What’s Your Startup’s “Six-Pack Abs” Story?
Figure out what customers want. Then keep talking about that.
Go to your nearest newsstand and find the latest issue of Men’s Health.
Somewhere on the front cover — I guarantee it — there’s a story about how to get better abs.
It might be called “Six-Pack Abs” or “30-Minute Abs” or “Melt Your Gut.”
But it’s there.
The editors of Men’s Health are intimately aware of the future that their readers crave. They sell magazines by telling that same story.
Over and over and over.
What’s the “Six-Pack Abs” story for your company?
When I coach leadership teams on strategic messaging, one of the first things I help them do is get clear on the future that their customers want.
“In other words,” I always say, “What’s six-pack abs for us?”
Once we define it, I help them come up with ways to tell that story — over and over.
Take Kissmetrics. (To honor confidentiality agreements, I write in detail only about only companies that are not my clients.)
If you’re a digital marketer, Kissmetrics helps you track conversions through your funnel.
Six-pack abs for Kissmetrics? More conversions.
Let’s take a look at how Kissmetrics repeatedly tells that story. First, it’s right there on the home page, above the fold (“turn visitors into customers”):
Scroll down and it appears again, this time as a chart about customer success:
Kissmetrics also tells the same story — incessantly — through content marketing. Here are a few of their blog post headlines:
100 Conversion Optimization Case Studies
The A-Z Guide of Conversion Optimization (Poster)
6 Copywriting Mistakes that Shatter Conversion Rates
Can you really keep telling the same story without pissing people off? Yes.
I once worked for a VP of Marketing who wouldn’t run stories on the same topic more frequently than every six months. Our top competitor, on the other hand, acted more like Men’s Health (and Kissmetrics), publishing content on the same topics week after week. Pretty soon prospects were finding that competitor’s content far more frequently than they were finding ours.
No one calls up the editors of Men’s Health and complains that they ran a six-pack abs cover story two months in a row. Same for your startup’s communications. And if someone does complain, well, nice to know people are paying such close attention.
Of course, you might have more than one six-pack abs story: Men’s Health talks a lot about sex and money, too.
About Andy Raskin:
I help CEOs, marketers, and sales teams tell clearer, more effective stories. My strategic messaging & positioning clients include leadership teams funded by a16z, True Ventures, First Round Capital and other top venture investors. I also lead workshops on strategic storytelling for entrepreneurs. To learn more or get in touch, visit http://andyraskin.com
