Delivering Value is, of course, vital to keeping the attention of your audience and ideal clients. And it's what makes them seek you out and voluntarily give you their attention. Which leads to credibility, trust and them becoming paying clients.

But in this episode of More Clients TV we're going look at something that I think you should perhaps put more focus on than delivering value itself.

If you want to get notified of these videos the minute they appear on Youtube, click the link below to subscribe to the More Clients TV channel:

More Important than Value?

Value is vital, obviously.

When it comes to attention, it's the crucial component that drives long attention.

Immediate attention is when you grab someone's attention through difference and novelty.

Short attention is when they begin to engage through curiosity. And we covered both those types of attention in previous videos.

Long attention is the most valuable type of attention. It's where people voluntarily come back to pay attention. Like their favourite TV show they tune into every week or the newsletter they always read.

Long attention is what creates clients by building credibility and trust over time and ensuring you're top of mind when someone is ready to buy.

And it's driven by value.

If your potential clients find your interactions with them valuable they'll keep coming back for more – and like their favourite TV show, they'll seek you out, they'll look forward to the interactions and they'll make time for you.

But what type of value do you need to create this sort of relationship?

Actually, I don't think it matters all that much.

What I mean by that is there's a huge variety of ways in which you can be valuable in your communications with potential clients. @@

You can give them practical tips and ideas.

You can share insights that shed new light on a problem and create “lightbulb moments” where they begin to understand things better.

You can share stories that inspire them and motivate them to take action or that build empathy and give them hope that they're not alone and things can change.

You can help them see the big picture and the path to their solution.

You can link them to resources or people they'll find useful.

Or you can just bring a little sunshine into their lives with an interesting or entertaining email or other communication.

So really you don't need to obsess about the details. As long as you've thought about what things your specific clients actually value and what it is you want to demonstrate to them to build your credibility and your relationship then there's a huge range of things you can do.

But what I'd encourage you to think about is less how you give value, and more about how and in particular when your clients get value.

Because the the time at which a client decides that you're the one or starts to see you as a real expert or begins to look forward to your communications is based on when they actually experience value in their business or lives from what you've said.

In other words, value is only value when it causes a positive change for someone.

There's a very real danger that we begin to equate value with pumping out more and more information but really it's about our clients and potential clients actually getting a result.

So we should think more about what a good result is for them and how we can help them get to that result faster through what we communicate with them.

In the world of software and services, they often call this the “aha moment”. It's the moment when someone “gets it”. When they realise what using a piece of software might actually mean for them and the value they'd get from it in the long term.

Back in 2015 Facebook revealed that their “aha moment” happened when a new user connected with about 7 friends. That's the moment at which they begin to see lots of updates from their friends on their feed and they start interacting and they start valuing their membership.

So Facebook made it a target to get new users to connect with 7 friends in 10 days.  And they focused almost all their early communications on getting new users to make those connections rather than the other features of Facebook which they could have talked about.

Because the faster that someone hits that “aha moment”, the faster they experience real value from the service, the more likely they are to stick around and the less likely they are to give up on the product. And it's not just a linear decrease in people leaving, it's an exponential decrease.

It makes a huge difference.

You see the exact same approach from other services. Dropbox tries to get you to upload a document as soon as possible. Slack tries to get you to send a bunch of messages as soon as possible. Because they know it's those actions that give you the “aha moment” when you begin to see real value from the product.

And the same thing applies to your communications. Rather than just sending potential clients more and more valuable content, think about what needs to happen for them to actually see or experience the value – to get an “aha moment” from you.

Maybe for your clients it's seeing the big picture and roadmap to the results they're looking for. Maybe it's some quick wins and actual results in their business. Maybe it's a clear diagnosis of the root cause of a problem they've been struggling to understand.

In my own business, when people sign up for my emails I aim to give them a big “aha moment” in the very first email they get from me. Something that makes them think “oh, I'd never thought of that, but he's absolutely right”. Something that gets them to look at their marketing in a different way with fresh eyes.

Because if that happens in the first email they're going to stay for the second and the third and the fourth. Rather than doing a generic introduction email like so many people do and *promising* them all this value they're going to get in the future, I try to make sure they get it right from the start.

So that “aha moment” trigger could be a lot of different things and for most clients there's not just one thing that will give them an “aha moment”. You've got plenty of options.

The important thing is to pick one, and then make sure it happens as fast as possible.

Don't just send then a smorgasbord of information, no matter how valuable it is in theory or how much work you've put into it..

Figure out what “aha moment” you want to give them and keep banging that drum early and often.

Because the sooner they get that “aha moment” the more likely they are to stay with you for the long haul. Which means you get to build credibility and trust and be top of mind with them when they're ready to hire someone.