The Perth Comedy Festival has just finished, so there’s been a lot of stand-up comedy around town over the last few weeks. Last week, I went to see five stand-up comedy shows. Three (Mike G, Sami Shah, and Lawrence Leung) were new to me, one (Felicity Ward) was recommended by friends, and the other (Anh Do) is somebody I’ve seen before.
I chose the first three because they were part of a pre-festival “sample” night, where about 10 comedians came together for one night and each did a short spot from their show. As a result, we were able to get some experience of them beforehand, and I’m sure that helped many people – including me – buy tickets for their full show.
A similar thing applies to your business.
It struck me that my process of choosing these five shows is exactly how you should look at your Internet marketing strategy – to reach three groups of people:
- Strangers: If you’re not yet known in your industry – like those first three comedians – you need to reach out to strangers – people who’ve never heard of you before. To prove you’re good, you need to give them lots of opportunities to experience you – with your blog, newsletter, podcast, video, slide shows, interviews, infographics, whatever. You need to provide a lot of samples of your work. That’s exactly what you’re doing with “content marketing”.
- Neighbours: As more people see your content, they share it and recommend it to others (who I call “neighbours”, because they don’t know you personally but have heard about you from somebody else), and you build a reputation (like Felicity Ward). That’s where social media comes in. It’s not where you publish your original content, but it’s how you distribute it.
- Friends: Finally, when you are well-known (like Anh Do), your clients and customers (I call these people “friends”) keep coming back because they know how much value you provide. Of course, you’ll still keep doing content marketing and social media because not everybody knows you yet, and you want to stay current even with those who do know you. But it’s easier now, because your existing clients and customers keep giving you a lot of business.
Where does YOUR business fit?
Ideally, you should be doing all three things all the time. If you are already at the third level (friends), you might not need to do as much of the first two (I reckon that’s why you sometimes hear older, more experienced people saying they “don’t need to do social media” because they’re getting enough business already. To some extent, they are right!).
But be careful not to ignore the other two – especially if you don’t already have premium positioning in your clients’ minds.
In the previous webinar, I showed you how to take one idea and turn it into 21 different pieces of high-quality content, which you can use for marketing purposes. In this session, I answer your questions about the process and tools.
I know many people (and I’m one of them!) are talking about “content marketing” and how important it is to your entire marketing plan. But I also know some people feel overwhelmed by just how much content they have to keep creating – especially if writing doesn’t come naturally. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, you might discover you can create a lot of high-quality content for little or no effort at all. For example, here are seven simple things you can do to create content with little or no writing involved.
One of the biggest problems with getting new business – even from existing clients – is proving your relevance. Sometimes clients and prospective clients don’t even realise your message, product or service is more relevant now than ever before. You can demonstrate relevance by showing them how their world has changed. This is often done with statistics, but they can be boring and difficult to interpret. A better option is to show these statistics and numbers in pictures, by creating an infographic.
In this webinar, I’ll show you how to take one idea and turn it into 21 different pieces of high-quality content, which you can use for marketing purposes – to attract high-quality traffic that turns into high-quality clients.
Expert Gold Radio brings you monthly ideas, information, interviews and insights into leveraging your leadership – through better communication, on-line learning and Internet marketing.
Content marketing is a bit of a buzzword now, but behind the hype is an important tool for building credibility, positioning yourself as an authority, and getting high-quality enquiries to your business. In this episode, I talk about why content marketing is important, and then show you how to create and distribute high-quality material easily and quickly.
Although people find round numbers easier to understand, they find specific numbers more believable. When you’re more specific, you sound more credible and authoritative, so use this in your Web site marketing.
If you’re not selling enough now at current prices, charge more. In fact, double the price. This isn’t just based on the theory that the more you charge, the more that people think it’s worth. Instead, the idea is to get you thinking about value, not price.
