Go from ‘lost in the weeds’ to ‘the business that leads’ - Seven ways to tell your business story at a deeper level
We live in a fast paced world, and your market can go from cold to hot, or from hot to cold, in a diabolically short space of time. Right now, a lot of markets are cold. There’s a competitiveness in all niches like never before, and patience is low while bitterness is higher than usual.
Many people don’t see these things, but when you’re in business, you see it early and clearly. You may notice your marketing ain’t quite as sticky, or there’s less foot traffic coming in. Or fewer inquiries.
At the subtle level, you might notice a slightly different tone or mood in your market.
This is not only normal, but expected as part of the game. And whether it’s there now or not, it’s guaranteed to hit at some point. One thing that can really help through these periods and all periods of business is building a strong core relationship with your audience, or positioning in a way that allows them to know who you are and what you do at a deeper level.
While this ain’t going to create total immunity from changing market forces… your business story will have meaning for your audience and you can built trust with your core network.
One word I mentioned in that last sentence was ‘story.’
If you read some of these articles, or emails - or even listen to the podcast, you’ll see most of my stuff is riddled with stories and it’s one of the main ways I like to write or communicate. But in this article, I don’t want to talk so much about ‘storytelling.’ Mostly because there are enough tactics out there on story structure, and how to go about it (including our copywriting guide, which you can get down the bottom of this page).
But on top of that, storytelling is only a minor part of ‘telling the story’ of your business, which is quite different.
Telling the story of your business happens on a much longer timeframe, and can include elements of your brand, your messaging, marketing and delivery.
One example is Nike. While it’s a huge brand that spans all kinds of markets, we all know the origin story of Phil Knight and his waffle-soled shoes, and the tagline of ‘Just Do It.’ Nike has history. We are clear on what to expect from the brand and whether we buy it or not, we’ve got a relationship with it.
Another example is a gym we did some work with. Three guys opened a gym, but before that they were all in the film and lighting industry. They were training BJJ, lifting, and doing movement training, but had nowhere to go that did all of them. So what they did was they created a gym. The tagline for the gym is “Fight, Lift, Move”. And it’s no surprise that in a lot of their content, there’s cool video, and they are good at marketing. Because that was their background, and they’ve created a unique culture that a lot of people want to be a part of. I’ve met people who used to train at that gym, and they always say how they’ve moved away now but it’s impossible to find a place to train that even compares.
This doesn’t just happen naturally. We have to communicate the story and world of our business, and what we’re about.
When you do this consistently, your audience will know more about you before they even step foot in your business, and already can tell that they are aligned with you. And because your story is unique, you will go from a ‘fits inside the box’ business, to a unique and compelling business, with a clear back story and direction for the future.
Let’s go through seven ways you can do this:
1 - Share your your back story
When Ruby and I moved up from Melbourne, I wasn’t really sure if I was going to do a coaching program. I had run a one-to-one program before, and it was great, but I needed a different model, and I knew it would be a lot of work to get it going. Soon though, a few business owners came to me and started to ask about coaching. Eventually I went away and drafted up an idea for the first offer and came back and showed it to them, and they were really excited about it. We started the first program and haven’t looked back.
Now, I’ve told this story one hundred times. Plus other stories - the story of the running store... The stories of the gym... And the story of building the Creator Club program. People start to ‘know’ the story. The point is, it can feel like you share the same stories a lot, but your back story helps to clarify your past experience and motives. It won’t resonate with everyone, but that ain’t the point.
The point is that it resonates with your audience - and it will - because the very fact that you are doing the work you do now to help these people, means you share a similar set of values.
2 - Why now is an important time for your business to exist
Why is now an important time for you to be doing what you do?
When we started up Creator Club, we focused exclusively on small service businesses with a creative streak. It’s an important time right now for small business, and we wanted to focus our attention on helping them learn the skills of marketing and sales, and learn how to build out their world powerfully to make money.
The timing for all of it actually was very interesting. The program we ran prior to Creator Club, which was like a test program, kicked off the day before all of the Covid lockdowns in Australia, which went alongside the biggest wealth transfer from small business to big business in history. A bunch of small businesses struggled, so the support on the coaching side and marketing - helping them build their world more powerfully - was key. And in the end, a lot of the businesses we worked with over that exact period had record growth, which was cool.
Thinking about ‘timing’ is key for telling a deeper story in your business. It not only creates relevance, but also urgency and motivation for you and your clients.
3 - Show how you came upon your current solution
As an expert in your field, you probably have a ‘right way’ of doing things that you know works. But maybe you didn’t always do it this way?
Typically, we all start out trying to do things some other way that doesn’t work, and then we go through hell to figure it out: we study, we get mentors, we learn, we try again… then if we are successful we can emerge on the other side as a guide.
In my first retail business, I shunned online marketing completely. I didn’t do social media, or email marketing. Instead, I ran thousands of DL flyers out to people around the block and did exclusively offline networking. But that was a mistake. While we grew the business, we missed out on obvious gains (this was right at the dawn of Facebook). Since that time, I learned how to balance it out. Now we do a lot of offline work as well as online.
Anyway, this whole ‘arc of learning’ is the path you took as the guide. But when you don’t share that journey, you only speak from the ‘finished’ position. It isn’t always relatable for people who are going through the whole mess right now.
4 - Show us what you want (your vision)
We’re naturally drawn towards people that are on a mission. If you can show us the vision you want to create and what is important to you, through the action that you are taking, we can resonate with you and your world. This is one of those cases where actions speak louder than words. It’s easy to talk about this stuff. But we want to know what you want, or what your vision of the future really is, not just what you say it is. We see this all the time with big business. They might say they’re about customer service, or innovation… But then when they don’t innovate in years we’re a little underwhelmed.
One of the visions we have around Creator Club is the roaring success of creative service business owners. Like an army that’s building a higher energy future, we’re teaching people to create, produce, market and sell their service effectively, so they can make a great living doing what they love. We ‘show’ this through the events we run, through our content, and even case studies we provide.
The only way we can really know what you want is for you to show what you want. Show your vision, and you will be telling your business story at a deeper level and we can resonate with your character and world.
5 - Bring out the ‘characters’ in your world
You may have all kinds of people in your world. Staff, writers, people helping you out. Depends on the size of your business and how you like to do things.
In our business, it is pretty tight. We take care of all of the main work - the writing, and of course any business coaching. We’ll outsource smaller things like videography, media, and some admin. But we are the main characters. So we don’t hold back on showing up as who we are. Our values are pretty clear, and our interests are also clear. We show what we do, and how we do it.
I did some work with a gym out west of here. We covered a lot of world building, and character work. Basically what we did then was brought out a lot of the ‘character’ of the main coaches, and then members as well. Almost instantly there was a strong interaction with the audience, and not only attendance, but client numbers were up almost 50%. This is because the character is such a key part of the story. It helps us build a relationship with the business, and we can decide to be a part of what they’re about.
6 - Showcase and elevate the people you serve (case studies, profiles)
One of the biggest subconscious questions we can have as customers is ‘does this business ‘get’ me?’ - Does the service provider understand who I am, what I’m about and what I need? In our offer framework, we call this establishing common ground. Basically without common ground, people will just assume you’re out to sell something to them, rather than understanding them and helping them.
Anyway, one way you can do this is through case studies, or interviews you do with clients to help showcase their great work. When you showcase or elevate the people you help, you’re showing what’s possible through your service, but you’re not pedestalising yourself. This allows the audience to imagine their own story, and see how your service could help them get where they want to go.
We do this a bunch of ways. On the website main page there are shorter testimonials. We’ve done YouTube documentaries with businesses that we’ve worked with. In podcasts, we’ve interviewed a lot of the small business heroes that we’ve worked with, and then in emails I’ll often share stories about how a business got success in a certain area, to bring an insight to the business owners that read the emails.
7 - Show how you help your people get what they want
When people come upon a new business, it can be hard to understand how it all works. And when we don’t understand something, we often stay away from it. On the Apple website, they allocate around thirty pages (on average) for each product they sell, which shows how the product works, the technology in it, and what it allows you to do.
In our world, we use content as the main tool to show how we help. In World Building terms, we call this ‘magic and technology’. So we use content to explain the magic. If you read the emails, or listen to the podcasts, you’ll start to understand how our coaching works. When things start to ‘make sense’ in this way, the world becomes more inviting.
Another way to think about this is the concept of x-ray vision. We always want to help people get more clarity, and another layer of x-ray vision. So you don’t need to give everything away, but part of the job in telling the story of your business is to shine some light on the work you do, so that people can start to ‘get’ what you do, and see how you really help.
Three ways to put it into practice
It’s all well and good to ‘know’ how to tell the story of your business at a deeper level, but it’s another thing to actually do it. The job for your marketing department (which is probably you), is to drip-feed this stuff into your marketing, so that your story seeps out over time.
Soon, you will go from a ‘fits inside the box’ business, to a unique and compelling business, with a clear back story and direction for the future.
Anyway, here are three ways you can practically bring out your story. Having the energy and motivation is up to you.
** Social media posts - you can really use this stuff as a storytelling platform if you want. Again, not to tell a story on every post, but to document your business, where you came from (backstory), who you help and where you’re going. You can even take each of the above categories, and twist it into social media posts that really are unique to you. You’ll notice that these aren’t high ‘value’ posts. They are there to build resonance with the people that you serve.
** Long form articles and podcasts - A lot of the businesses that we work with write a weekly article or blog post. There are a couple of reasons for that. The first is positioning - it’s difficult to position powerfully just with social media. The second though, is the longer format lets you tell micro stories that bring out your overall business world.
** Everywhere you show up: speaking, organising events, guest articles you write, the book you want to do. Everywhere you go as a business owner is a chance to strengthen your position by telling at least some part of your story. This doesn’t always mean it’s going to be your origin story, but bringing out what you stand for, what you want, and where you want to go is a powerful way to build trust and resonance.
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