Tell Your Story

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.