I was speaking to one of my Momentum Club members on the phone last week, and one of the topics we focused on was how to move potential clients from that initial point of not really knowing you, to where they're ready to buy from you.

Great content has a big role to play in how you do that online, but it's not enough. In particular, your content has to not just build your credibility and deliver value, it has to bring your potential clients closer to the specific mindset they need to be ready to buy.

In this week's 5 minute marketing tip video I show you exactly how to do this with your content marketing.
 

Video Transcript

Hi it's Ian here. Welcome to another 5 minute marketing tip.

Last week I was on the phone to one of my Momentum Club members and amongst other things we discussed how to use marketing, and in particular content marketing to take your potential clients from where they usually start off, not knowing much about you to where they're going to be ready to buy from you. Now great content is a part of that, it's an important component but it's not enough. What you need is “breadcrumb content” that leads your potential clients step by step from where they are to where you need them to be. I'll show you how to create breadcrumb content after this break.

Hi, welcome back. Imagine you've got a beautiful garden and you love nothing more than to watch the birds fly and land and eat bird seed and tweet and do whatever birds do, but your problem is that the birds tend to congregate at the bottom of your garden rather than near your window where you can see them. What do you do? You could try just throwing out bird seed randomly and the birds will fly about and grab all that bird seed but they're going to go wherever the bird seed lands rather than by your window. What you need to do instead is to lay out a trail of bird seed, a breadcrumb trail from where they start out at the bottom of the garden up to your window so that they congregate there and that's where you can see them.

It's exactly the same thing with potential clients. You need your content to be great but you also need it to be breadcrumb content that leads them from where they are now to where you need them to be.

How do you do that? Well you need to know a couple of things first. Firstly you need to know where you want them, where your window is. Now in he case of potential clients where you want them to be is being ready to buy from you or maybe being ready to have a call with you or being ready to come on a webinar. What does that mean in detail and specifically? Well think through what the know and feel factors are. What does that potential client need to know and feel to be ready to hire you.

If you're a leadership coach for example, maybe that potential client needs to know that you'll be able to get real bottom line results for their business because you've done it before when you've coached other people. Maybe they need to know or feel that they'll be capable of making the changes so that might mean that they need to know that you've worked with people just like them. Maybe they need to know that you understand their industry or their sector or their type of business. Maybe they need to feel that there will be good chemistry, a good connection between the 2 of you, etc, etc. Make sure you've brainstormed, thought through and written down what those know and feel factors are for your ideal clients because those are the things you've got to show. Those are the breadcrumbs you've got to lay to get people to where you want them.

Secondly you need to know where they are, where you need to throw the breadcrumbs initially. What that means for potential clients is you need to know what their big goals and aspirations, their problems, their challenges, what they're interested in, what they care about, because that's the type of content you've got to produce for them to pay attention to. You can use all the content you want in the world about how great you are or the great results you've got but nobody really cares. What they care about is their own problems, their own challenges, their own aspirations, the things they're interested in so you need to know what those are because those become the topics that you create your content about.

Here's how you combine the two. What you do is you write about or you make videos about or podcasts about or blogs about or emails about the topics that your potential clients are interested in but you illustrate them using the know and feel factors that will take them closer to where you want them to be. What does that look like in practiceS? Let's say you were a LinkedIn trainer and that you had worked out your know and feel factors were that people needed to know that your LinkedIn training led to real business results rather than just a pretty profile and a whole bunch of other factors. Let's focus on that one about getting business results first.

Now in order to get the attention of someone who might be a good client for you, you might write a good content article or do a video on 7 tips for improving your LinkedIn profiles. That would be interesting to your potential clients, they get value from that, it would increase their perception of you as an expert in the field but it's a bit like throwing the bird seed out randomly. It doesn't necessarily take them nearer to knowing that you would be the right person to work with. Instead of just writing out 7 tips for improving your LinkedIn profile article, what you might do instead is write a case study or tell a story of how one of your clients used those 7 tips, you're still saying what the 7 tips are but illustrate them in a story of how your client used them to get the business results they were looking for. Maybe a new job or maybe a new client or something like that.

By doing that you're still getting across the great content, it's till highly valuable to potential clients but it's also illustrating one of the know and feel factors, one of the breadcrumbs that's going to take them just that one step closer to being where you want them to be knowing all the know and feel factors and them being ready to hire you. Now the key is to do this systematically so every time you put in some new piece of content, think through firstly, what are the topics that my potential clients are going to be interested in and they're going to add value to? Secondly, how can I illustrate that with one of the know and feel factors? Now you won't necessarily be able to illustrate with a know and feel factor every time. The first step is to get that valuable content but the more often you can use a know and feel factor in the way you illustrate your valuable content the closer people are going to get to you and the quicker they're going to get close to you.

That's really it. That's the simple process. Scatter those breadcrumbs where your potential clients are by using the things they care about, their problems, their goals, their aspirations, their challenges but illustrate those topics with the know and feel factors that are going to bring them closer to your window where you can watch them. They're going to bring them closer to being ready to hire you.

Speak to you again soon, cheers.

 
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