I’ve been listening to Michael Gerber’s book Awakening the Entrepreneur Within
.
I don’t usually listen to books on my MP3 player, but I’m really glad I did with this one. Gerber – who is reading his book – is really passionate about the subject of small business and this passion really comes through in the audio.
One aspect of Gerber’s book that has really captured my imagination is his urging us to tell our story, the story of our business. I think this is a brilliant way to describe what we do when we market our business well.
Most of us who start a business did so because we had something we were passionate about. It wasn’t just about the money – if it was we’d go back to school and become doctors or investment bankers. We have a dream; a dream about something we thought we could do differently or better than the rest.
Maybe we got tired of receiving terrible service and decided to do it better. Maybe we woke from a dream with a partially formed business plan in the light bulb above our head. Maybe we thought we could build a better mousetrap.
It doesn’t matter what sparked the idea, it became something that excited and inspired us. It had to – how else would we find the energy to create a business plan, convince our families not to have us committed and actually set up shop?
Think back to the first time you told someone about your dream of starting your business. Were you nervous that they’d shoot you down? Or too excited to contain yourself? Whatever you were feeling, it probably wasn’t a staid and bland feeling. There was some heat there.
But somewhere along the way we decided that the excitement we have for our business is unprofessional. So when we talk about our business – about our products or about our services – we use business-speak. We use the language of marketing we read in a text book somewhere. We keep the emotion out of it. Just the facts ma’am.
The problem is when you remove your passion, your excitement, yourself, from the marketing message, you lose all the heat. You loose what makes you and your business unique. And even worse, when you start using “appropriate” marketing language you start sounding like everyone else.
The whole point of marketing is to make yourself stand out – be different.
So what can you do?
Throw out the textbook in your head. Quit worrying about what’s appropriate. And put your passion back into your marketing message. When creating your marketing message – whether in print, on the web or spoken aloud – remember what inspired you to start your business in the first place and make sure you use that energy.
To use Gerber’s analogy, don’t just create a marketing message; tell the story of your business. Tell the story of what makes you unique, what makes you different, what makes you better.
Marketing your business is no time for modesty. You need to be bold. You need to think big.
And it’s not just about you and how you can grow your business, make more money. Telling the story of your business is about helping more people. If your business was created because you want to do something better, it’s your obligation to tell people about it. If you’ve built a better mousetrap, you need to let people know about it. If you don’t, you’re dooming them to settling for an inferior mousetrap.
Andrea J. Stenberg
