Use your voice, it’s your only monopoly
Wouldn’t it be nice to have something that no one else has… your own monopoly? Well, you actually do, it’s your voice. The key is to learn how to use it to show people that you’re actually different, before they get to hear your spoken voice. Want to hear how?
Listen to this new 9-minute episode and find out.
If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at [email protected] or visit my website www.AlanBerg.com
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Below is a full transcript. If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at [email protected] or contact me via text, use the short form on this page, or call 732.422.6362
Please be sure to subscribe to this podcast and leave a review (thanks, it really does make a difference). If you want to get notifications of new episodes and upcoming workshops and webinars, you can sign up at www.ConnectWithAlanBerg.com
– Did you know that you actually have a monopoly on something? Listen to this episode and find out what it is. I’m Alan Berg, thanks for coming back for another episode of the “Wedding Business Solutions” podcast. Wouldn’t be nice if you actually had a monopoly on something? Something that nobody else has, nobody else can have and nobody else ever will have. Doesn’t that sound exciting? Well, you actually do. You have a monopoly on your voice. Your personality and the results that only you can provide. So, how do you get this across to customers so that they realize that in hiring you, they’re not just hiring another wedding and event professional, they’re hiring the one and only you?
So, what is a monopoly? A monopoly is when you have something that nobody else has, right? So, you have a product that nobody else can have or a service nobody else can have. That’s tough because if I think about the services that people have for their weddings and events, there are very few people that I can think of. Very few, if actually, if any, that have a monopoly. Now, even if you did come up with something new, somebody is going to copy it. Let’s just face it somebody is going to copy it. And if it’s a product and it’s a commodity type product, somebody’s going to copy it. They’re going to make it cheaper than you because they didn’t have your research and development. They just bought yours and cloned it, right? So, what do you really have a monopoly on? You have a monopoly on your voice.
Every brand, every person, and every business has the opportunity to have a voice. Think about Target. Look at the Target ads. There is a particular voice. There’s a particular feel for that. Think about Taco Bell, has a particular feel and Taco Bell’s voice is different than McDonald’s voice. And McDonald’s voice is different than Wendy’s voice. And Ritz Carlton’s voice is different than The Four Seasons’ voice. Every brand, every company has the opportunity to show their voice. What I see all too often is you using pretty much the same voice as everybody else. I read your marketing materials or read your website, and you’re talking in a very distant way not in a very personal way. And if you’re SEO, search engine optimization team, and I say, team, you could have outsourced it, you could have done it yourself, when they’re getting into your website heavy, it depersonalizes what you do because they’re trying to stuff in these keywords so you’ll come up higher in Google and Bing searches, right? That’s what SEO is, search engine optimization.
So, the first thing you want to do is you want to optimize for the user. You want to talk to the user about what you can do for them. So, if I’m reading your words and I see and hear, we can do this, we can do this, or actually I was consulting just the other day with someone and they said on their website, you know, what we do for our clients. I said, how much of your business is weddings? And they said, number about 90%. I said, clients? How about couples? But besides the fact that it was ‘what we do for OUR clients’ or OUR couples is still about you. “What we do for you, our couples and clients…” would have been a better way to say that. As a matter of fact, that’s what they’re changing it to. So, look at the wording on your website. Look at the wording in your marketing and read it out loud. If you read it out loud, does it sound like you?
Very simple, very simple. I’ve done all of my own books, I’ve written six books. I’ve done them all in audio. And I did them. Because as a speaker, as a consultant, as someone that people have heard this voice before like you are right now, if you have never read any of my books and you were to read one of my books, it would sound like this. Because when I write, I write in my voice. I put it down. Now, it’s not perfect grammar, not by any means. My ninth grade English teacher would not be very happy with my grammar, but it is conversational grammar. And it does sound like me and it is consistent with my voice. Of course, if you listen to me on Audible, on the audio books, you’re actually hearing my voice. So, I can read you my books. But here’s the thing.
When I did my Audible, when I did my audio books, I didn’t have to read the page over or the chapter over before I went and did the audio because I wrote it so conversational. I was able to pull it up on an iPad and just speak. Just read those chapters because they were me. They were my voice in the first place. They weren’t over-edited to the point where it didn’t sound like me anymore. Your website, your marketing should sound like you. Now, there were times when on my website I will have to switch to the third person, which is someone talking about me instead of the first person, someone talking, me talking, just my voice. “Hi, I’m Alan Berg. And I’m glad you came and I can help you this way.” And the reason is I can’t use my own name in the first person too often. I can say at the beginning, you know, hi, I’m Alan Berg, thanks for coming. But if I keep saying, you know, “I’m Alan”, that’s hard. But yet I need to say: Alan Berg, Alan Berg CSP, Alan Berg Global Speaking Fellow. I need to say those things on my website. So, there are places on the site where it talks more in the third person, which is that, you know, “Here at Wedding Business Solutions we can help you”, whatever, so that I can use these phrases in there.
When you read my website, though, even when I’m doing the third person, I’m still talking to you about you. I’m trying to use my company voice to talk to you about the results that you’re going to get. And that’s the key. When you speak to someone about the results that only you can provide them, they have to hire you to get them. But if you use the same wording as everybody else, and there’s a lot of copying going around where someone’s like, oh, there’s a successful business, let me copy their marketing piece, or let me copy the wording on their website. The thing is, you don’t know if that’s working for them. You just see it there. And what made them successful may not be the words on their website, and the words in their marketing pieces, it might simply be referrals, networking, getting business from other sources. So, don’t copy things if you don’t know why they are or are not working for that other company, because you could end up copying something that doesn’t work. Or worse, you’ll copy something that works for someone else and it doesn’t work for you because your needs, your customers, everything is different.
So, you have a monopoly on your voice. Go to your website, go to your marketing pieces, and think: when I’m speaking to someone in a consultation, when you’re talking to a couple on the phone, on Zoom, in person, how do you speak to them? What are the things that you talk about? What are the the adjectives and the verbs that you use in there to express the results that they’re only going to get from you if they hire you?
I was at a conference just recently and I said, if we could live in one of these parallel universes I wish that we could have, this was a DJ and photo booth conference, there were three very well known, talented DJs in the room. There were many more than that, but there were three that I could call out by name. And I said, I wish that the three of you could do weddings for the exact same couple on the same day, at the same time, at the same location in three parallel universes, so we could see that with the same couple and the same guests and equipped with the same tools, right? Every song that you can imagine and the lighting and all the things there, that you would come up with three different results. We would actually get three different results. They would all be wonderful, the guests would be having a great time, the reviews would be phenomenal, but they would be different. And it that’s what you need to express, is your monopoly, is the results that only you can provide. And if you’re not expressing that, very often, the cheaper price wins. So, find your voice, use it, there’s your monopoly. I hope this helps.
I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is [email protected]. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
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