My core marketing strategy is to produce valuable content to showcase my expertise and build relationships with potential clients long before we ever meet.

And whether it’s blog posts, longer articles, podcasts or videos – the core challenge for anyone following such a content strategy is coming up with interesting stuff to “write about”.

In fact, the number one reason I hear from people who want to get into blogging or content marketing but have struggled to do so is that they just can’t imagine producing enough interesting material. Or they’ve tried and then run out of steam.

Well, let me introduce you to Dave Gorman.

Dave’s a comedian based here in the UK. He started his career fairly gently by writing for established acts, and his first show at the Edinburgh Fringe “Reasons to be Cheerful” was based on an analysis of whether the items mentioned in the Ian Dury song “Reasons to be Cheerful #3″ actually were reasons to be cheerful.

So far, so not very much.

But then Gorman hit on a brilliant idea which would propel him towards 4 bestselling books, sellout live shows and his own TV series.

And it’s one we can all use ourselves.

The simple idea was that instead of trying to think of interesting things to write about for his act, he would do interesting things – and then write about those.

It turns out that people are far more interested in the weird or exciting things you’ve done that in the weird or exciting things you’ve just thought about.

So Gorman’s 1999 Fringe show was called “Dave Gorman’s Better World” and was created by him writing thousands of anonymous letters to local newspapers asking for suggestions from the public on how to create a better world – and testing them out to see if they worked.

His next wheeze was triggered by spotting that an assistant manager at small Scottish football team East Fife had the same name as him. So he drove 450 miles to meet him and photograph the event. He then set about meeting another 53 Dave Gormans across the world (one for every card in a pack of cards plus the jokers apparently). He chronicled his adventures meeting these Dave Gormans in the book and TV show “Are You Dave Gorman?”.

Next, he resolved to live his life according to a literal interpretation of his horoscope each day. Turned out pretty well when he bet everything he had on rank outsider Ian Woosnam (who he shared a birthday with) winning the Dubai Classic golf tournament (which, of course, he travelled to see) and won.

After that, he started his “Googlewhack Adventure” when he became obsessed by finding google search phrases with only one result – and then travelling the world to find the person behind that single result. The result for him was another bestselling book and TV show.

More recently, he travelled America avoiding all corporate outlets and using only family owned hotels, restaurants and petrol (gas) stations. “America Unchained” was again a bestseller.

Then he challenged the public to take him on at any game of their choice – from poker to darts to Khett to Cluedo to Kubb. And of course, he travelled to play them and chronicled his adventures in yet another besteller.

So how can we harness this approach for ourselves?

The key is that people are more interested in what you’ve done than what you think.

What I mean by that is that it’s great to have new ideas, theories about your field, predictions for the future.

But what really gets people hooked is hearing about practical experiences.

You can cull those from your own personal experience. Or you can interview others or create case studies.

Or you can do what Dave Gorman did: go out and do something interesting.

You recommend a particular approach to leadership, for example? Use it yourself. Get your clients to use it and record the outcomes. Video interview them afterwards. Get them to chronicle their experiences.

You show people how to get more traffic to their website? Create a live case study from scratch. Build a website, put some content on it, follow your traffic strategies and record the results.

In my case, I test out the marketing strategies I recommend myself. A lot of what you see on my blog is a result of my own experiments (particularly with online marketing) to see what works and what doesn’t.

You can do the same.

You want inspiration? You need something interesting to write about?

Then do something interesting.

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Here’s something on a similar vein. PR Guru David Meerman Scott describes how he got 50,000 twitter followers. Not by obsessing about getting twitter followers, but by publishing 4 books, doing 126 talks in 15 countries, shooting 125 videos etc. In other words, doing interesting stuff makes you an interesting person to follow. Read more here: The secret to getting 50,000 followers on twitter.

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So what’s your source of inspiration and ideas for great content? Drop me a comment below, I’d love to hear and share.

“Email is dead”

“Everyone’s using social media. No one reads emails these days”

“People are sick and tired of more and more email. They’re overwhelmed”

Have you heard comments like this recently? Me too.

It’s tempting to believe them and focus more on other ways of communicating.

Except for my business, email seems to be working just as well as ever.

Just me? Apparently not according to a bunch of market research that’s been done in the last few months.

Is email being wiped out by social media?

According to research by Merkle (View from the Digital Inbox 2011) – text messaging is the preferred method of personal communication amongst 18-29 year olds and the phone is the preferred method for other age groups: email comes in a strong second, being preferred by well over double the number who prefer social media.

And when it comes to commercial communications – email sweeps the board as the preferred method with 65-78% of people preferring it. A pitiful 0-4% of people prefer social media for commercial communications.

So while many people are beginning to use social media (and especially text messaging amongst younger people) instead of email for personal communications. When it comes down to business – email is still king.

But surely no one opens emails any more?

It’s true – average – open rates have dropped from 14% to 11.4% in the last 3 years according to MailerMailer’s Email Marketing Metrics Report.

But that’s largely due to more (bad) email being sent (and not opened). If your emails are still as valuable as they were 3 years ago with subject lines just as interesting – they’ll still get opened.

In fact, click rates (rather more important than open rates) are as good now as they were three years ago (and better than they have been in the intervening years).

But no one wants to be “bombarded” with email

It’s funny, whenever I speak to people worried about emailing too frequently and “bombarding” their customers and prospects with emails and I ask them how frequently they’re currently emailing – it’s usually monthly or at most weekly.

Is one email a week “bombarding”? Only if the emails have little of value in them.

In fact, I spoke to a marketing consultant earlier this week who switched to emailing his subscribers daily nearly two months ago. That’s right: daily.

The results?

His open rates have remained the same. His unsubscribes have dwindled to virtually zero. And most importantly, the number of enquiries he’s getting for his services from email subscribers has shot up.

I’m not saying you should email daily. But the chances are you can email more frequently and get better results. The people who object and unsubscribe when you send that one extra email a week? They were never going to become your clients anyway.

But I can’t do those fancy graphical emails

You don’t need to.

I got a bit cross recently when a (very) famous sales guru put up a video saying you needed to use highly graphical emails to get the attention of your prospects. (As it turns out, the guy was selling – you guessed it – a system to make graphical emails).

The facts on this are pretty clear. The best research I’ve seen is from MarketingExperiments a couple of years ago. They discovered that:

• Emails that use lots of graphics and formatting got 34% fewer clicks than plain text emails.

• Emails that had a little bit of formatting: the occasional underline or bold text and highlighted links got 55% more clicks than plain text.

Why is that?

Lightly formatted emails look like the emails we get from people we know and trust. Friends and business colleagues.

Graphics heavy emails look like advertisements.

So stick to neat, lightly formatted emails.

Make sure they can be read on mobile devices too. According to Knotice, 13.6% of all emails are opened on a mobile device.

Fancy graphics play havoc with mobile devices. At best, they make the text appear tiny. At worst, the email is unreadable.

So you’re saying I should use email as one of my key marketing channels then?

Yup. Without a doubt.

According to the Direct Marketing Association’s 2011 Report “The Power of Direct”, Email brings in $40.56 for every dollar spent on it, compared to catalogs’ ROI of $7.30, search’s return of $22.24, Internet display advertising’s return of $19.72 and mobile advertising’s return of $10.51.

Difficult to argue (too much) with those figures.

PS Sadly, that really is a screen capture of my gmail inbox along with the number of spam emails I’ve had over the last few months since the last clearout.

I ran a private webinar over the weekend for my email subscribers where I answered questions on Pain Free Marketing.

One of the very best questions was “how much information should I give away in advance of someone working with me to entice them to sign up?”

This is one of the questions I hear most often from professionals – worried they’ll “give away the store” in their attempts to follow my “Value In Advance” strategy.

I was going to do a long blog post covering all aspects of this question.

But tonight, at a pro-manchester event, over a few beers, Paul Aspden of Clock Creative summed it up far better than I ever could.

In Paul’s words:

“You remember when Bob Monkhouse lost his jokebooks?” (for those of you not based in the UK, Monkhouse was an old-school stand up comic known for his huge repertoire of jokes who had a bit of a renaissance in the 90s).

“Well, the guy who found those jokebooks didn’t become a famous stand-up comic, did he?”.

Paul’s absolutely right.

It turns out that what made Monkhouse successful wasn’t his jokes – the information he knew. It was his personality, his delivery, his relationship with his audience. Even though he was famous for his repertoire of jokes.

It’s the same for all of us.

We worry about giving away too much information. Maybe our clients could do it all without us if we give too much “value in advance”.

But that’s almost never the case.

Hardly any professionals sell pure information. We sell results.

And the results we deliver come partially from our knowledge – but also from our experience (knowing what knowedge applies in what situations), our skills (our ability to apply our knowledge – there’s a world of difference between knowing what makes a good sales letter and being able to write one, for example) and our contact base (who we know).

The truth is, that if a blog post or an article or a PDF lead magnet you give away can reveal all your “secrets” so that clients don’t need you – then you don’t really know very much.

Come on, think about it. The sum total of your expertise. All the value you could deliver to clients. Can you really give that away in a simple article or report?

Only if you don’t really have that much to offer.

If you really have deep expertise and experience, there’s no way you can give that away in a short report.

And the sort of clients who’ll take a short report and try to implement it themselves rather than hiring you?

They weren’t going to hire you anyway. Don’t kid yourself.

They’re the cheapskates. The barrell scrapers. The freebie seekers. If you didn’t offer your free stuff, they’d have found someone else who did. They wouldn’t have come looking to hire you instead.

But there are plenty of people who will hire you after being impressed by your free stuff who wouldn’t have if they hadn’t seen it.

So please – don’t get paranoid about giving away too much useful information. It really is almost impossible for professional service firms.

 

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We all have horror stories to tell from our experiences. One of my worst was my first official business development role when the big consulting firm I worked for put me in charge of one of our largest UK accounts.

I’d been a very successful consultant – and had learned to sell effectively in that consulting role.

But as an account manager I was hopeless.

Like many professionals, I was great once I was in a face to face meeting with potential clients.

I just couldn’t get enough of those meetings.

I really hated phoning or even emailing my contacts, trying to set up meetings to “explore how we might work together for mutual benefit” (= pitch our services). It felt incredibly uncomfortable: pushy and salesy.

So I hardly made any calls. And I hardly got any sales.

I was in real trouble for a while. But then – pretty much by accident – I noticed something a little bit weird. Something that gave me the confidence to call potential clients and which made them enthusiastic to take my calls – and even to start calling me.

To find out what it was, check out the free video I’ve created by clicking here:

Or click here:

www.painfreemarketing.co.uk/value-in-advance

 
it’s the first in a series of 4 videos on how to win more clients without the pain and expense of traditional marketing and selling.

You’ll need to opt-in with your email address to get access and so I can send you links to the remaining 3 videos (if you’re already on my weekly Insider Strategies mailing list you should have got an email from me by now about getting access to the videos).

I had a lot of fun making the videos – and they’re getting great feedback so far. I hope you find them useful.