Who Are You? who who who who …

I love this song by The Who, especially this part of the lyrics:

I took the tube back out of town
Home to the rolling pin
I felt a little like a dying clown
But with a streak of Rin Tin Tin
I stretched back and I hiccuped
Looked back on my busy day
Eleven hours in the tin pan
God there’s got to be another way

This part of the song reminds of the time when I was struggling with my business. I was working so hard and it just didn’t seem like I was getting anywhere. It took an exercise I do with my clients to get my business back on track. It basically came down to honestly answering the following question:

What is the one thing that defines your business?

When we’re trying to grow our business, we tend to accept work for many different types of services – ‘Well, sure I can find a way to handle that type of work’ or ‘I’ve never done that before but hey, if you’re willing to pay me to do that, I’ll give it a try.’ Too many of these jobs can take us off our focus, become a bad use of our time and often, they end up hurting our bottom line.

There comes a time when we realize we can’t be everything to everybody. No one wants to be the backup singer for the opening act with a thousand other people singing the same tune. If you can find your focus, then your business can turn into the headliner who owns the stage.

So, how does this ‘finding your focus’ thing work? Let’s work through these steps to discover your niche market. Our final goal is to get to the final statement where your business ‘equals’ who you are. My favorite example that explains where we’re going is Disney = Magic.

Let’s run through this exercise using my business, Fox Interactive. When I first answer the question ‘What equals your business?’, I could say something like social media, marketing or even combine the two to say social media marketing. That’s a great term to use for SEO but it really doesn’t explain to you about what we do or give you a reason to contact me and hopefully, hire my company.

So what really sets Fox Interactive apart from all the other social media marketing companies? (If you’re working on this exercise – here’s the part where you have to get out a piece of paper or pull up a word document in your computer.) If I make a list about my company and what makes us unique, it would look like this:

• Fox Interactive has been in business since 1999 so we’re a stable business – meaning we’re not a fly-by-night company who will disappear after cashing your deposit check
• We are a marketing company who focuses solely on media planning/placement, developing social media campaigns and social media training – meaning no, we don’t handle SEO, website development or developing mobile apps
• Our team provides ROI and analytic reports to help create efficient campaigns – meaning you’ll see the results of what you paid for instead of guessing about whether it worked or not
• As the head of this really cool company, I am a social media strategist who takes your campaigns past just the graphics and setup of your social media presence – meaning we help your take your traditional marketing plans and show you how to translate them into social media marketing

When we look at my unique stuff list, what does this say about who we are? We could say our elevator speech is: Are you struggling to figure out how to make social media work for your company? Fox Interactive is your social media personal trainer who offers our experience to design an effective marketing program to help you reach your social media goals.

And then take it down to its baseline of who we are: Fox Interactive = a Strategic Marketing Personal Trainer. And that’s how you find your own Disney magic.

Take some time to work through this exercise and let me know what you discover about your company in the comments below.

Photo credit: Who am I?