This Saturday is Make Your Dreams Come True Day. Which sounds like a wishy-washy kind of day, with rainbows and unicorns and no possible connection to your business.
Except dreams can be incredibly powerful. Your dream has got your business to this stage already. That and a shedload of hard work, I get it. But your product or service could look like someone else’s dream to them.
Which may sound like mumbo jumbo, but Make Your Dreams Come True Day could allow you to create some really engaging content. We all like to hear great stories of what people have done. You’ve only got to look at the success of books by Richard Branson, Jo Malone or Gary Vaynerchuck.
So, what’s in the story of what you’ve achieved already?
In telling it, you can be human, and absolutely should be human. It’s the advantage you have as a small business versus a faceless corporation. You can tell the stories of the tough times as well as the good. You can laugh at yourself. Talk about what’s gone right, what’s gone wrong. What’s better than expected and what’s the funniest thing that’s happened. What would you do differently if you did it all again? These are stories you could go out and tell.
Go the opposite way
Or you could do the reverse of all of this, and not talk about yourself. Be different and make your customers the heroes of this story. How do they use your product or service to make their own dreams come true?
Maybe you run a fabulous holiday cottage that has hosted great family get-togethers? Tell that story. What did they get up to? Where did they go? What’s their best memory?
Perhaps you make woolly hats. Where did people wear them? What’s their story? You might be surprised how many proposals happen up mountains in bad weather, but that’s a story.
Make your customer the hero and tell the story of their dreams coming true.
Do it everywhere
Content doesn’t have to be the written word. Funny that some people still think that’s the case. But the visual is just as important. You also don’t have to choose one over the other. You can take the same story and tell it in different ways in different channels.
In fact, the worst mistake is just reposting precisely the same thing in every channel you choose to be in. There are nuances to each social channel. If you’re going to go to the effort of doing this, then make the most of it by doing it in the right way.
For example, the optimum number of hashtags is very different in Facebook (apparently only one and no more than six) than on Instagram (between nine and eleven). So just reposting the same thing on both could get you very different results. Given how Facebook in effect penalises you for posting content that gets no engagement, then it’s really best to optimise your efforts.
Dreams are hard enough to realise, without doing work that doesn’t get the results your efforts deserve.
So, while Make Your Dreams Come True Day might seem a bit fluffy, I think with a bit of thought, there are some great stories you could go out and tell. Whether they include unicorns and rainbows is entirely up to you!
