How Small Business Owners Can Beat Overwhelm and Focus on What Actually Matters

Do you ever post on social media and all you get back are crickets and hardly any likes and hardly any engagement at all? Well, it's really common, and today we're gonna unpack why that might be and what you can do to fix that.

One of the things that you'll hear me talk about throughout this podcast is storytelling. Why is that so important? You've probably heard about storytelling, it was all the rage, and it's been all the rage for several years. But why is it so important?

Well, because features and benefits just don't matter anymore to customers. I'm not saying do away with them. I'm saying that they certainly don't stop the scroll. They don't build trust, because they're just a list of features and benefits and facts that are, you know, frankly quite boring, and they don't really do much to differentiate you from your competition. And they just don't make you unforgettable. So they don't do any of the things that small businesses need for them to do.

So what can you do instead of features and benefits, or in addition to? It doesn't mean, like I said, that your features and benefits need to completely go away. You still want those on your website and in certain other places. But you don't want to lead with those all the time, just as a list on your social media, or frankly anywhere really, because they don't stick in anybody's brain.

In fact, studies have shown that facts and figures are just not nearly as memorable as things that are shared in the form of a story. So what you can do is take each one of those features and benefits and turn them into an individual story, hopefully featuring a hero. And the hero should almost always be the customer, and what you, as the sidekick, were able to help that customer achieve because they used your service or your product or hired you in some capacity.

So breaking that down further means we have to trigger emotion in most of our posts. And that does not mean you gotta get people crying and weeping or gnashing their teeth or anything like that. It just means that emotion makes things memorable. Scientifically proven fact ... way, way, way more memorable than facts. And so if we share those facts couched in a story that triggers emotion, that's a home run right there.

So rather than saying "family owned and operated," which I see all the time ... a lot of small businesses are family owned and operated, and there's nothing wrong with that. I think that's a great thing. You just have to figure out a way to turn that into a story. So rather than just listing "family owned and operated," if you have not a lot of space ... I know a lot of you maybe do a mailer or a postcard or a leave-behind or something like that, and you just don't have a lot of space ... what I don't like to see is cramming that flyer full of boring features and benefits, because that's what all your competitors do.

Instead, can you figure out a different way to say it? Like "family owned for 52 years." Okay, how about "family owned since disco was in style"? Anything like that that's gonna trigger an emotion ... maybe nostalgia, or a laugh, or something like that. Any type of memory that somebody may have with that era or anything to do with disco. You have just become so much more unforgettable, and that also makes you stand out from all of your competitors who are just stating the fact "family owned since 1952" or whatever it happens to be.

So anything that you say as a feature or benefit ... "open 24 hours" ... what's a different way that you could say "open 24 hours"? "We have people work the night shift so that you're always covered." You find really any way to say it besides the boring "open 24 hours" that your competitors are using as well, and you are going to find that you are going to get a lot more eyeballs on your material because it's going to stand out a lot more.

I love injecting a sense of humor into things, like the disco example. But if you're not in a business that is prone to something laughable ... I love to use the mortuary example ... you can maybe find some ways in your marketing, if you're not marketing to people who have an immediate need, but you're just trying to be memorable, there are absolutely ways to still use humor.

Another thing you can do that always triggers emotion is using pets ... dogs, cats, guinea pigs ... or babies, kids, family. I spoke on an earlier episode about a guy that owns a car repair shop. He had been posting forever of just professional pictures of stock photos of cars with perfectly clean mechanics who are clearly models hired to pose in a picture and have probably never unscrewed a lug nut in their life.

But instead, what he did recently was he posted a picture of him with his son, and his son looks to be like maybe three, and he is crouched down next to his son and they are looking at a tire and doing something with the tire. And wow ... an image can trigger emotion as much as the right sentence or as much as a video. So it doesn't always have to be ... I know I harp on video a lot ... it doesn't always have to be a video.

But what can you do that showcases what you're about, or tells a story through visuals, through video, or through what you write? And I do hope that you're mixing it up so you're not always just posting text and you're not always just posting a photo. You're mixing it up and doing a combination of all different types of formats, because those resonate ... they hit differently, and they resonate with different audiences. Some people are readers and they are drawn to your text. Other people prefer a video, because we are largely a video-consuming society these days. But sometimes the same can happen with a photo, and you accomplish the same thing.

So how can you take every single one of those features that you list on your website and find a way to highlight a customer, or something ... a problem that was solved by one of your amazing staff ... making other people the hero, shining the light on other people? And you certainly are allowed to every now and then brag and take credit for things. Just don't do it all the time.

I love a good humble brag. There are all sorts of humble brags on LinkedIn that you'll see all the time ... "oh, I was so honored to be chosen for Store of the Year," something like that. It's better than saying "just announced: Store of the Year." There's no emotion behind that. So even a little bit of a humble brag is so much better than just an announcement that has no personality and no humanity to it.

So this is one of the shorter episodes. I hope that is helpful to you, and I would love to hear your thoughts. And while you're at it, grab a copy of my new book. It's called Small Is Your Superpower, and it is available on my website, thebuyerinsider.com, or from Amazon.