Small Business Website Content Marketing Blog

The new year brings a lot of opportunities for start-ups.  Every start-up needs a great elevator pitch. It’s the quickest way to convey your company’s mission statement and start building rapport with potential customers. Many elevator pitches are too long, too confusing, or both. You need to make sure to keep them short, simple, and in terms that people who are unfamiliar with your business and industry can understand.

I’ve found a great framework for building elevator pitches. It’s just like Mad Libs in that you have specific blanks that you will fill out with the appropriate information. Here’s what the framework looks like:

“My company, (company name), is developing a (a defined offering) to help (a target audience) (solve a problem) (with secret sauce).”

What we want from your one-sentence pitch is to learn what your company name is, truly understand what it is that you’re building, who you’re going to sell or offer it to, what specific problem you’re trying to solve, and how your solution makes you unique.

To avoid at all times: vagueness (“we’re building a platform for SMBs who want to sell more stuff by using our software”), meaningless buzzwords (“we’re developing a post-PC, people-centric mobile app”) and empty, irrelevant words such as ‘innovative’, ‘revolutionary’, ‘award-winning’, ‘amazing’, ‘premier’, ‘fantastic’, ‘patent-pending’, ‘next-generation’ and the like.

Try it out!  Post your elevator pitch using the guidelines above in the comments below!