Your Story and Why It’s Important

People don’t buy a product or a service from you. They buy a story.

A story is at the root of trust. Why do you do what you do? It’s important. It matters to people.

And it’s also the core of your content strategy. Great content is how you will connect with your audience, directly and indirectly.

Direct Connections – B2C or B2B

There are only two ways that you can build trust directly:

1. Tell your story in clear language—not only what you do, but also how you do it and why you do it, too.
2. Your story is a promise. Consistently come through on that promise.

This takes time, of course. The first time you tell your story to someone, a conversion is not likely. Some will give you the benefit of the doubt, but trust is something that you earn over time. The issue with new businesses is that you often don’t have a lot of time. If you are bootstrapping, how long can you wait without getting paid? If you are funded, how patient are your patrons? How do you accelerate the business?

Indirect Connections – C2C

There’s only one way to accelerate the trust process—advocacy. Customers creating other customers for you. I call this C2C, and for small businesses, it’s your growth engine. The hard part? Advocacy can’t be bought. It must be genuine, and given willingly. There is tons of research on this—if an advocate is compensated in any way, it undermines any credibility and thereby the effectiveness of the advocate.

So how do you creates willing advocates? Oversimplifying, there are only two things you can do:

1. Over-deliver. By definition, no one talks about something unremarkable.
2. Write the script. Give your advocates the language they need to sell on your behalf.

The ultimate goal is for customers to be carrying your message for you. People naturally appreciate a great product or service—one that is remarkable. Help them with it, though. Reduce friction. Make it easy for them to tell your story to others. Give them short, sharable pieces of informational content. It’s not their job to explain it for you. In fact, once it is their job, they are not believable anymore.

This is way more powerful than traditional marketing, and it’s the only way to supercharge your growth.

Start with a genuine mission, build trust by consistently over-delivering, and create meaningful connections around content.

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This piece is a part of a series called Content Strategy for Entrepreneurs. If you need specific help in building a content strategy for your business, please see http://michaelboezi.com/entrepreneurs.

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Photo credit: Ryan McGuire, image licensed under CC0.