A while back, one of the people I work with sent me a voice memo from his shop. He was telling me, off the cuff, why he started making the thing he makes. It was about his daughter.
I asked him to point a phone at his face and tell that same story, not perfectly, not polished, just true. We trimmed it down to ninety seconds and posted it.
It didn’t sound like marketing at all. Just a man telling a friend why his hands won’t stop working.
What actually happened
Over the next eleven days the video brought six thousand new visitors to his site. Eight hundred and eighty people shared it. He got messages from buyers in Oregon and a woman in North Carolina who said it made her cry.
None of this came from a clever hook or a trending sound. It came from the part of the story he almost left out, the part about his daughter.
The lesson, quietly
You probably already have a version of this story. You tell it across the counter, at the market, at church on Sunday. The internet doesn’t need a new you, just the one your customers already meet.