The Courage It Takes to Write With A Point-of-View

Taking a stand and writing with a point-of-view takes courage. For today’s B2B Marketing Agency Insights, CEO Austin LaRoche discusses why standing by your company values can be a powerful strategy to attract customers.

Video transcription below:

Welcome back to B2B Marketing Agency Insights. I’m your host Austin LaRoche. Today, I want to talk about courage. In our previous video, we talked about content and needing to write with a point-of-view. Writing with a point-of-view is something that is really scary to a lot of people. But it doesn’t have to be – it just takes courage, because courage is contagious.

The people who want to work with you are really going to want to work with you once they see your courage. There are a lot of things going on in the United States right now. For some reason, some things that seem super simple to us like social justice and having everyone’s life being treated fairly are somehow becoming political, and you see bigger brands unafraid to go there. Nike has gone there and will show that love. That takes courage because there is a lot of people who, when those commercials come out, say, “I’m never buying Nike again, I’ll never do it.”

It takes courage to take a stand because everybody who is not feeling that way, everyone who feels separately and shares those same values as Nike, goes, “Damn. Alright. That’s why I buy Nike. That’s my company. I love those guys.” That is far more powerful than being afraid to lose a couple of customers because you will not be everything to everybody. But I want to scale it back because most of us don’t need to have that extreme point-of-view. It is easy to highlight that because it is a national issue and example that we can all relate to.

In smaller doses, we can identify things that we believe that our competitors don’t do. It doesn’t make our competitors the bad guys; it just means we think differently. If we are really courageous and can step up to say, “Listen, this is how we believe things should get done,” it will make a difference. Even if you have a customer who is like, “Well, that’s not how we want to get it done,” just say, “Well, this is how we believe it should be done. This is what we believe in as a company. These are our values.” Even on a small scale, it is going to make them want to work with you more.

Values can go all over the place. It can be simple brand values; it can be operational values. Sometimes, it doesn’t take nearly as much courage as you might think. Sometimes, it just takes that commonality. But commonality can only get there when you are willing to stand for something, to do something, to get behind something. Like my company, we get behind the EOS. We love EOS. When we work with other companies that run on EOS, it is a great relationship because we think the same way. We share the values. It is not necessarily courage.

We say that [EOS] is the best way to manage clients, which is really funny because even clients who don’t run on EOS see how we manage their account, and they think, “Wow, they are super organized. I want to be around super organized people.” Now, there might be other people out there who are like, “I kind of like when things are all over the place, I like to improvise, I like to fly by the seat of my pants.” And good for them. I will courageously tell them that they are not my customer. But all jokes and examples aside, taking a stand isn’t easy. It takes courage. If you want to write with a point-of-view and be a company that can get people to actually love and care about them deeper than just products and services, you will need to have the courage to believe something, to stand for something, and to unite your customers and your company around a central theme.

Even if you don’t, I’m sure you can run a fine business. But if you want to stand out and want people to actually love you instead of “like you,” you gotta be courageous.

Good luck out there. I hope you can do it. For everybody else at ATAK interactive, I’m Austin LaRoche saying, “Thank you so much and good luck growing.”