🛸QEE: Michelle Mazur’s Guide to Revolutionary Messaging

RJ Redden:
Cape toss on the goggles. You are now in the quest for epic sorry. The quest, for a epic experience. My name is RJ Redden, and next to me today is Michelle Mazur. She is a person who takes messaging very, very seriously. We've just been having to talk offline here, just chatting beforehand. She's a genius at, helping mold messaging that really works, not just stuff that you can print out of a thing that everybody else has and it's been recycled 3,000 times. This is the real stuff.

RJ Redden:
And today, I just I wanna welcome you to the podcast, Michelle.

Michelle Mazur:
Thank you, RJ. I'm excited to be here. I love the whole epic quest vibe. All of my friends in high school were, except for me, were very into D and D. That was not my vibe, but I watched a lot of D and D games because I wanted to hang out with my friends. So

RJ Redden:
Yeah. Nice. There may be a little D and D that happens at this house. Maybe. Maybe. Okay. So, Michelle, without further ado, who are you? What do you do? Why do you do what you do? Give us everything.

Michelle Mazur:
Yeah. So I am a messaging and marketing strategist who created a framework called the 3 word rebellion. And, basically, what that all means is that I am focused on how do you communicate the value of what you do and communicate in a way that is persuasive and moves people closer to wanting to work with you. Because for me, that is what message strategy is. It's like, what are the key ideas that I need to convey in my marketing, in my copy when I'm on a sales call that help people decide to work with me, that get them to raise their hand and sign up for my email list or, you know, jump on that sales call initially. So literally that is my focus. And I am one of those people where I'm deeply committed to you standing out and not sounding like everyone else because there is so much that is the same old, same old in marketing. So like, you know, like live your best life, be your embodied self for the coaches out there or make 6 figures in 6 seconds.

Michelle Mazur:
And I grew my list to 20,000 people and so can you. And all of that is really trite. It undervalues your skills, your perspective, and your expertise. So I want you to be able to stand out and be, like, the obvious choice, create demand for your work. And part of the way I do that with people is I have a framework called the 3 word rebellion, which is the message of change you want to communicate to your clients. Like what is that outcome? What is that result in just a few words? So think about it like start with why. It is your start with y caliber message that you can be known for. And that's really what my work is all about.

RJ Redden:
Exactly. Because there is so much out there competing for our attention. Mhmm. We've got doomscrolling. That's important. We've got, you know, we've got political stuff is rearing its ugly head. We've got, you know, pretty much every glowing rectangle we come across is fighting for our attention right now. And, yes, we you know? And and so when we're expecting people to remember us, what you know, I mean, it's a hard job.

RJ Redden:
We're just talking that, you know, a lot of the big players in certainly the coaching realm right now who got their got their start, you know, 5, 6 years ago or whatever. Yeah. Hey. A lot of them would not be able to get that kind of crowd today because their messaging is bland.

Michelle Mazur:
Yeah. It's boring. It's generic. And that's just an idea I cannot get out of my head that the people that a lot of us are told to look up to as like, oh, if you wanna have this kind of business, you need to be like this person. Their messaging, the content they're putting out in the world is boring. And if they had to start over to day at 0 with no email list, no social media following, they would struggle to build that audience because they would be drowned out in the sea of sameness. What they're saying is so boring and bland and generic. And not to mention that it doesn't even work anymore.

RJ Redden:
But not anymore, baby.

Michelle Mazur:
Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

RJ Redden:
Well, and that's that's that is exactly what I'm talking about because, you know, most people, they are focused most entrepreneurs are focused so broadly because they see people with big lists and they make big money and they go on cruises and drive flashy cars and isn't that fabulous? And, I want to do that too. And and they get sucked into a trap that is almost impossible to escape, which is look at me. I made a $6,000,000 in 6 seconds. Use my templates because these were absolutely killer. And it's the same bland, boring message everybody else is using.

Michelle Mazur:
Yeah. Which won't work for you. You're not going to stand out. It's like it's a race to the bottom, really, is what's happening. When we are using templates, like, as we were talking about, if you're copying and pasting AI and just slapping it on LinkedIn, like, that is a race to the bottom. You are going to blend in. You're going to sound like everyone else. I always talk about this, like, in terms of milk.

Michelle Mazur:
Like, when you go to the grocery store and you want to buy milk, it really doesn't matter what brand, because milk is milk. Sure, you might could have almond milk or oat milk or 1% or 2%, but we tend to buy, like, whatever is on sale because it's all milk at the end of the day. It's all stuff we're gonna pour into our Cheerios. And when you are a coach, when you have a business built on expertise, you can't be milk. Otherwise, you're going to always compete on price.

RJ Redden:
That's right.

Michelle Mazur:
So and if you're using these templates or you're using AI and just copying and pasting, because like AI can be a great little buddy to help you with your messaging and help you think through things or think things in a different or think about things in a different way. Yeah. But, yeah, if you're just copying and pasting, you're going to be milk, which means you're going to be competing on price. And it is a race to the bottom. It's going to be a struggle to get your clients.

RJ Redden:
It's it's going to be a huge struggle even though people are fooled into believing, Well, if it takes me just like 5 minutes to create an article, then I can fill up my whole article pipeline for a whole month and, in an hour. And then that's gonna be great. The problem is you're not filling that with connected material. No. Just no. Filling it with letters.

Michelle Mazur:
Yeah. And I understand that desire to do less marketing. Right? Because as business owners, we tend to be juggling a lot. We have sales. We have client delivery. We have business admin, and then we have marketing. And we're like, alright. How do I do less marketing? How do I spend less my person? Like, who am I talking to? And being very niched about it.

Michelle Mazur:
Because most of our businesses, we don't need thousands of clients. No. Some people need, like, 5 a year, and that is good enough because that is how their business model is. Some of us need a little bit more than that, but all of that impacts how we market and allows us to do less marketing. Like yesterday I was chatting with a therapist, and she wants to get more clients. And she's like, well, what should my lead magnet be? And I'm like, what? Like, why would you have a lead magnet? Like, your people are gonna go from finding you, like, getting your name, going to your website. If they like what they see on the website, they're gonna book a consult. They are not getting on your email list.

Michelle Mazur:
She's like, what do you mean I don't have to do an email list? I'm like, not really. Not for what you're doing.

RJ Redden:
Yeah. Well and that's that's the thing we are we have been. I think I think that there's a movement afoot. I think that there's a pendulum swing coming with everything standardized and homogenized like milk. And then that pendulum swinging over to much more customization, personalization targeted less, I gotta get a 10,000 followers so I can make 3 sales today and and more. You know what? Who am I really looking for?

Michelle Mazur:
Yeah. And how can I tailor my message to that person, the language they're speaking, what they want and desire, where are they hanging out, how can I capture their attention? Maybe social media is not the best place because god knows you're competing against cat videos and cute puppy videos, and people might not be looking for you in those places. So it's really about thinking through all of that of, like, how can I really personalize and tailor my message and my marketing to the person I most want to be working with? And we haven't been doing that. We've been doing things like ideal client avatars. You know, those like Jane is 37 years old, and she has 3 cats. And on the weekend, she likes to watch prestige TV like Succession, and she still has a a poster of her favorite eighties band in her office. It's like, cool. And Jane doesn't exist.

Michelle Mazur:
You can't really sell to people who don't exist. And none of that information is actually helpful for you to find Jane and market to her in a way that's actually gonna be meaningful. That's gonna make her stop and think and pay attention. So, yeah. Like, all of that needs to go away.

RJ Redden:
Oh, it and and I think that it I think that it will because it absolutely has to. People's BS meter, you know, as you were saying, it just it absolutely rings where it would not have done before the pandemic, would not have tripped a trigger at all. Now it's just like, oh, way too many buzzwords in one paragraph. Gotta go. Yeah.

Michelle Mazur:
It's like, I don't even know what you're talking about here. This seems like word salad.

RJ Redden:
Oh, word salad. Word salad is so fun. For those of you who don't for the uninitiated, word salad is just like when people just kind of string a bunch of words together in a in a fashion that seems like it might be the, you know, something interesting. But once you you you analyze it, it just you're going, what what did they say? That is worthwhile.

Michelle Mazur:
Yeah. It's like, What does that actually mean? I am not sure.

RJ Redden:
Oh, well, and the worst is the, you know, oh, the worst is a lot of, a lot of the agencies and the people out there that are pitching AI products because it's a buzzword. So we are gonna write that on a big yellow sticker, and we're gonna smack it on everything we own, and we're gonna start charging more for it because now my stuff's with AI. Like, oil change, 1999. Now with AI. No. No. You don't need an oil change, honey. And, the Zuckerberg was my favorite.

RJ Redden:
Zuckerberg. Anyway, absolutely. You know, they're all fighting it out in public, and and, you know, competition is good.

Michelle Mazur:
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Only

RJ Redden:
yeah. Only helps the rest of us.

Michelle Mazur:
But, but, yeah,

RJ Redden:
like real connective tissue, you know, the best way that I've been able to use AI And I do. I use it for copywriting. I absolutely I, you know, first of all, I use my own product which is good. It's 1st draft ninja. I wrote it. It writes in my own voice, but it writes in 80% draft. You know, it ain't quite there. I gotta give it a hug before it goes on the Internet because because I want it to be, like, if it's the last thing I ever wrote on the earth, I want someone when they read it or hear the video to sit up and go, woah.

RJ Redden:
Who is that person, and how do I get a hold of them? Mhmm. That's what I want. And, and I want everything that I do to be that valuable. I don't post as much as other people. I don't write my alt list as often as other people. But when I do, people hit reply and answer me back. Mhmm. There's the magic for it.

RJ Redden:
You know? Yeah. So, what do you think is the what is you know, if you were starting to focus if you have those same values as we do and you wanted to focus more of your business on on quality rather than quantity, of message, of content.

Michelle Mazur:
Where would you start? You know, where we start, and we don't think about starting here, is by talking to your clients and the clients that you loved working with the most. So this is called voice of customer research. Right? And, I mean, my background is in partially in market research. I was doing it for, like, big companies like Microsoft and Burt's Bees and 7th generation. And one of the things we would do is interview their customers so we can capture the words that they are using to describe what is happening to them. Because our clients are actually speaking to us all the time about their problems, about their experiences. And voice of customer is just a way to kind of gather that up and be like, oh, okay. So this is what they're struggling with in their own words.

Michelle Mazur:
And and it's and it's since you since we have, like, expertise, we tend to take whatever the problem is and then frame it within our own expertise. And it's like, no, You actually want the raw experience. Like, one of the things that I talk about in my own work is this I this phenomenon that I call the overlook expert. And I sent an email about it, about how many times experts are actually told to disregard or deny part of their expertise. Like, one of the examples I saw on LinkedIn was, like, don't be an expert, be a human. And I'm like, wow. News flash. A 100% of experts are also humans.

Michelle Mazur:
But I had messages like that when I started my business. They're like, oh, don't use doctor Michelle Mazur. People are gonna be intimidated by you, and no one's gonna wanna hire you. And even the way that the web celebs teach us to market, it's not about marketing to our expertise. It's about the overcoming story or I can do it and so can you, and I'm just one step ahead of you. And it's like, yeah. But I'm 40 steps ahead of most of my clients, which I should be because they don't wanna be experts in messaging and marketing. They wanna benefit from it.

Michelle Mazur:
So for me, that is, like, starting with who you serve, having those conversations, capturing their language. And here's the cool part. When you capture their language, you literally can put it on a sales page. You might have to zhuzh it up, but I have written so many, like, landing pages and sales pages where I have taken what my clients have said and literally just plopped it on the sales page. Zuzh did a little bit, but that was it. And as soon as you start doing that, people are like, oh, you see me. You hear me. When I describe the overlooked expert and how experts who really know what they're doing are often passed over and ignored, and they're flying under the radar.

Michelle Mazur:
People are like, yeah. That's me to actually get out there and market and be seen and be known. So that's always the best place to start, Voice of customer. Start with your people.

RJ Redden:
Start with your people. You know, I mean, even if you've just, you know, done a whole pivot in your business, you can still start with people that you've served in the past and get them talking about, you know, about stuff. I mean, it isn't there are folks that wanna make it into rocket science.

Michelle Mazur:
And it's not.

RJ Redden:
It's not. And it doesn't it doesn't have to be that way. And most of the people who wanna say that it's rocket science and you have to do these 18 steps in in this way and stand and point your finger and put this tinfoil cap on your head. All of the things that they're that they're saying that absolutely has to be done, you know, really when you think about simple human to human communication and connection, It's so much more simple than that, and and it can be done. And but it is exactly the right place to start.

Michelle Mazur:
Because

RJ Redden:
when we're

Michelle Mazur:
starting with,

RJ Redden:
well, should I do a quiz? Or, you know, like like you're you're way you know, the people who say who say all the stuff that you have to do, that system benefits them.

Michelle Mazur:
Yeah. And the interesting thing is is, like, we are taught tactics. So a quiz. Like, a quiz can totally work. It might not work. I don't know. It really depends. But we're always taught like, oh, this is how you use Instagram.

Michelle Mazur:
This is how you use TikTok. This is how to do a YouTube video. Like all of those things. And then if I take a step back and I'm all like, okay. So how is the quiz getting you to the goal of more clients? And they're like, I don't know. Well, how are you gonna get the quiz out there? Well, I don't know. I thought people would just come to my website. How are you getting people to your website? Oh, I don't know.

Michelle Mazur:
It's like they haven't taken that pause to figure out what their strategy is before leaping into a tactic. Because strategy is this beautiful place where you think about what goals you have, what you want to achieve, and then what are the plans and actions you need to take. And so with marketing, it's pretty easy because it's like, oh, great. My goals are I want to make this much in revenue. I need to generate this many consults, and I need to grow my audience by this much. Cool. How are you going to do that? Like, is it going to be Instagram or are you going to host a summit? Because both of those things could grow your audience. And it's really about picking out, like, what's the right one for you.

Michelle Mazur:
And for me, it's like, let's not do marketing we hate anymore. Yes. If you hate being on LinkedIn, don't be on LinkedIn. You don't have to, you have so many options available to you to grow an audience. And guess what? People got clients before social media. And I think we've gotten trapped into this like, oh, I have to be on social media. Who says?

RJ Redden:
Who says?

Michelle Mazur:
Amy Porterfield. But but who benefits from that? Amy Porterfield. Right?

RJ Redden:
Exactly. You were you you were saying web celebs. I that is a wonderful word for them. Yes. Excellent. There's also, oh, entrepreneurs. You will want to explosively laugh and explosively vomit at the same time, because it really is a dose of reality.

Michelle Mazur:
Yeah. And I don't recommend watching it before you go to bed because I binged a whole bunch of his videos one night, like, before bedtime. And then I had the weirdest dreams.

RJ Redden:
Oh, yeah. Do not

Michelle Mazur:
do that.

RJ Redden:
No. Now here's a question I've just been wondering for myself along my own lines, but I wonder if you could speak to it. Yeah. How much does the communication the knowledge of and the communication of your shared values with your audience, how much does that attract folks? I've I've been wondering that for a long time just specifically because when I talk about my values, when I talk talk about, you know, the the way that I feel about certain things, which oh, no. You're supposed to be do dress professionally and don't name yourself. My first business, I will tell you this, was named Queen Ninja Guru, Specifically, because I read a LinkedIn article that said you should never call yourself a queen, a ninja, or a guru of anything because you sound stupid.

Michelle Mazur:
I thought,

RJ Redden:
don't tell me what to do. I've called myself all 3. Boom. It's done. You know, I can't even write online paper. Just it doesn't work for me. Anyway, the, you know, all of the stuff that we're supposed to do is not stand out.

Michelle Mazur:
And I

RJ Redden:
know you feel strongly about really standing out. Can you talk to that for a minute?

Michelle Mazur:
Yeah. I mean, I think it's really important to share your, what you're rebelling against. I mean, the 3 word rebellion is based on 2 questions. Like, what are you rebelling against, and what's the change you want to create? And the message, like, what you wanna be known for comes together out of those two questions because you have to know what your foil is before you can figure out what's the change you want to create. You gotta know what the villain is before you have the hero. Right? And I think it is so important to talk about, like, what you believe in, what you see as BS, who is the villain in your client's story and naming that for them. Recently, I was working with a client who is a public speaking consultant for, like, b to b organizations. And she was just over that fact that there's one right way to public speak.

Michelle Mazur:
There's just this one right way to do it. And really it's about figuring out what works for you, what plays to your strengths, and we all bring different strengths, and we're not all gonna sound like Tony Robbins. And, god, we don't wanna live in a world where everyone sounds like a Tony Robbins, but that's, like, the right way to do it. So but by naming that, she could then use that as a foil for the work she does and her approach and talk about why having one right way to be a speaker is so problematic and how it diminishes different types of voices. It's not about equity and inclusion. Yeah. And, and so, and I love that idea, but really standing in that and owning it, especially when everyone in the marketplace is giving, like, their tips for how to be the best public speaker speaker ever.

RJ Redden:
You know, the problem and the solution. Gosh. I've been in so many master classes. Haven't we all? Where, where the, you know, folks are just they're doing what they do, and that that is okay. But I think the biggest thing that I want to let my clients know is that, you know, what you doing what you do is attractive to your people no matter what that looks like.

Michelle Mazur:
Yeah. And the fact is, like, I'm not for everyone. You're not for everyone. And that's okay because someone who doesn't want to rebel against the status quo, is probably not my right kind of client. They're not my right type of person. But if it's somebody who wants to do things differently, who wants to make a bigger change, whether that's for their clients and then experiencing that ripple effect once that client changes. Maybe that's for their industry. Maybe it's for the entire world.

Michelle Mazur:
Like, that's more my person, and not everybody wants to do that. Some people are like, I just wanna be an accountant, man. I just wanna add up numbers. I just wanna have enough clients. And that's cool. Like, go do that. There are other people who can help you with your messaging and marketing, but it's it's not gonna be me. No.

RJ Redden:
No. Well, I feel like I wanna hang out with you more often. How would people get ahold of you, my friend?

Michelle Mazur:
Yeah. So the best way to be in my world is to join me in the make marketing sucks less newsletter. I send out a twice weekly newsletter all about how to make your marketing suck less, and it's based in research and not BS strategies that just work for me and nobody else. So if you are interested in that, you can go to doctor michellemazer.com/newsletter and sign up. And together, we will make marketing suck less. And I always tell people, I can never promise that you'll love marketing, but you will hate it a tiny bit less.

RJ Redden:
Yeah. And when it's when you know, sometimes when I get in it, is marketing less. Surprise.

Michelle Mazur:
Yay.

RJ Redden:
What what an absolute pleasure to have you on the show today. It just it's so nice to meet somebody that that knows so well, what what those what those those things are that are gonna blow up in our faces. And and, you know, and especially just love the part where you talked about. Let's start knowing your ideal client beyond Polly Patterson, who has 33.5 kids in a minivan and is going to a soccer game right now. None of that tells me anything about her. Mhmm. I don't care why she I I don't care that she's a nurse. I care why she became a nurse.

RJ Redden:
Mhmm. You know, like, getting into psychographics, and and really digging into who those people are.

Michelle Mazur:
Boy,

RJ Redden:
you, my friend, are a marvel and irreplaceable. I know I haven't seen you in months, but I've been really looking forward today. And so thank you for being on my show today.

Michelle Mazur:
You are so welcome.

RJ Redden:
Fantastic. Well, next week, y'all, you don't have to take your cape off if you want to. You can keep it on all week, but next week, we'll be back. Same bot time, same bot channel, exploring the quest for epic engagement just a little bit more. So join us on that leg of the journey, won't you? And until then, lots of love, and I will will see you later.