Content Marketing Archives - Do This Not That Marketing

June 20, 2018 by RonTester Leave a Comment

Storytelling for Business

Win with Storytelling

Whether you want to touch a nerve, reach a new audience, or boost your sales, storytelling is the most powerful tool in your arsenal. As humans, we love a good story, and when it resonates with us, it can drive us to take action when nothing else can.

Think about it—which would you rather read, an interesting story, or a sales letter? Which are you more likely to remember a week from now, a compelling story, or a features and benefits comparison? And which are you more likely to buy, a story you can see yourself in, or a product that does x, y, and z?

If you think back on your most recent purchases, from the business coach you hired to the car you bought last summer, chances are you’ll find a story that resonated with you, and that drove your decision to purchase.

Stories About You

You’ve heard it time and time again: People buy from those they know, like, and trust. And part of getting to know you is hearing your stories. Your potential clients want to know how you came to be in business, what experiences you’ve had that drove your decisions, what lessons you learned along the way.

Your stories don’t have to be directly related to business to be powerful, either. That anecdote about the time you nearly got arrested for not having a valid driver’s license is the perfect lead in to a blog post about better record keeping. Or the story about how you accidentally seated two warring families together at your wedding reception? It’s just what you need to drive home a point about relationship building.

Stories About Your Clients

Otherwise known as social proof, stories about your clients are incredibly useful in your marketing and branding strategy. Testimonials, white papers, case studies and the like are all just stories, after all, and they showcase how you and your products or services have changed a life or a business for the better.

Stories About Your Products and Services

Yes, even your products and services have stories to tell. Why did you decide to create that new program? What will it help your clients achieve? Who is it not suited to? These stories and more can show your potential clients more about your products and services than any sales page ever will. When you openly share your thought processes as you were creating your program, buyers will instantly know if it’s a product or service that will work for them or not.

Clearly, stories have a lot of power when it comes to branding and marketing, but you have to use caution. Beware of the awkward insertion of a story just because you’ve heard it’s good for your marketing. If you find yourself midway through a blog post and you write something like, “but anyway, enough of that, let’s get on with business” and then making a total shift to a completely different subject, chances are the story isn’t working.

But if you can tie your story in naturally to what follows, that’s your golden ticket to better branding, more sales, and a more profitable business. We love stories. Don’t be afraid to tell yours.

If you need some help figuring out which stories to tell or how to tell them, I recommend you check out Donald Miller’s Building a Storybrand or Paul Smith’s Sell with a Story.

But if you’d rather get personalized, immediate help, we should talk. Email me at ron@rontester.com.

April 23, 2018 by RonTester Leave a Comment

How Scaling Affects Content Creation

Improved Idea Generation

Scaling content forces you to give each piece of content a lot more thought and consideration and planning ahead. With the additional planning and reimaging of the content, you will come up with more ideas because you aren’t thinking of each piece of content as one thing in isolation anymore.

Instead, each piece of content becomes not just a blog post, but research for future pieces of content such as an eCourse, or a video education series, or a podcast. Now that you can look at content differently you’ll be able to bring more creativity to all the content ideas that you generate.

Get More Bang for Your Buck

By strategic rewriting, reformatting, and reusing the content that you have spent a lot of time, money and effort creating, you’ll actually get a lot more bang for your buck.

If you can create a certain number of pieces of content each month, based off your product funnel and the information you want to impart on your audience, and then each of these pieces of content are recreated into other formats, and each new creation is shared multiple times on social media, via email marketing and via your affiliates, how much more will you be able to grow your business from each piece of content?

Get Your Ideas to More People

When you spend time reproducing your content into many different forms, and even languages, and sharing it often through social media, email marketing, and other means, you’re going to get your ideas to more people than you did before.

The more people who see your information, the more leads you’re going to get, and the more credibility you will get for the work that you do. Strategic content creation, curation, and sharing across multiple networks will work in concert with your overall marketing plan.

Develop Thought Leadership

One of the ways in which you become a sought-after person in business is to become a thought leader. Scaled content allows you to become a thought leader by helping you make the most of the content you are creating, plus the content other people have created through curation.

By showing others your expertise through sharing your thoughts on other people’s content, and choosing the right content to share with your audience from other authors, you will become known as a thought leader within your community. This can boost your credibility exponentially among your audience members.

Make Competitors Allies

A great way to turn competitors into friends is to start curating their content. Share their content with your audience with your commentary and thoughts. You can use as much as 50 percent of your content as curated content as long as you add in your own thoughts, link to and provide attribution to the original creators of the content.

Now competitors will see what you’ve done and they may be encouraged to comment on what you said, or bring you into a cross-blog conversation that can bring you brand new traffic from their audience. Plus it turns your website or blog into a hub for information revolving around your niche, a one-stop shop for your audience to find the information of the day about your topic.

Multiply Your Message

Once you’ve developed a piece of content in any format, you can immediately multiply the message by reproducing it into new formats. You don’t want to copy and paste the information into a new format; you want instead to use the work as research, and reimagine it into a new format.

The blog post becomes a slideshare, and the slideshare becomes a YouTube video, and so forth. Use some creativity when moving content to a new format. You want to consider the personality of the network that your content will be pushed out to when crafting the new format. Also, give the new format some of its own personality and creative changes to ensure that it’s not cookie cutter.

Become a Global Brand

Most people read content or use content only in their own language. If you want to reach other audiences in other languages, you can duplicate your content into new languages by having it translated into entirely new websites. This will attract the audience you want to promote your products and services to.

Don’t just use the same content in a different language, but also be sure to consider the values and personalities of the audience that speaks that language. You may need to change more than just the words to make it work. However, adding more languages can boost your selling potential and your reach. Consider English, Spanish, French, German, and any language that has freedom of use and purchasing power on the internet.

Empower Brand Ambassadors

Affiliates, employees, contractors, friends, colleagues…they all need to feel as if they can share the work that you do without concern. Make it easy for them to share your content in their own words on their social media accounts, blogs, and among their contacts.

Push out content that can be edited by your colleagues, affiliates, employees and contractors to make it original yet still carry the message you want to get out. Teach them how to use the information to make the most of it.

Ask for Help

At first, content creation was a mystery to me. And it was hard enough to come up with any content, let alone scale it. But when you get used to scaling your content, using one thing to create another, then another, then another, you’ll find that the work gets even more interesting and enjoyable.

Do you need some help strategizing about what sort of content you should be creating and how you can scale it? If so, please ask someone. You can always email me Ron [at] rontester.com. And if we’re not a good fit, I know other people that might be able to help. What you absolutely don’t want to do is go it alone and suffer. Life is too short to suffer.

August 21, 2017 by RonTester Leave a Comment

Making Videos? Ask Your Audience What They Would Like to See

Asking Is Almost Always Better Than Guessing

Generating topics for videos is something you will need to do if you’re going to produce regular videos for your audience. The best way to accomplish this is to ask your audience for ideas about the types of videos and what subjects they want you to cover. There are different ways you can ask or find out what your audience wants to see.

* Warm Them Up – Most audiences are used to the one-way communication that most people provide to them. They get emails, they sit and watch a presentation, and they read blog posts. But they aren’t used to real engagement. You need to start small, warming them up by always ending every blog post, every social media post and so forth with a short question.

* Encourage Interaction – Reward people who engage with you by thanking them, and by acting excited about their contribution. Consider giving them a prize or a percent off coupon for coming up with such a great idea or question.

* Send an Email – Use your email list to your advantage. When you are trying to come up with ideas, shoot them an email to ask for their input. Make it fun for them to respond by inviting them to a free Facebook brainstorming group, or offering points toward products and services for good ideas.

* Visit Discussion Groups – Remember that your audience lives in other places besides only on your lists, your groups, and your discussion boards. Go to other places where they like to hang out and read the discussions. Any question they ask can become fodder for a new video.

* Conduct a Survey – A really good way to ask questions of your audience is to send a survey. With a short survey you can also get a little extra information about the group, plus input into what types of videos they’d like to see. Make it worth their while by promising and delivering a surprise at the end of the survey. I use SurveyMonkey or Google Forms.

* Ask on Social Media – Go straight to your social media accounts to ask questions of your audience. You can also send a poll via social media, or you can post an infographic with information and a question such as: “What is the next video you’d like me to make?” If you can give them a couple of choices to choose from, you’ll be more likely to get more answers.

* Have a Contest – Let the audience pick the topic by giving five topics you want to talk about, then let them vote on which one they’d like to see most. The winning topic gets made, and the ones who voted on the winning topic get invite to submit more questions and maybe ask a question live at the event.

* Frame the Question Right – You want to lead the choices in a certain direction so that you know you can make a video about the topic. For example, maybe you are confused about two different options; post only those two options. Or maybe you know the topic, but you want to know what they need to know about the topic; approach it that way instead.

Asking your audience directly is one of the best ways to choose a topic for your next video. Don’t be afraid to ask them. It doesn’t mean you don’t know what to do—it means that you care about what your audience needs. They’ll appreciate being included.

If you have an idea for a video you’d like to see, post it in the comments below. Or you can email me ron@rontester.com.