“My advice for life: dance and sing your song while the party is still on.” – Rasheed Ogunlaru
You have your own distinct perspective, personality, and experience in the world – singular and never to be duplicated again. Sharing yourself genuinely delivers incredible value to you and your prospects and customers:
- You get to relax into who you really are. Maybe you even go through some discovery so that you can unlearn all the garbage about being ‘professional’ and get in touch with what only you can offer. And that will remove some stress and make marketing a little easier.
- Your prospects and customers get to have a rich experience wherever they encounter you: on social, your website, in video… Unlike the bland experiences most people are, unfortunately, creating in the name of expediency and a lack of understanding connection and its role in business.
How does this work? What do you do to make it happen?
- Listen to how you talk with your friends when you’re discussing something that matters to you, or even when you’re just having fun. That’s your voice.
- Look at what you’ve written for posts on whatever social platform or even messaging app you like to use. That’s your voice.
- Use that tone, personality, style and address your communication to the individual on the receiving end as if you were talking directly to them. Not to a crowd or a nameless individual, or even some avatar you made up in a workshop you took. Picture someone you know, then speak or write to them.
- Rinse and repeat. Until you feel you’ve captured yourself and also conveyed the key points you wanted to make.
Marketing from now on will be effective for those who know how to communicate with personality. And that offers a competitive advantage for smaller businesses: large companies have to build composite avatars because their functions are fragmented and compartmentalized. As a small business, you can directly connect with your community and picture them, even if you have a marketing team they have the privilege of being closer to customers and prospects than almost any large business or enterprise.
Putting your unique voice in play offers unparalleled advantage. Use it.
