Edition 0: Welcome to The Content Code!
Excited about the future and bringing you weekly thoughts on how to build a great company story - one that slices through the noise and pulls your potential customers closer.
I see such incredible potential in the way companies use storytelling, but they’re falling short.
A great way to evaluate if the way a company is telling their story is resonating is what I call the ‘one minute test.’
The One Minute Test
A few things should be obvious in the first minute of visiting a company’s website:
1. What the company does for their customers
2. Why a potential customer should believe that is valuable to them
3. Examples of customer success stories
4. The transformation the potential customer will see working with the company
5. What the potential customer should do next
Unfortunately, on many company websites - in particular - and in marketing materials more generally one or more of these elements are missing.
If your customer doesn’t understand what you do, they won’t care if it’s valuable for them. If they do understand what you do, but don’t understand the value of what you do, they won’t care.
If you don’t show them examples of past success stories, they have nothing to compare themselves against. Without this ‘mirror’ you’ll have almost no chance of them sticking around long enough for you to explain how you can make their lives better.
And staggeringly, you can visit some websites where it doesn’t even make sense what you should do next to buy, subscribe, or move forward.
No really, I’m serious. I see it all the time.
The Move From ‘We’ to ‘You’
In our world, there’s very little new under the sun. Everything that there is to be done, has basically.
This isn’t fatalistic, it’s an opportunity.
Most companies talk about we:
* We do this, we do that, we’re so amazing
* Here are our features and benefits
* Here’s why we’re disruptive, innovative, and revolutionary
* Here’s all the great things we’ve done and our awards
News flash:
Your potential customers couldn’t care less.
No matter how great you believe your product, service or offer to be, you’re not curing cancer, and you’re likely tweaking something that already exists. Those changes alone are not your competitive advantage.
When you shift the company story from ‘we’ to ‘you,’ focusing exclusively on how your potential customers’ lives will improve or their pain will disappear due to your ‘painkiller,’ you create an emotional hook which pulls people closer.
Without this hook, you’re one in a thousand.
Another company selling features and benefits to people that want to hear how you’re going to help them transform, not about all the little technical pieces or widgets that make your solution .0000001% better than your competitor’s.
So, ask yourself, are we focused on ‘we’ or ‘you?’
Too much on we?
Stick around, and we’ll help you make the shift.
So your competitive advantage is truly transformational.
Edition 1 coming Thursday, July 4th.