2012 was our first full year in business since Tim and I joined forces. It was a pretty good year all considered and we feel like we have been blessed as the foundation has been laid for what this business will become. Like most businesses do as the year comes to a close, we spent quite a bit of time reflecting on what the year looked like and tried to get that “one thousand foot view” that business leaders often talk about….the one that allows you to see things that you wouldn’t necessarily see when you are all muddled up in the day to day of making things happen.
One of our goals for 2013 is to really push the growth of the business. We want the business to create jobs and give back to the community. In order to do this the business needs to be as healthy as possible. Something that we noticed is that as we spend time trying to help our clients grow their businesses we have totally neglected the marketing of our own business. An area that has been most neglected is our own website. This is not good when your primary product is websites.
Our website is a simple and clean website that tells what we do…or so we thought. When taking the time to analyze the message we were conveying it did not take long to realize that everything on the site was feature driven. Simply stated we said that we build websites, do email marketing and social media management. Whereas this is in fact what we do it is boring and does not set us apart from every other Jane and John Smith out there building websites. If our website was going to be a sales funnel for us it needed to tell the potential client what pains they have that we were going to ease.
We planned a meeting that was to be nothing but a brainstorming session to come up with a simple, one or two line explanation of who we are and what we do. We started throwing things out there and writing them on a whiteboard. We came up with things like “digital marketing” and “online presence”, you know…the same old stuff. As we kept drilling down we got closer and came up with benefits like “we connect you to your clients” and “we return time to the business owner”.
The meeting went on for a couple of hours and it was a great time of realization for all of us that we are more than the services that we deliver. We actually help the people we work with. It is easy to get caught up in the work and focus too much on the features and not enough on the benefits of who we are doing the work for. The central idea that we came up with is that every one of our clients… website clients, social media clients, or email marketing clients… they all have the same need. That need is that they have a message to get out or a story to be told. That is who we are; that is what we do… we tell your story.
If someone asked you to tell them in a sentence or two, “what does your business do?”, could you tell them?
