Wednesday 21st April 2010, 4:07pm
Naked Business: Building a Wall of Sound
Nancy Fulton Mazur, Director of the Doug Richard Mentoring Club
by Nancy Fulton, Editor School for Startups
I launched my first commercially profitable website in 1996 when the Internet first started to “go big”, so I find many of the things currently touted as “new” are really “new again”. In the 1990′s there was huge pressure to get your sites listed in the search engines, to have people link to your site from forums, and to create content that was “sticky”. Flash forward to today, the chatter is all about social media, search engine optimization, and viral marketing . . .
Don’t get me wrong. It is obvious that the Internet is evolving. But I am struck by what seems to be a universal constant when it comes to marketing a great business well.
Marketing is never the job of a few in a business these days. It has to be everyone’s job. Why? Because every person that works for an enterprise talks to hundreds of people, if not thousands every year, in a variety of media. Without unity of vision and clarity of message, your company dissolves into a shapeless puddle of messages. By trying to be everything to everybody it becomes nothing special for anybody.
As we are getting our ducks in a row for the upcoming Start Here classes as well as several future courses and some really big plans for an exceptional summer, School for Startups has become a hive of communication activity.
Every single soul, and there are a lot of us now, is on the front lines interfacing directly with customers, sponsors, the media, event guests, featured entrepreneurs. There’s this complex “square dance” where three or four of us are working on an email blast, five or six of us are posting content on the site, some of us are sending big press releases out, some team members are working with Doug on television and radio events. We are all in constant communication with one another and the outside world . . . across media, day in and day out.
And recently it has hit me that we really must speak with One Voice.
Because efficient as we are, and as well known as we are getting in entrepreneurial communities across the UK, we are still a very small business. We don’t have the bandwidth or resources to send a flurry of imprecise marketing messages out. We have to be needle sharp in what we say about who we are so our message finds our customers.
We must make it clear that “We teach entrepreneurs how to start and grow stronger, more profitable businesses“. Every operation we undertake is to forward that goal. Every strategic relationship we start is toward that end.
Every communication we have with an outsider must communicate that vision. Every message we put out on Twitter, Facebook and Linked In say must say the same thing. That core value must be at the heart of every blog article, every course, every interview.
To steal a phrase from Doug . . . we must become a “wall of sound” when it comes to delivering that message.
We face real challenges as we work for unity of marketing communication:
- Every new person who comes into the business has to go through the process of finding out that our company helps our entrepreneurs create better, more profitable businesses. They have to learn that we aren’t just another training business teaching whatever course pays best.
- Specific language for our unified marketing message, and the “flavors” that support specific courses and initiatives have to be developed and communicated internally almost constantly to everyone.
- Sometimes the apparent distance between a specific undertaking and our core business objective seems very wide. For example, why does Doug Richard, founder of School for Startups, assume an active “voice” in UK politics. Because one of the most important ways School for Startups can help our entrepreneurs found stronger, more profitable businesses is to help foster an economic environment that supports business rather than inhibits it.
Building a unified wall of sound that emanates from every person in a company is something I never hear people talk about, and yet that “unity of message” is something I’ve seen in every successful startup I’ve ever worked for or with.
It was certainly a key feature in Doug’s ITAL Business Computer Systems and Visual Software, and is true of School for Startups as well. Maybe the first people you really, truly have to sell on your business . . . is the people who work with you.
Tags: Articles, doug richard, how to start a business, naked business, seo, starting a business, startup marketing, uk small business
