We've been talking for a little while now about strategies to get and maintain the attention of your potential clients.

To get them to sit up and take notice.

But for those of us who want to market ethically and have the best interests of our clients at heart, there's a problem.

I'm sure it's something you've come across yourself: the things that it's easiest to get your audience to pay attention to aren't necessarily the things that are good for them.

In fact, very often it's the opposite. The things that it's easy to get people to pay attention to are often rather bad for them. Or at best, a waste of their time.

You see it all the time with fad diets, shiny new technology or in my field, yet another amazing new way of getting clients that turns out not to really work all that reliably at all for real people.

The problem is that our attention is always drawn to the new and surprising.

Yet in most of the fields we work in, what works and is best for clients are things that are tried and tested. The opposite of new and surprising.

Usually the reason clients are struggling isn't that the answers to their problems aren't known. It's that they're hard work and they take time, skill and application.

But people not only don't want to hear that message – they're wired to ignore it. Their attention is drawn to surprising new things, not the repetition of things they already know – no matter how important they are.

Unscrupulous sellers take advantage of that and spend their time coming up with exciting new things to promote that don't really work but that get attention and sell well.

But for those of us who want to do the right thing, getting attention becomes that bit harder when what you're trying to get people to focus on is tried and tested wisdom.

It's not impossible though.

It's like the excellent teacher who manages to make mathematics interesting for their kids by embedding the principles they want them to learn in a fun new experiment. Or the author who wraps an old lesson in a new story. 

A good way for us to make the old feel new again is to focus on what's actually holding our people back from succeeding with what they already know they should be doing.

I had a chat with a well-known public speaker a few years ago who was bemoaning the fact that when clients called him back they always wanted him to talk about something new and different from the last time.

“They still haven't implemented what I told them last time…or the time before that”.

He felt he was stuck between teaching them something new that wasn't really useful to keep them happy, or trying to re-teach them what they already knew and risking losing their interest.

My advice was simple: focus instead on what's holding them back from implementing what you already taught them.

Quickly remind them of what they know they should be doing. But then spend your time talking about why they're not doing it and how to fix that.

That's new information that will grab their attention. But it actually gives them results rather than just being new for the sake of being new.

You can apply that to almost anything.

In my field, pretty much everyone knows they should be following up regularly with potential clients. But very few do.

By and large they don't need reminding that they should be following up. They know they should be, so if that's was my only message they'd soon tune out.

Instead, I need to talk about new ways of following up that are easy for them to do. New strategies to make sure they can stick to their follow-up plan. Or perhaps an interesting new story of someone who used a different approach to follow-up that worked really well for them.

That way I'm still sharing valuable information that works. But it's interesting and new so it gets attention.

Is that something you can do in your business?

I suspect so.

But you'll need to spend a few minutes thinking about it. Or maybe even do some research on what's holding your folks back from doing what they need to know.

Understanding that and helping them with it gives you a whole new level to your marketing.