned before, and connection is what sets us apart from Ally, right? So I can just churn out words. They could churn out facts, but it’s that connection that really makes us human, that is memorable, and that will ultimately encourage them to become, well, not just a client of yours or a student of yours, but an ambassador for life.

So tone deafness shows up a lot of different places. Emails, for example, when’s the last time your list heard from you? I was just talking to a client the other day and they had this personal list of 10,000 emails and getting to the bottom of, okay, when’s the last time you reach out to these? Are these contacts? Are these a real list?

Are you in regular communication with them? How do we need to approach this? Do we need to warm them back up? Hey, I’m Gina. I know it’s been a while. You may originally be on this list because X, Y, and z. You may know me from this. Make a joke, right? And I ghosted you for a good 12 months.

And I’m sorry. However, I’m here for you now and I will be here for you now. Consistently X, Y, z. So thinking about where your audience is now and how we need to speak to them so we’re not tone deaf versus just busting out. It’s been a year, right, since you email them and just busting out and saying, Hey, I’ve got this great course you should buy from me.

Like, who the heck am I to see that and to just burst through the email doors and say bye for me, Hey, I curated this list. I’m entitled to this communication. It’s not right. We’re not entitled to medications. We’re not entitled to relationships. We earn them. We earn them even online, just like in person. Here’s another example. Social media are your posts meeting your audience where they are emotionally, or are you just shouting into the void?

So sometimes I’ll read my my feed. I like threads and I know a lot of the feed is what you’ve curated. So I’ve curated a lot of tennis, a lot of TV show feeds and and then there’ll be people on there giving me personal development advice. And you’ve got this girl and it feels so it’s shouting into the void, like, Who is this for?

And maybe that’s for their audience, but it feels so inauthentic. It feels tone deaf to me because it’s just somebody saying, Hey, you got this. Who are you to say I got this? Think about things like that, right? Or when something happens, when there is a current event and maybe there’s violence or something political, are you taking that into consideration?

Are you being thoughtful and sensitive to what’s happening around the world, or are you just posting your launch posts because it’s the date? Same with your website. Does your homepage feel warm and welcoming or is it more cold and transactional? Is there personality to your site? Is your story front and center or are you just bland, right tone deaf to what your people want?

All right. Let’s talk through some solutions now. We’ve talked through where we can fall into the tone deaf trap a little bit. What can we do instead? And first and foremost, of course, is thinking about your audience. Who are they really? Where have they been? What’s happening to them right now? If your audience is parents of young children, for example, I’ll remember the chaos and exhaustion that really defines those early days, right?

I just remember not being able to think straight when Tristin was two, three years older, when he was a baby. Like forget about brain fatigue, so put yourself in those shoes. Second, check the cultural and emotional context. I just talked about this. What’s happening in the world, your industry, your community. If you ignore it, you’re message can feel off sometimes even a small acknowledgment.

I know it’s been a heavy week, for example, can soften your message. And listen, I don’t get political guys, but I will acknowledge, hey, I know it’s been chaotic or I know it’s been a heavy week just saying that and whatever that looks like for you, that’s okay. But I’m here to help you move forward. Right. The action doesn’t stop when we have a busy week when the chaos is swirling around us.

So I keep it, but I still acknowledge it. Another solution is to read your words out loud. Sometimes we don’t catch tone until we hear it. Does it sound like something you’d actually say to a friend? Or if not, it may come across as maybe even stiff or harsh? A fourth element is to catch yourself, especially when you’re giving feedback or you’re giving coaching like I was doing the other day.

I had a friend who was giving feedback on a website. This was a few weeks ago and she was giving it face to face and and all of a sudden the woman she was giving feedback to her face started, just sank, just sank. We’ve all been there, right? Where all of a sudden a critique kind of goes awry.

And my friend didn’t catch the nuance of her face just sinking. She said that later and and this woman was upset. So sometimes we need to check ourselves. And she asked for permission. By the way. Hey, do you mind if I give you some feedback? And she said, yes, but even that it’s our responsibility to capture the nuances, especially face to face, even if we’re not face to face over Zoom, I should have caught my colleague’s face sinking.

So capturing the nuances of those kind of situations I think are really important. Adding empathy. Another essential piece. Ask yourself if I were in their shoes, how would I feel reading this? How would I feel watching this? A small shift like changing You should too, you might consider can make a big difference. Or one of the pet peeves of mine is when you say you need, okay, how do you know what I need?

I understand you want you might understand my pain a little bit, but I don’t know if you necessarily know what I need. So that’s a little language, new nuance that I flag. And then finally, of course, always give yourself a gut check if possible, run your copy past a colleague or friend, because sometimes fresh eyes will spot some tone issues, some tone deaf issues that you might.