Speaker 1: In this episode, I'm going to break down a marketing strategy that time and time again has proven effective no matter what social media platform or network you're using. It works on Facebook, it works on Instagram, it works on YouTube, it works on LinkedIn, and it'll work on pretty much whatever new social media platform comes out next. But here's the catch. It's not new and it's not that exciting either, but it works and it works really well. So let's get to it. All right, so as you probably already know, marketing is important. In fact, in my view, it is the most important thing because it's marketing's job to help you attract new leads and new clients and new sales and new customers for your business. And without those, well, you don't really have a business, do you? But of course, when it comes to marketing, well, it's not done in a vacuum or in a bubble with just you and your business, creating all this amazing stuff and then just keeping it to yourself. No, you got to show it to some people. After all, that's how you're going to be able to connect with them and build rapport and establish a relationship and eventually lead them to make a sale or to purchase or to do business with you. Those people you're trying to reach, your potential clients, your potential customers, your audience, well, they've seen it all, which means they're a whole lot more skeptical and jaded and cynical because they've been hyperly aggressively marketed to for years on end. They've seen those crazy claims and those over the top statements saying that this is the greatest thing ever and this will solve all of your problems in five seconds and get rich quick or become a millionaire overnight. Unsurprisingly, most of these claims have over-promised and under-delivered, which has led to some pretty skeptical customers. The problem is, is that the volume of all of these different messages that tend to way over-promise and then way under-deliver, well, they've led to a pretty burned out market. That's, again, really skeptical of pretty much any marketer or any business or any message that gets put in front of them. Plus, to make things even harder on you, don't worry, I got some good news coming in just a second. Well, to make things even harder on you today, customers and clients and buyers in general, well, they tend to have a whole lot more power, mainly because they're able to quickly compare and contrast and do all sorts of research, which means that they often have more information about whatever it is that you're selling than you may have yourself. The key then and the way around all of this is to understand that the customer and the client does have power. And if you're able to understand how they make buying decisions and the natural way that the brain works, well, you're able to craft marketing that works with your clients and with your customers rather than against them. So in order for you to do that, well, first we have to take a look at two very different approaches when it comes to marketing, outbound marketing and inbound marketing. Outbound marketing is what most people think of when they think of marketing. Think of advertising and TV commercials and basically anything that goes out there and interrupts or goes out to the market in order to basically put your stuff in front of them. As a very broad and very basic generalization, if something goes out there and gets in front of someone's face and interrupts them, well, it's kind of outbound marketing. Now, of course, for outbound marketing to work, it needs to be a little more aggressive and a little more pushy and a little more salesy. After all, you're going out there and you're interrupting someone and shoving a message in their face. And if you want it to actually deliver a positive return on investment or ROI, well, you're going to have to get their attention and you're going to try to have to make them do something pretty quickly. Now, here's the thing with outbound marketing. A lot of people, especially more modern marketers and more with an emphasis on relationship and connection and building ethical marketing. Well, they tend to dismiss outbound marketing as irrelevant or outdated or spammy. And while yes, there are outbound marketing strategies and tactics that will fall into the spammy kind of bucket, well, there are ways to do it right and to do it ethically, making sure that you have alignment with who you're trying to reach and the offer you're putting in front of them and the value behind it and all kinds of stuff like that. That said, there is an alternative to outbound marketing, which tends to be my preference, and that is inbound marketing. So if we define outbound marketing as something that goes out there and interrupts someone and puts our message in their face, well, then inbound marketing is the opposite of that. Or what Seth Godin calls permission marketing. This is marketing that your clients and your customers and your audience and your market have asked for. They've essentially gone out there themselves. I guess that makes them outbound customers. Whatever the case, this is where your customers and clients go out there on their own. They make their own decision to go out there and pursue information or to try to solve a problem that they have. And when you position yourself, your business and your marketing as the solution, as a resource or someone that can help them by providing information or content or resources or whatever, well, you'll naturally start to attract them. And this allows you to essentially market without having to aggressively market. And from a marketing perspective, this is a very, very powerful shift because again, it allows you to create marketing that doesn't look or feel or sound like marketing at all. In other words, you're able to sell without selling. Now when this happens, well, the customer or client or prospect or person you're trying to reach, they don't feel like they're being sold to. So they naturally lower their guard and they're more open and more receptive to your message and to your offer and to your marketing. Here's an example to really help drive this point home. This video that you're watching right now with you and me here today, well, it's the perfect example of inbound marketing. I didn't run ads to it. I didn't chase you down the street and shove a video in front of your face. I didn't do anything to actively go out there and make you watch it rather than possibly sending an email to my email list, letting them know that this video is now available. And yet if the video does what it's supposed to do, what I designed it to do, well, it should establish a little more of a bond between you and me. It should build some trust. It should allow me to deliver you some value that who knows may one day lead to some kind of a relationship in the business world or personal world. Hey, we can be friends. And the beauty of this is that even though right here, right now, I got nothing to sell you. And that doesn't mean that at some point in the future, you won't reach out on your own free will or do a little more digging or a little more research into how I may be able to help you solve a problem that you have. And that my friend is the power of inbound marketing. But of course for inbound marketing to work, well, there's one underlying principle or tenet or core foundational piece of stuff that sounded very scientific. And the thing that ties all of this together is content. And more specifically speaking, the strategy behind the content, the way you design it, the research you put into it, the way that it's structured and the way that it's presented to your audience. Here's the truth. Content marketing is by far one of the most effective ways for you to grow your business, attract new clients and new customers, and essentially make more sales. But for content marketing to work, you need to do it right. Let me tell you a story and take you back in time to when I first got started in marketing. When I first got started in business, I was like most new entrepreneurs. I was hungry, I was ambitious, and I was desperate to make all of this work and actually make enough money so I didn't have to go back into the real world and get a nine to five job again. But in those early days of a business owner and an entrepreneur, well, I was like most other people in that I didn't have a whole lot of extra money for fancy video equipment or advertising or all of the other things that I thought I needed to do if I wanted my business to grow. So I did what I could with what I had. And essentially, that meant a whole lot of research, a whole lot of reading blogs and basically talking to anybody who would give me the time to sort of point me in the right direction. And after reading books and doing study and talking to different mentors and coaches and things like that, well, a certain trend or a certain pattern started to emerge. And this pattern, this trend that pretty much all of the six, seven and eight figure entrepreneurs that I emulated to be like back in the day, well, they were all doing one thing and that thing was creating content. But not just any kind of content, content that followed five different stages. I guess that's, that's 10. Content that followed five different stages. So let me break those down for you now. The very first thing that they understood when it came to creating content, and again, it didn't really matter what social media platform they were using or what social media platform you want to be using or whatever social media platform comes out in the future. You first need to dial in your preferred content style. Now when I'm talking about style, I'm not just talking about the tone of your words or the branding or the colors or the music or anything like that. Rather, I'm talking about the bare bones elements of what format or what media you're going to be using. Now, here's the thing. When you're trying to decide what content style to use, you've got to find the overlap between two different areas. The first of which is what kind of content style do you like to create? Do you prefer video or audio or text or graphics or whatever? And the second area is what kind of content your market wants to consume. Again, video, audio, text, graphic, you know the drill. Now my strong recommendation here, if this is at all possible, is to look at a video marketing strategy. Not only does it give you kind of the most persuasive and most personable and authentic and human connection with someone that you're trying to reach, but it also gives you the most creative flexibility later down the road. For example, you could take your video and you could rip out the audio. I got a podcast. You can take that audio and transcribe it into text, and now you've got a blog post or an email or different social media posts. And you can take all of that content and give it to a designer and have them create graphics or infographics to really help drive the point home. It's a whole lot easier when you start with the video and you work down rather than when you start with the text and try to work out. All right. The next thing that you need to have in place with your content marketing strategy is long form content. Now, long form content is essentially content that people are going to consume in a more in-depth fashion, probably for around three minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes, maybe even upwards of 30 minutes or an hour, maybe even two. And just think about the power of that for a second. Given the choice between creating really quick, digestible, snackable content that someone whips through their phone at a million miles a minute or sitting down with you for 20 minutes or half an hour or up to an hour, which one do you think is going to enable you to build a bigger connection? That, that's, that's a rhetorical question. It's the long one. Now, of course, when we're talking about long form content, we're not talking about the traditional things like a book or even a speech, but rather could be a video, could be a podcast. You could be your podcast. You could be a guest on someone else's podcast. It's essentially something that allows you to tell a little bit more of a story and again, build that deeper relationship. Now, of course, long form content isn't the only kind of content you want to create. You do want to supplement this with short form content. As I already hinted at, short form content is that short, snackable content that someone can consume in three to 30 seconds. Basically, as they're scrolling through their phone and looking for stuff and you pop up and give them a little bit of value or educate them or inform them or entertain them. The beauty of short form content is that it's easier to create and it's easier to consume and it allows you more opportunities to increase touch points and increase the frequency with which you're showing up in front of your market. As I've said many times before, frequency can be directly correlated with trust, meaning the more that you show up in front of someone, the more that they're going to trust you. For my psychology nerd friends out there, this is known as the mere exposure effect and it's a doozy. All right. The next kind of content that you need to have in your toolkit, in your arsenal is conversion content. Now, when it comes to conversion content, most entrepreneurs, most business owners, well, they tend to do one of two different things. Both are wrong. The first of which is they create no conversion content, which means all value, all the time, just stories, never an offer or a message or something that tries to get the relationship to that customer stage by getting them to buy something. The other side and equally, if not more wrong, is the all conversion content where every single message is an offer or a hard sell or trying to get someone to buy something. Unsurprisingly, this does not build a whole lot of goodwill with your market and can burn out your audience very quickly. So, what's the answer? Well, the answer, like most things in marketing, is kind of somewhere in the middle. It's a mix of value content with offers that are relevant and relatable to the market that you're seeking to serve. Now, there is no one size fits all approach here for the perfect ratio of value to content to offers and all of the stuff that goes into it. So, you're going to have to take into consideration your market and your style and your tone and what you're trying to promote. And then the fifth piece of content that you need to have is content ascension. Now, content ascension is basically just fancy marketing talk for the customer journey, maybe even a marketing funnel, some kind of weird content way. But what you want to do with content ascension is essentially continue to nurture and continue to engage and continue to connect with your market by guiding them from where they are now to where they want to go, one piece of content at a time. When you design this well, when you structure out a nice customer journey that allows you to overcome objections and pre-qualify people and continue to offer value, well, you can automate the entire thing to happen behind the scenes so that when someone gets introduced to you and to your world, well, they work almost magically and effortlessly through this journey, arriving, having no idea who you are and leaving a happy and loyal and satisfied customer. Now, of course, the secret to making all of this work is to make sure that it's based on proven marketing fundamentals and foundational principles, which is why the next thing you're going to want to do is check out the video I have linked up right here on introduction to marketing. So, make sure to check that out now and I'll see you in the next episode. Marketing helps people solve their problems by clearly defining and delivering solutions and really explaining the benefits of those solutions so they can get better results.