Messaging Elevator Pitch
The classic imaginative scenario, you wind up on an elevator with a potential customer or investor and you get 60 seconds (or less) and what do you say? Do you bumble through it or do you crush it? I hope you crush it. However, unless you are exceptionally good on your feet, without a prepared elevator pitch, you might be in trouble. So how do we come up with an elevator pitch? I think one of the greatest resources for this is StoryBrand by Donald Miller. The main concept of StoryBrand is that when you are thinking about messaging for your business, you need to think about how to make your customer the hero of the story and your business the guide that will help that hero succeed. A short marketing message should address, at the minimum: who you help and how you help them.
For Adelsberger Marketing, we realized that most of our customers come to us because they are having problems with digital marketing. They are either confused about what to do, scared to do something about it, or realize they do not have enough time to do it right. We wanted to position ourselves as the expert they come to help guide them through digital marketing. Ultimately we want them to succeed at digital marketing with our help. Our logo is a shield which invokes some fierceness, so we say, “We lead businesses to conquer digital marketing.” We then follow up with some ways we do that for people. I frequently add on to that core message based on who I am speaking to. If it’s a company I feel like needs our design services, then I start talking about who we have helped recently in that service area.
When thinking about a marketing message, we need to consider what our customer needs from us, not necessarily what we want to brag about. I may want to brag about our newest camera gear, but most customers don’t care. They only care how I solve their problems. Your marketing messaging should reflect that.
Our recommendation would be that you have a one to two line marketing message and a somewhat longer paragraph that both you and your team can spit out at any moment. When working on a longer form pitch, get into more details like: specific services lists, success stories, and notable client lists.
Once you have your basic messaging, it is important to keep it consistent across all your builders and drivers. You may highlight different aspects for different elements of your drivers, but for the most part, you will come back to this well of messaging again and again.
This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.
