Lessons on story-telling

It’s been a little over two months since I started at Tempered. For the last 5+ years, we’ve had a hard time nailing our story.

We’ve been a company made up of incredibly intelligent savants. Folks who know their stuff and have done revolutionary work.

And yet… our storytelling was dour, complex and overly-technical. We didn’t have pull. Trying to explain what we did to the average person took over a minute.

One of our first tasks as a newly assembled marketing team was to relaunch our brand website. Out with the old and in with the new.

We were going to revamp everything… and we desperately needed to.

And after two long months, we crossed the finish line…

Here’s what I leaned into, as we launched a v.1 of the site:

stop playing by everyone else’s rules.

Seriously, we were never going to be as good as someone else at their game. We had tried for too long to sound like we belonged in a market, where other companies had set the rules and determined the game. By every measure, we were setting ourselves up to lose.

lean into our strengths.

We wanted to highlight what makes us revolutionary for our customers. We had to learn to lean into our strengths. There are some crucial problems we solve for our customers, that quite literally no one else can solve. We were not bold enough in clearly articulating those strengths.

clearly define our own market.

We tried positioning ourselves as a direct competitor to specific vendors, when in reality we were setting our sights too low. We didn’t need to convert the market to our products. We simply need to land our the right customers, who understand the problem and how we elegantly solve it.

details

link: tempered.io
focus: story telling, website copy, brand differentiation, narrative positioning