The Best Way to Cut Through the Noise

EVERY market is noisy. So what’s the number one way to cut through the noise in your market?

Let’s start with a story. I recently indulged in some Sunday scrolling on social media. In addition to the usual noise from business owners claiming they work an hour a day and earn millions from passive income, I noticed another troubling trend that continues to grow.

Many business coaches and other experts now claim that every piece of content should sell something. Unfortunately, an increasing number of small service businesses follow this advice. I unequivocally know this “advice” to be false. The next day, I wrote a LinkedIn post about it that grabbed people’s attention, so I decided to turn it into this blog post.

As a professional communicator with more than three decades of experience, here’s why I think that philosophy hurts any business inclined to follow it.

When a business is always selling, it becomes transactional. People view that business as a commodity and buy based on price. Once a competitor makes the same offer for less or gains more reach, the first business struggles because people don’t care where they get the service.

They don’t care because the business lacks a strong brand. The company hasn’t offered value in advance to build connections and trust. It hasn’t shared its values or purpose. There’s no emotional relationship between the audience and the business.
Here’s another trend that worries me: copied content.

There are dozens of entrepreneurs out there LITERALLY copying other entrepreneurs’ content — from social posts to sales pages. It’s shocking, disrespectful and illegal.

Most entrepreneurs are good people who want others to succeed, but not by passing someone else’s work off as their own. I know people who’ve experienced this. Even though the copied content was eventually taken down, it took a major investment of time, emotion and sometimes legal fees to make that happen.

The silver lining? Loyal followers often alerted them to the copycats.

I used these two extreme examples to highlight two big mistakes I see in marketing. But the solution to both is the same: focus on building your brand. That is the best way to cut through the noise.

Any business, whether it’s a company of one or 100, needs to build its brand to achieve long-term growth. A brand builds influence, reputation and authority. Real experts know this. They don’t post and email about their latest offer every day. Instead, they serve their followers and subscribers with valuable content. They earn the right to sell.
Businesses that build strong brands, from identity to experience, choose long-term value over short-term gain. That means they focus on transformation rather than transactions. They create thought leadership content with ORIGINAL ideas rather than using AI or copying their peers.

That is how they cut through the noise in their market.

Their content educates and inspires, building a network of people who know, like and trust them. So when they do make offers, they have an audience that wants what they offer — and invests more — because these experts have already proven themselves worthy.

In this era of writing clickbait or not writing anything original at all, be the leader your people are seeking.

What’s wrong in YOUR market? What truth do you believe that no one else is talking about? What change do you seek in your industry, neighborhood or the world?

Talk about that. Write about that. Connect with the people you want to serve and show them why you’re worthy of their trust.

People typically buy based on emotion. When we focus on building that emotional connection, we can offer real value and charge accordingly. THEN we can more deeply serve the people we founded our businesses to serve.