One of my favorite subjects when it comes to marketing is the WHY.
I love how Simon Sinek puts it:
“People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it.”
WHY you do what you do is at the core of everything about your business, from what you offer to how you market yourself.
So why don’t we ever talk about our “Why?”
The reality is that your WHY not only drives you and your business, it also convinces your clients to do business with you. Sometimes WHY we do what we do is as simple as solving a problem or because it saves our clients money. But great marketing has a way bigger and better ‘WHY’ than, “we save you money,” and it starts with telling your story.
You’ve been increasing your engagement on LinkedIn and then capturing those leads on your website to help build your email list. You now have an audience you can talk to whenever you want. But why should they keep reading your emails over every other one they’re getting? If you want to break through the immense amount of noise that’s continually thrown at us, telling your story is the only way to do it. It’s also the best way, especially in the B2B space.
Your WHY Helps Tell Your Story
Your story starts with the person who started the company or the current CEO/president. Really, it’s about making that person the face of the business and sharing their personal story of how the business came to be and WHY they do what they do. That’s what people are really interested in. They want to relate to somebody just naturally as a human being. By sharing the WHY of the business owner, or the story of WHY that business came to be & the people behind it, a business can greatly increase their chances of relating to a potential prospect and getting them to be interested in purchasing what the business has to offer.
Your WHY also automatically leads into the rest of your story about HOW you do what you do.
Your WHY Helps Build Word of Mouth
One of the greatest things about the WHY is that it comes back to what we talk about with word of mouth marketing, especially in the B2B space. Sharing your WHY is perfect for spreading word of mouth because it gives your clients and people interacting with your business a very easy way to tell the outside world why they buy from you and why others should too. It also creates a unique way of talking about the product or service you offer and can help you stand out.
Sharing your WHY and telling your story is a huge advantage that you have as a small business because it’s so much easier to do that when you’re small – there really is a face and a person behind the business when you’re a small company. One of the pieces of pushback I often hear when working with small business owners is that they want to look big. And one way to do that is to impersonalize the business. What we see working is to do the exact opposite of that. Share your story. Capture the WHY and make it an easy story to tell. It’s one of the best ways to remain top of mind.
I do this every day. I meet somebody new on LinkedIn or at a networking event and they ask what I do. If I said, “Well, I run a digital marketing company,” frankly, that’s the most boring thing in the world that I could say. The truth is that my WHY is that I am amazingly passionate about helping businesses grow, and that is way more interesting. My mission of helping to bring that bigger business out in smaller businesses – that’s a much more compelling story to tell.
Your WHY is the perfect place to start telling your story and the first thing we want our prospects to learn about us. It’s why we make it the first part of every nurturing campaign – the series of emails that we automatically send once we’ve captured a prospect’s email address. The nurturing campaign gives us the opportunity to talk about WHO we are, WHY we do what we do, and WHAT we have to offer. It’s the best way to share your story with your prospects and stay top of mind.
Learn more by listening to our B2B Word of Mouth Marketing podcast episode, What is Your Why?
All the best,
Bill Bice
CEO