Presentation Matters

If you look like a bum, that matters. It does. If you haven’t brushed your teeth, if your hair is all ratty, if you’re sitting at home in your underwear please put on some pants. You don’t have to put on pants, but what I’m saying is that your presentation matters.

We judge books by their covers. We can’t help it. We all have prejudices. They’re ingrained in us. We’re conditioned by our parents, by our society, by where we grew up. We can’t escape it, and the goal isn’t to escape the prejudices. It’s too simply know that they’re there and to operate with that knowledge.

That’s neither here nor there. Because what I’m talking about it presentation. I’m talking about how you look and how you behave and how you communicate, and the cadence in which you speak and how you present yourself.

It is very, very important when it comes to your business, because people will judge you based on how your website looks, based on how you sound, based on how you’re dressed. So what we want to do is take that into account. We want to know that we’re going to be judged for our presentation, and then be deliberate about our presentation, right?

I have to make these videos super high quality. I have to shoot them on nice cameras and have nice lighting and multiple angles. Because in this industry, I am judged based on my production value. And I’m already pushing it with the long hair and the beard. It’s already a stretch in this industry as a content creator.

So what you want to do, is you want to know who your audience is. And understand kind of what makes them tick. And what they’re going to respond to, and take subtle cues from the types of content that they consume and the questions that they ask. And you want to cater to your market, right?

So in my business that’s geared toward baby boomer women, we use very clean and very simple, not a whole lot of flash. Because they come from a generation that didn’t have all this madness. We, in our generation (if you’re of my generation which you may not be), but if you’re say under 35, you grew up consuming tons of neon colors and advertisements and stuff like that.

You want to know who your trying to appeal to. You want to know what connects with your market. You know, a “mark” is a carnie term. And what would happen, is that at the carnivals back in the day, what they would do is literally mark people on their shoulder with chalk, so these people would be marked as they walked around the carnival. Then the retailers would know, that’s a mark. I can sell to that person. They knew who their prospect was. Because someone else had told them.

And Facebook will tell you who your prospects are. You can go to Facebook audience insights, can you can look up who like this fan page also like this. You can see what people are interested in. You can see the types of content that they consume.

And it’s not about your product, it’s about your promise. The promise is what people buy. They look at two products, they look at the sales messaging and the promise that is made, and they choose the one that has the better promise.

Now, the job of the product is to back up that promise. You have to have a really good product. You must provide a good experience to your costumers. They have to love what they get, so that way you can engage with them and have them do business with you again.

But your presentation matters. And your presentation is everything from how you look, to how you sound, to how your webpage looks. And this applies to more than just business. This applies to every area of your life. I just wanted to make this clear, that your presentation does matter. And that you should put some attention on it.

Ezra Firestone here from SmartMarketer.com. Thanks for watching. I’ll see you in the next one.