Get High at Work!

Tell Your Story

Written by

Kevin Sandlin

in

There are not many days that I don’t have the conversation with an entrepreneur or small business owner about “telling your story”. It’s incredibly important these days to maintain a constant flow of communications out from your HQ to your target audience. Here are 5 reasons that your outflow of story telling must stay constant and consistent.

  1. There is so much competition these days because it’s so easy to create a startup with a web site – a good looking web site – that it’s easy to be overrun in a space that you’ve owned, just because it looks like you’re asleep at the wheel and the new kid on the block is kicking it.
  2. The 24 hour news/social cycle enables someone who’s never heard of you yesterday to be your most adamant fan today, just because you connected with them and showed the right empathy for their pain.
  3. Your story is constantly changing because your are, after all, a startup, and that’s the job of a startup: do dozens of experiments until you find the right solution for the biggest problem with the most customers willing to pay.
  4. Your market is always growing, so there are always new customers who haven’t heard of you yet, and the most popular way consumers make decisions these days is by consuming real information from blogs and peers that they trust.
  5. Your audience is always looking for the solution to their problem. They just haven’t found you yet. Thirty years ago, would you have opened a little office and put out a shingle and then hid inside the office? No, of course not. You’d have set out to meet every potential customer in town so you could – wait for it – tell them your story.

Now you have the internet. No more telling your story to one person at a time. Sangram Vajre, the CMO of Account Based Marketing startup Terminus, just published a post that somewhat transparently says “here’s the tools we use to market ourselves.” At the bottom of his mar-tech stack, the building blocks on which everything else relies, is, you guessed it, their blog. That’s how they tell their story. Check it out here.

Those are just a few reasons that your startup needs to constantly tell its story. It just so happens that the easiest way to tell your story is in a daily, weekly, or bi-weekly blog. Tomorrow I’ll review a couple of constructs that can make it much easier to keep the stories flowing.

Comments

Leave a comment

More from Kevin

  • Try a sample, then eat the whole cake

    Have you ever seen a big tasty-looking carrot cake in the window of a bakery, then run in and bought that $21.99 carrot cake, and then you get home, nuke a piece, dive in, and…ugh. That’s how my grandmother made carrot cake!! Where are the raisins? It’s so dry! But you bought the whole cake, and…

  • 4 Steps to Determine How Well You Know Your Brand

    This post originally appeared on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog. How well do you know your brand? DO you know your brand? Actually, “brand” is an uncomfortable topic for many startup founders and small business owners, simply because they weren’t thinking about their brand when they started. It’s not a knock on them. Every entrepreneur…

  • It’s easier – and better – for someone else to tell your story

    Since transitioning from a simple content aggregation publication into a content marketing service, I’ve had dozens of meetings with entrepreneurs and marketers about “telling their story.” A consistent pattern has emerged out of those meetings that has become predictable in all my initial consultations with potential clients: It’s easier for me to tell your story…

  • How and Why to Segment Your Website Audience

    This post originally appeared on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog. When you go shopping for new clothes, online or in a brick and mortar store, which section do you hit first, the men’s or the women’s clothing? Good. OK, when you need a new power cord for your computer or smartphone, do you go…

  • 4 Steps to Predictable Marketing Outcomes

    One of the greatest achievements in starting a business is when you reach the point at which you can conduct a marketing campaign and predict with great confidence the outcome of the campaign, regardless of the end goal. When you can accurately predict the outcome of each individual marketing effort, you can then grow your…

  • Digital marketing summed up in six simple points

    Last Thursday, I led a 2-hour version of the six hour version of the 10-week Digital Marketing class at General Assembly. I really enjoy teaching these short, impactful sessions that serve as great introductions or primers for folks who want to learn to talk the talk in Digital Marketing or determine if they’d like to…

  • Digital Marketing 101: Glossary of Digital Marketing Terms

    This post originally published on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog. 1. Analytics – information resulting from the systematic analysis of data or statistics. In digital marketing, analytics is the information resulting from systematic analysis of data gathered from marketing activity such as email marketing, landing page A/B testing, or Google Adwords purchases. 2. Average…

  • Digital Marketing 101: Creating Your Digital Marketing Calendar

    This post originally published on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog. This post is part of our Digital Marketing 101 series. Sign up to get the full series! Everything we’ve discussed so far in this Digital Marketing 101 series has focused on what to do and a bit about how to do it. But in…

  • Digital Marketing 101: Understanding the Digital Marketing Funnel

    This post originally published on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog. When we started our latest session of Digital Marketing at General Assembly’s Atlanta campus, I told the class, “the term ‘digital marketing’ is a misnomer. It’s marketing, but we focus on getting our message to our audience digitally. But it’s still marketing.” What I…