Audio Lesson Five: HOW
HOW TO DO LESS, BUT SELL MORE
You’re practically there. If you’ve gotten this far in this audio course, you’ve completed the first four fundamental principles of a disciplined marketing strategy that will serve as your permission to spend less time marketing, and more time selling. Your worksheet should now show us:
Who we’re marketing to
Why they are motivated to buy from us
What we have to offer to get them into our sales funnel
Where our audiences live, work and play, and where they go to find solutions to their pain points and challenges
All that’s left to do now is to turn this marketing strategy into a marketing plan.
There’s no stopping us now!
(If you haven’t completed Audio Lesson Four, or the corresponding section in the worksheet, turn back now or go all the way back to the beginning, if you must.)
What’s all this talk about email?
Before we dig in, I have to explain why I’ve been adding email as the “plus 1” to your singular marketing modality.
For one, I bet you’re not fully embracing email. It’s old, it’s clunky. It can get easily deleted or relegated to a spam folder. There’s some truth to that. But even with those qualifiers, the hit rate on email is astronomical compared to virtually any other form of digital marketing out there.
And I’m not talking about the emails you send as a matter of course running your business. I’m talking about email as a delivery channel for your thought-leadership content.
Don’t take my word for it. I’ve been mentioning the name Brian Clark a lot during this audio course. You might know him as the brains behind Copyblogger and other ventures. If you don’t know who he is, he has built multiple 7-figure businesses over the course of his career, without investors and without employees (for the most part). He is the model. And the teacher. He has been a content marketer since before they even had a name for what he was pioneering.
His preferred method of marketing? You guessed it: email.
A few relevant data points from his latest “7-Figure Small” project, Future Freedom:"
For every $1 spent on email marketing, you get $38 in return.
That’s because people spend 5.6 hours per day checking email — up almost a half hour since 2017.
Email remains 40 times better at converting people than social media.
I’ll add a few of my own:
Email is owned media, meaning you have total control over the message.
Email is affordable. No expensive SEO or pay-per-click required!
Email has no algorithms. The algorithms that govern content flow in social media have more and more control over who sees your content. And who doesn’t. That’s a problem for me. Why would I put all of my eggs into a basket that I, as a communicator, have less and less control over with each passing day?
So it’s time to get over your apathy toward email.
What else ya got?
But don’t worry. Email won’t be your only thing. Just your main thing. Email marketing is all about moving people from the top of your sales funnel, through the middle, and all the way down to the bottom: a sale!
Anyone for whom you have an email address is in the middle of your sales funnel already. Either they are—or have been—a client, they’ve opted into an email campaign of yours at some point, or they are a trusted friend, colleague, family member, vendor, associate, acquaintance, and so on.
Literally any of those people could be your clients. Or referral sources. So why would you ignore them?
But the one limitation of email—and why it can’t act alone—is that it does very poorly outside of the sales funnel. You can’t email someone if you don’t have their email address.
And that’s where your pre-selected “What” comes in from the previous lesson.
You are going to couple your What, with email.
And that’s when the magic happens.
THIS IS YOUR HOW
Let’s use some examples by way of illustration. Let’s say you’ve identified your ideal client as a corporate decision-maker in his or her 50s, who is struggling to understand modern technology. The are naturally tech-averse, but they know they need to brush up, or risk getting broomed out. (That’s their pain…fear.) And you just happen to sell or consult on the very technology that this audience needs to master. So far so good.
Let’s further say that, through your research and your own observations, that these people are avid consumers of content to self-teach what they don’t know and think they can’t get anywhere else. But they prefer audio content to reading. They listen to audio books, rather than read the printed or Kindle versions. They don’t read a lot of blogs, but they listen to a fair amount of podcasts. They do this because they can consume the content passively while doing something else—working out, commuting, walking the dog, etc.
Lastly, let’s assume that this aligns with your natural skill set and passions. You like to create content, but hate to write. But turn on a camera or a microphone, and boom! Magic!
Given all of this, you decided that your What is podcasting. Your Where? Likely LinkedIn, as that’s where this demographic tends to go online to learn, network and build relationships.
With me so far?
Good. Now imagine a wheel. At the hub of this wheel is you. A coating around that hub is your content envelope. It’s the way people get to you. In layman’s terms, I’m talking about your Website. At the outer rim of this wheel (where the bicycle tire would be) are your audiences, spending time where live, work and play. (We’ve decided LinkedIn for this illustration, remember?)
The spokes are the channels you’ll use to get them from where they are on the wheel, into your hub…which is you and your content envelope. So you’re not spinning your wheels (pun point for that one) on an unmanageable and ever-increasing number of spokes, we’re cutting away all of the waste and focusing on just one spoke: your podcast.
You’ll have to do that one thing very well for this to work. But that’s infinitely more effective than doing a lot of things poorly. More on that in the bonus lesson that comes at the end of this course.
Your How is going to be creating valuable content via a podcast, that your audiences are hungry for, because it addresses their specific pain points and challenges, and you’re going to deliver it to them in their preferred content modality, where they are already spending their time looking for solutions.
The podcast isn’t the offer; it’s only the conduit. It will serve to provide free value to your audience, thereby earning their trust, establishing your domain authority, and constantly reinforcing your expertise to the market. Why would a prospect look anywhere else?
They won’t. When they’re ready to hire someone to make their pain go away, it’ll be you. There likely won’t even be a short list.
In the meantime, we are getting your niche audiences off of the wheel at the outer rim, and into your hub. That’s when email kicks in.
If you need reminding why that’s important, go look at those data points enumerated above one more time.
HERE’S THE HOMEWORK
Forget for now how much time this is going to take you to orchestrate and manage. That’ll be largely up to you, as we’ll explain in the next installment, Audio Lesson Six: WHEN. But not only is it largely up to you, the whole purpose of this program is to give you both permission and a pathway to do less, but sell more.
I wouldn’t abandon that notion now.
So again, without concern to time or timing for the moment, go back to your worksheet, and enter your version of your How: Something like (to borrow from the above illustrative example) podcasting + email + LinkedIn.
Then start making your content calendar.
Wait. Nobody taught me how to create a podcasting content calendar.
Yes, we did.
Remember that list of pain points, challenges and questions you identified? The ones that your niche audience grapples with everyday, and is out there in the wild trying to solve for themselves? The ones they reported back to you when you had your client conversations? The issues that your current clients and customers ask you about each and every day? The stuff that is so in your wheelhouse, it practically feels easy for you? Yet, somehow…people marvel at your mastery of the subject matter?
Start making a list. That’s your content calendar.
See you next time.