Quick tasks to help you define your authority
One fun activity I do with my clients is to write a news article about their business aimed at attracting the eyeballs of clients.
Information prioritisation
This task achieves information prioritisation, or forced prioritisation.
It helps you work out what is the most important information, the stuff in the middle, and the least important information. It helps you angle the story of your business. Every story needs a ‘hook’, a headline, that catches attention. It must compel. But every story also needs a photo, an attractional quality, and finally substance contained in the meat of the article.
The Newspaper article
The intent of the ‘article’ I ask clients to write is not to publish it. The intent of this task is to help them articulate to their clients.
Produce a newspaper article about 'you'.
Describe the main photo. What’s it showing and why.
What’s the secondary photo of and why?
What do the captions under the photos say?
What’s the headline on the story?
What’s the secondary headline?
Now write the 500-word story while remembering the old news journalist’s framework (the inverted pyramid with the most important information at the top in the first paragraph, and the least important information in the final paragraph).
Define your ideal client
Your ideal client is the person, or company, you best serve and that is best for you to serve.
Who are your clients now? List your clients. Include their demographics (age, socioeconomic factors, gender etc). After you come up with your list, circle the clients you most want to keep, and put a cross through those you don’t want to keep, or those you want less of.
Fill in the details. Consider their motivations - what drives their buying decisions? What technology do they use? What social media platforms do they use? What are their aspirations? What are their fears?
Prioritise. Circle the clients you want to keep and put a cross through the ones you want to lose. Who do you want to serve? Who do you want to work with?
What do your ideal clients need? What is the service or product you can provide them, better than anyone else can?
The end result?
The end result here is that you have de-cluttered your narrative. In doing this, you were forced to exclude information. It can be a painful process. As the old writing adage goes, “Kill your darlings”. To tell a compelling story about your business, to communicate the role of your business succinctly, you need to leave out the boring bits.
I have great fun with my clients as we pull out the gold in their business stories.
Want help standing out?
In our Designing Authority workshops, we’ve refined how we quickly tap into what you stand for and how you increase your presence. Want to find out if you fit our Designing Authority workshop?
