Welcome to brilliant-entrepreneur and BizVolutions!
There’s a method to all my madness, I promise. When a post has got the category, BizVolutions, it’s aimed for small businesses. When it has the category, brilliant-entrepreneur or Moonlighting Entrepreneur, it’s for entrepreneurs or solo professionals.
I figure it’s easier to divide them up this way because at some point in the future, I’ll be spinning off the BizVolutions posts to its own domain. For now though, I figure what I have to say is best said to everyone on one blog. Thus, if you subscribe to the RSS, you’ll get all the posts, no worries. Also, if you sign up for my biweekly eZine (over to the right of this post), you’ll also receive information geared toward both. If you really hate that I am clumping it all together, email me or tell me on Twitter.
All right?
Onward.
The importance of a business story has been harped on by countless small business consultants in the past five years or so. It all started with Tim Sanders and his book, Love is the Killer App. The idea Sanders proposed is that you could win business by sharing more of yourself with your customers. A lot of businesses thought this was a bit of hocus pocus, and perhaps they’re right. But if a business is serious about surviving in this era of “emerging business” and economic depression, well, you’ve got to play by the new rules.
I’m not saying you have to ditch every marketing practice right away, in fact, I’m not suggesting you ditch anything. I’m explaining that rather than chasing your customers with postcards and phone calls and interruption marketing, you learn to think in terms of inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is the undeniable fact that most people are searching for information in our Internet, social media age. They are out there looking for solutions to their problems (well, they always have been, but more so now with the advent of social media tools) and if you create a web site or presence on a social media network that helps them solve their problems, they’ll come find you.
The first step is creating the story of your business. Let’s face it; people love stories. They understand most complex issues of life using stories. Dry factoids about your business won’t interest people looking for a solution, a story about how your company found the solution for themselves and then decided to share it with the world, now that attracts an audience.
So, how to create this story?
1. Write or dictate every boring factoid about how your business started: who, what, when, how. Explain who your first customers were, what you solved for them, and what you learned as a result. And then once you have all that down, you get creatively selective.
2. Think in terms of a movie screen. There’s the problem set up at the beginning of every movie. Pick a scenario that you know most people are going to connect with (and try to pick the scenario that is your star product, or the product that you want to really highlight). This is your act one. Everyone is running around screaming because the big bad roof is bad and needs repair, or your pipes are leaking and there’s more anguish and hand-wringing. Or show someone who got a really bad haircut. I picture scary horror movie music playing in the background. These people need your solution.
3. Now, introduce yourself as a good-looking guy or gal just minding your own business and walking in the rain or in the snow (you know those movies) and you get an epiphany. You picture yourself saving the world with this radical idea. You’ll provide haircuts that look good, you’ll replace someone’s roof just before the big storm, you’ll fix the leaking pipes with your Superman cape on.
4. And then the climactic ending. You do save the world. You offer your exceptional services to your niche audience. You find a hook “simple plumbing fixes” or “It’s all in the layering,” or “We roof your house quietly.” Whatever you know is the reason your customers buy from you already. It’s not cheesy, it’s simple human nature. People don’t care that you began roofing four years ago or that you bought the company from a disreputable man. They want to know if you can fix THEIR roof NOW, before the storm gets here.
You may use some of those factoids in your story, but the key is: you can help them. You can solve their problem. And then you make sure you are creating content that tells your visitors and prospective customers that in a myriad of ways, in a variety of mediums. So that they NEVER forget it.
Action Tip: Once your story is written, how can you transmit it in as many different ways as possible? Can you write a white paper? Can you write blog posts? Can you do a video? A podcast? Can you create a “starter kit” for new customers that includes this story?
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