The elevator pitch is a brief statement designed to sum up any important business concept in just a few simple sentences. This can be a sales pitch for a product or service, a mission statement, or your businesses unique selling proposition. Whatever the notion, take a page out of the book of Twitter, where every share must be conveyed in 140 characters or less – that model encapsulates the essence of an ideal elevator pitch.
Why do we consider your ability to illustrate your business ideas between the first and fifteenth floors to be so important that we have dedicated an entire blog post to it?
While it may be obvious that your message should be clear, concise and memorable to consumers, investors, and the like; what may not be quite as obvious is that your clear, concise and memorable message should be conveyed to and ingrained in the minds of all your employees as well. Everyone who works for you, regardless of their position, should be able to enumerate those messages that capture your business ideas at the drop of a hat, so that no matter where they are uttered, the message is the same.
This type of internal branding may seem like a minor concern but when you consider how many business owners say they rely on word-of-mouth to increase brand awareness, 82% according to a survey conducted by the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), the words uttered by every employee become extremely important.
Additionally, consider that your employees are part of the massive on-line population contributing to the never-ending discussions on social media every single day and while they are participating in the online conversation “50% of them are posting messages, pictures or videos in social media about their work, and a third of them are doing so without any encouragement from their employer.” Buffer Social shares this statistic from Gallup’s 2013 State of the Global Workplace survey results in their recent blog post about Including Employees in Social Media Strategy.
It is not just the fact that your employees are already talking about your business on-line but the reality that their contributions are considered more reliable by consumers than that of company owners and managers. According to the WOMMA website, “The annual Edelman Trust Barometer (a trust and credibility survey that collects data from more than 30,000 people) regularly shows that regular rank-and-file company employees have more credibility than executives.”
The word-of-mouth stimulus that business owners have long place so much importance on has morphed into a whole new animal, one WOMMA refers to as “inside word-of-mouth”. Inside word-of-mouth promotion takes place on the internet and social media has turned everyone in your employ into unsuspecting, multi-tasking, marketers. You can take advantage of this double duty by arming your employees with the power to promote as well as unified messaging in the form of a well thought out elevator pitch.
Manning Media’s marketing consultants can help you craft the clear, concise and memorable kind of messaging that your employees will be proud to share and that will engage consumers. Contact us in Frederick, 301-620-7700 or in Hagerstown, 301-733-4500 or fill out our online request form by clicking HERE!