You are your biggest asset. When marketing your service or product, you are not just selling something, you are sharing something of yourself. It pays to trust your gut and go with the option you are naturally drawn to. Some marketing book declared that the color blue psychologically assures people you are trustworthy and reliable, but you’ve always been drawn the autumnal colors of rust and orange and deep red. Go with the color palette that speaks to your soul – because what makes you happy will translate to your customers as self-confidence, which definitely highlights your trustworthiness and reliability!
When I launched my business, my husband and I were joking around about names for my (then non-existent) virtual assistant business. Essentially what I wanted to do was provide unconditional support to small business owners, like your best friend would do. I loved the idea of being everyone’s “Biz Bestie” and seriously thought about using that name, despite the fact that the url and social handles were already taken. Then I started brainstorming about ‘support’ and I came up with the idea of a “Biz Bra”. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Every time I turned around I came up with another clever word-play that fit perfectly (pun intended) with my ideal business values. Supportive. Customizable. Scalable. Personal.
That’s when the doubts came…the fear that no one would take me seriously. What Jeff Bezos-wannabe tech-bro was gonna want to work with a company called Your Biz Bra? Obviously, this was just a fun word-play exercise and not a real business idea. Except it kept coming back. My husband helped me build the site (the url AND social handles were available for this one!). I even had an @yourbizbra.com email address. Though I still hadn’t told anyone the business name, I had 3 clients already (they worked with me as Kimberly Logan LLC and had found me via a friend of a friend, through my previous career in theatre, and a referral from a class I had taken). So here I was, with a business, a business name, paying clients, and a business website, but I was crippled by fear that if I told the world who I was, I’d never get anymore work.
More than one of my mentors has talked about the fact that not everyone is going to be in your audience. One way to look at it is that “8 Billion people will never agree on anything”. (Thanks Brad!) Another way to view it is with the Rule of Thirds (Thanks Bon!):
- Accept the fact that 1/3 of the population are your super-fans. Nothing you do will ever be wrong. They will buy everything you put in front of them because they LOVE you.
- Another 1/3 of the population are your haters. Nothing you do will ever be right. They will hate everything you put in front of them because…well, just because.
- The final 1/3 are somewhat malleable. They will like some of your stuff, be interested, maybe buy once in a while, but they are not your Ride Or Die and you could alienate them completely by accident at any time.
- Remember never to waste your energy on the middle 1/3, and you’ll be fine.
I am a big, BIG fan of The West Wing. Like in the first 1/3, super-fan, I-LOVE-this-show kind of fan. I had met others who agreed it was a good show, but until I discovered the podcast The West Wing Weekly, I never imagined there was a huge population of people just like me when it came to my level of obsession. The fact that they were able to make a podcast (back in 2016 before everyone and their brother had a podcast) about a show that, at the time, had been off the air for 10 years, and hadn’t been released to streaming (yet), tells me that they didn’t care how non-fans would react. They believed in their love of the show and discovered that a lot of other people were just as excited by it. They reminded me that I needed to speak to my audience.
Whenever possible, when telling the story of your product or service, get personal. Why did you create your offering? What were you going through? What was happening in the world that jump-started you on your entrepreneurial journey? Your ideal customer wants to see themselves in you, and the only way they can do that is when you show up, authentically, as YOU. Here’s the caveat – getting personal without taking it personally is a challenge for everyone. But you can cultivate some comfort.
With that in mind, I started using my @yourbizbra.com email to sign-up for things. I used it for my calendly account, so people could book a discovery call with me. I used it for the PayPal Business account I opened. I used it as my username for my business banking account. Eventually, using it regularly and seeing it in these ‘business’-related activities helped it to feel more legitimate to me. It built my confidence in being able to say that my business is called Your Biz Bra. (Then I learned to be very careful when speaking the name out loud because someone misheard it as Your Biz Raw…oops!)
It turns out the Jeff Bezos-wannabe tech-bros were never actually who I wanted to be speaking to anyway!
Comments are closed