Find your story
Jerry L. Kennedy | TLT Social Media Marketing February 2013
A compelling tale will hook your prospects better than a list of product features and benefits.
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THE WORLD OF SOCIAL NETWORKING AND ONLINE MARKETING can be a scary confusing place to the uninitiated. It can also seem, at first blush, like a giant waste of time.
Think about it for just a moment, though. If there was a set of tools that would allow you to get to know your best prospects before you ever called or met them, wouldn’t you want to figure out how to use that tool, even if it came with some risks? Of course you would. That’s why you’re here, ready to take the plunge into the social media pool. You might be asking yourself, though: Where do I start? Great question.
A lot of folks will want to jump straight to picking a platform at this point. Should you join Facebook? Google Plus? LinkedIn? Twitter? All of the above? Well, slow down a minute. Before you decide where to spend your time, you have a much more important question to answer: Why?
I’ve said it many times before, but it bears repeating: Finding your why is the first step in any successful endeavor. If you don’t have a compelling why, the what and how of your efforts will most likely fall short of your intended mark. Oh, you might engage a few minds, but you’ll never engage hearts, and the heart is the master of the sales decision.
Have you ever really thought about why you do what you do for a living? How would you answer that question? Is your answer, “To get a paycheck?” If so, you might want to think about whether you’re in the right line of work. Getting a paycheck is certainly important, but it’s not the kind of story that’s going to make your prospects care. Why should your clients and prospects take the time to listen to what you have to say?
Here’s another way to frame the question: What’s your story? When you begin to think about your business in terms of story, you’ll find that things suddenly become a lot more interesting. After all, which do you find more engaging: a dry list of features and benefits or a well-told story about an innovation that turned a business around? I’ll answer that for you—no matter what you might think about your desire for “just the facts,” the story will get you every time.
Why? You’re human, and humans are wired for story.
When you rattle off a list of the features and benefits of your product to me, I’ll be listening to what you say, but since my brain works about five times as fast as you can talk, I’ll probably also be thinking about what I need to pick up from the grocery store on the way home from work and whether the girl in accounting liked the shirt I wore today.
Tell me a good story, though, and you’ll get my full attention. Suddenly, your words are painting pictures in my brain. Instead of getting distracted by every little thing that crosses my field of vision, my brain is actively participating, filling in the details of the outlines you’re drawing as you speak.
That, my friends, is the first step toward success in the world of online marketing. Once you find your story, then and only then can you decide where you’re going to tell it.
Jerry Kennedy is owner of Inside Out Business Solutions, a sales and customer service training organization. To learn more sales strategies, visit Jerry’s blog at http://jerrykennedy.com or you can reach him at jerry@jerrykennedy.com.