Wouldn’t it be great if people flocked to hear the story of your business the way they flock to a blockbuster movie?

You probably don’t have many resources to back your ideas. You don’t have a multi million dollar ad budget or a team of professional spinners. Your ideas need to stand on their own merits.

Your story will help you make your ideas stick. By “stick,” we mean that your ideas are understood and remembered, and have a lasting impact — they change your audience’s opinions or behavior.

You can work with the same 3 elements that make great movies so powerful, and create a “sticky” story. Here’s how:

1. A strong introduction that capture attention; usually a question to be answered, something to be found or a task to be achieved.
2. A climax where the main character reaches a crossroads (physically or mentally) and has to choose a direction and what to do.
3. A conclusion that ties the beginning question to the end result for viewers.

1. A Strong Introduction

Start your story by telling prospects what drove you to take the worrying and often terrifying step of starting your own business. What was missing for you in your corporate job? Was there an event that made you decide to go out on your own? read more

If you’ve been following the twitter craze and how the marketing world is experimenting with it, then you’ve probably heard about the Skittles fiasco. In a bold stroke of bravery (or short-sightedness), the agency folks covering Skittles decided to make the Skittles.com homepage a twitter stream of the world’s commentary using the word “Skittles.” Anyone who wanted to could twitter about Skittles and see their 140 character “tweet” on the frontpage of Skittles.com. What started as a clever and amusing marketing campaign quickly got out of hand as people started to take advantage of their control over the brand. Postings about Skittles and political affiliations, diarrhea, and outright off-topic and offensive musings quickly put an end to the experiment.

More than a marketing faux pas, I saw the Skittles experiment as a key milestone in the ownership of brands. One could argue that brands have always been the property of their constituents - the customers, employees, and partners. Afterall, a brand is ultimately determined by what people think. However, individual opinions of a brand have always been overpowered and washed out by the power of advertising and mass-media. Until now, there has never been a mechanism to showcase individual opinions as a collective consensus.

The Skittles incident is a sign of the times. Any brand that searches twitter, the blogosphere, or facebook updates will now see countless peoples’ missives about their brand experience. Packaged and presented for all to see, this could be the greatest or worst thing that ever happened to a company.

Alas, brands have been reclaimed by the people who always owned them in the first place – the constituents. It makes you wonder if the value of “brand equity” listed as an asset on a company’s balance sheet is now up for grabs? Perhaps there is a new measure of brand equity – the consensus of the brand’s constituents? Will the future of a product or service now be determined by “brand consensus?”
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I spent almost 10 years working in Benin, West Africa.  As I quickly learned, it was a storytelling culture.  But just a soon, I was told by my language coach that a good story is not necessarily based on whether it’s true or not.  A legend can be propagated because people often accept it without substantiation.  As in any culture, myths were so prevalent in Africa and it was difficult to discern fact from fiction (especially as an outsider).  In our business world, there are probably a hundred marketing myths that small business owners hear each day as well.  So let’s pick 5 popular marketing myths and test their truthfulness.

MYTH 1:  “You gotta spend money to make money.”

The truth is that if you are not investing, you’ll never claim ROI.  If I call my broker and say “how’s that stock of mine doing that I never bought?” he’d consider me a fool for expecting any returns.  You spend money on inventory, software, and of course payroll in hopes that it will turn a profit.  Why would you expect strong marketing results without putting some serious resources behind your efforts?  However, the claim of having to spend massive amounts of marketing cash has been shattered by the host of affordable and sometimes, FREE marketing tools available.  And with the rise of social media, you can engage in interactive marketing so that you trade in that cash outlay of expenses for time cultivating relationships in a variety of online forums.

MYTH 2:  “All the old ways of advertising are gone.  Everything is online now.”

There are many in my field saying that traditional methods of marketing are out.  Newspapers are dying. Phone books get recycled more than used. But you should probably give the boot to anybody on your marketing team with a dogmatic stance against conventional marketing methods.  Why?  Because it’s demonstrating that their plan is based solely on trendy copycat marketing.  Your marketing decisions have to be first based on who you are targeting.  If your target market is not online, then direct mail may be the most effective reach.  And sometimes, even for guys like me who spend hours a day on Facebook and Twitter, even the most simplistic methodology can make the connection from my need to your solution.  The picture above was taken at the intersection near my house.  I noticed it because my wife and I were wondering where we might find information about girls’ summer softball for our oldest daughter.  A few hours later, we had her registered.  All from a simple sign.
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We all make mistakes, and our instinct is to cover them up - hopefully learn from them - and then quickly move on. When we share our resumes or publish our websites and bios, we seldom dedicate a section to our failures. After all, the first impression is so valuable and you wouldn’t want to taint it with anything negative…right?

Well, it turns out that we are all human. And, when someone is looking to hire you - or work for you, they are likely curious about your weaknesses. Why? Because they want to know what they’ll need to deal with. It is a fair question, and increased transparency would only lead to better matches and collaborations.

Why does the process of finding one’s weaknesses need to be so difficult? The obvious answer is the shame associated with mistakes and imperfection. If we all acknowledged that everyone screws up sometimes and were willing to talk about our failures and lessons learned…well, we’d probably develop and perform better on the job.

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As prospects clench their sweaty hands tightly around their shrinking budgets, even a whiff of confusion or doubt will kill the sale.

OK, perhaps a bit dramatic, but now is the time to sharpen your marketing strategy and certainly sharpen your marketing message. It’s time to cut the garbage and stop trying to be all things to all people — mainly because you can’t possibly do it well and it’s causing you to be no things to no people.

You must cause some drama with your marketing to get people off the fence. You must get your prospects to react one way or another. They must think, “Hey, you’re talking about me” or “I’m not who you’re after.” I love that or I hate that is a far better result than ambivalence. read more

When we present a seminar to a group of business owners, we always ask, “Who here is in the marketing business?” The answer usually is, “Just YOU.”

It’s really a trick question, because the simple fact is: Anyone who operates a business of any kind is in the marketing business. Otherwise how would you build your business? Every time you book an ad in the paper, run a radio commercial, send out a flye, launch a web site, or any other activity you engage in to promote your business, you are in the business of marketing!

In order for that marketing to be effective, it must convey a “Strong Idea” about your product or service to those people you are trying to reach.

Most of us market in ways that are interesting but not sensational, truthful but not mind-blowing, important but not “life-or-death”. You probably don’t have many resources to back your ideas. You don’t have a multimillion-dollar ad budget. Your ideas need to stand on their own merits.

You need a way to make your marketing messages stick. You need a Strong Idea. read more

We are big fans of “growing” loyalty among Ideal Clients over pretty much any other business building tactic. It’s the lowest cost sales activity you will ever engage in, since you are already doing business with them, you already know what they want and need, and you can easily find out if they are being wooed by someone else. How easy is that?

And yet… we have hundreds of examples of business owners who not only don’t take advantage of this fantastic opportunity, they positively destroy it. See if you recognize yourself in these stories:

A client who spends $100 a month in your hair salon calls to make an appointment only to find her favorite stylist has left. Did you keep a database of all the clients who came to the salon and allowed you to contact them, tell them the news and offer them an incentive to remain a loyal client? If not, you lose $1200 a year. read more