The Online Prosperity Experience

Marketing Is So Much More Than Pretty Pictures

During the course of my work, I speak with coaches, consultants and business owners pretty much every single day.

With very few exceptions, most of them confuse ‘Marketing’ with ‘Promotion’, or ‘Ads’, or ‘Public Relations.

The danger, moving forward, is that the historic role of marketing – as a key component of an organisation’s strategic execution – will disappear forever.

We’ll be left with Martech-driven, cookie-cutter campaigns producing ever lower returns – and where marketing will get the blame.

Marketing brings the customer's voice to the table.

Not only is this important for future product and sales strategy. It (should) include insights and recommendations on real-world, tangible metrics like Customer Lifetime Value and Customer Acquisition Cost.

Real marketing is first about having a deep and fundamental understanding of your customer. After that, it’s coming up with a strategy designed to help your business increase sales in the market you’re in. The sexy bells and whistles are, of course, an essential part of the route to success. But they’re not where you should begin – and they’re certainly not the most significant part.

It’s no wonder so many businesses come to us complaining about how their marketing isn’t working.

Most coaches, consultants and small business owners haven’t a clue about the internal workings of the business where they work.

They just want to post (yet) another pretty picture on Instagram. 

That’s not marketing.

Understanding how the human mind works and how to attract and hold the attention of your audience will enable you to create content that out-performs the competition and pleases your users at the same time. 

You can empower them to get access to the information they need quickly and easily and ultimately complete their tasks with as little wasted time as possible.

Now let’s take a look at some specific techniques that use knowledge of how the mind works in order to grab people’s attention and hold it long enough to deliver your message:

In this Google-focused age, it can be hard to understand what content will help a business become successful.

If you run, market or write for a coach, consultant or small business, this challenge can be even more frustrating and feel insurmountable.

Fortunately, it can be simple to write or create solid, trustworthy content that your audience can appreciate and search engines will be more likely to trust.

Avoiding the following mistakes is a great way to begin improving your content writing, whether you are a business owner, a marketer or a content writer.

1. Keyword Stuffing
2. Writing Fluff
3. Using Unoriginal Phrases

After these issues are taken care of, you or whoever is responsible for writing for your company’s content can start focusing on creating original content that is SEO-friendly and audience-friendly.

Understanding that every podcast, website page, article and blog post that you put on the internet is important to your business and customers in numerous ways can help you re-frame your thinking about content marketing and writing for the web.

Being boring doesn’t make you more credible.

Even if you have a great product or service that provides value for your customers, a little pizzazz can keep customers engaged. This makes them

1. Hear your message,
2. Make an impact,
3. Remember you,
4. and are excited enough to want to take action.

Our customers now have information overload, which has caused them to decrease their attention spans.

If you keep your message relevant and always take into account your audience’s interests, tolerance level and time, adding pizzazz to your presentation can have nothing but upside for your bottom line.

YOU DON’T WANT MORE TRAFFIC.

You might think you do, but you don’t.

SEO firms will promise it to you. Marketing agencies will show you gorgeous looking case studies: “We increased traffic by 1,115%!”

You will read blog post after blog post after blog post promising that if you just do X, Y and Z from their top 10 list, your traffic will explode like a majestic firework made out of money – all your business problems will be solved. And after all that brainwashing, it might even say so in your own messy handwriting, printed in your book of marketing goals for 2014 – “Improve website traffic”.

When it comes to most things in life, I’ll take quality over quantity any day. That includes business prospects.

For most coaches, consultants and small businesses today, the website should be a pillar in their marketing strategy and a primary sales channel.

In the day and age of inbound marketing – creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product – heavy web traffic that includes a high number of unique visitors to your website might look good, but if those visits aren’t from quality leads – people who might actually buy what you’re selling – it’s nothing more than traffic for traffic’s sake.

To get quality leads, you have to know exactly who your ideal client is. By developing buyer personas for ideal clients, you can better attract quality leads. 

You don’t want more traffic. Scratch it out.

1. You want better-targeted traffic, not more traffic.
2. Sometimes, earning better quality traffic (and more money) means reducing the amount of incoming traffic by being exclusive to your market.
3. To capture that targeted traffic, you need to know who that market is. That means building personas – and then building a brand around them.
4. There are other, better success metrics to focus on: Leads, sales, cost per lead, return purchases, sentiment analysis and so on. Don’t get distracted by traffic’s big shiny disco ball.

You don’t want more traffic. In fact, sometimes you might want less.

You can wind up with a lot of nice-looking numbers and spend countless hours of admin time trying to vet leads.

Traffic on its own is worthless.

It’s the things traffic is supposed to do for you that make it valuable: leads, sales, brand advocates.

These are what you actually want more of. 

The fallacy here is that more traffic will definitely lead to more of those things.

You get more of those things when you increase your targeted traffic.

If I were to ask you your value proposition – the thing that makes you different from everyone else and the reason people should choose you over a competitor, what might you say?

• “We offer the very best in customer service.”
• “We offer a superior quality than our competitors.”
• “We get to know our customers’ business.”

Blah, blah, blah.

These tired messages have been rehashed so many times that they are meaningless to readers. They’ve got no personality, no proof, nothing “sticky”.

They’re so ubiquitous they might as well be placeholder copy in website templates.

"What is Lorem Ipsum?"

It’s like eating cardboard – dry, tasteless, unpalatable. That’s not to say your USP isn’t relevant, or your claims aren’t true. It’s just that you have to present them in a more compelling and believable way.

Before resorting to these boring platitudes, ask:

“WHY?”

• Why are you their best option?
• Why does your business do what it does?
• Why are you different from your competitors?

“HOW?”

• How does your claim to be customer-focused actually play out in real life?
• What special processes do you use to assure quality or service?
• How will what you’re telling them actually change their experience positively?
• How is your business set up to serve your customers better?
• How do you put your money where your mouth is?

Your copy should present you in such a way that it’s blindingly apparent what your value proposition is, even without bashing the reader over the head with a run-of-the-mill statement like “We are the best in the business.”

Give them something to grab on to.

Your USP should be implicit in every other bit of copy you have.

To be clear: This is not about dancing around your USP with a bunch of flowery text. It’s about cutting the fluff and getting to the core with demonstrable proof.

Instead of saying “customers are the heart of our business”, share the details that irrefutably prove that claim. Your tone, voice and personality should all show customers that they’re the centre of your attention.

Instead of saying “we have high-quality products”, you ought to describe the differentiating factors that obliterate any doubt in the customer’s mind.

If you want to make more compelling claims, ask the questions your customers are going to ask – and don’t settle for lazy, tired clichés.

Commanding appropriate fees speaks to the value placed on your work. But in order for others to value your work, the process starts with you. It begins by establishing credibility and trust prior to ever placing anything on the market.

By building credibility first you are then able to sell value.

Frequently, it is the lack of self-confidence that is called into question.

• Review past accomplishments and list them. If you are active on social media, review the nice comments received. What is the common thread for all of these?
• Focus on the commonality to build talking points for your clientele. Marketing pieces may be created around these as well. This becomes your grassroots branding program at its best.

Setting a fee for services also requires research. You will need to decide if you wish to be at the top of the scale, midway, or at the bottom.

There is an emotional tie in all of this.

Imagine yourself at a department store first drooling over the expensive designer section and then timidly walking over to the reduced pricing section.

Where you would like your services to appear – designer or reduced?

The way in which to build credibility, that produces referrals and testimonials, is to charge a fee that is fair to all (including yourself) and deliver on and possibly beyond the expectations of your clientele.

As long as you produce highly credible information, outstanding customer care, and exceed expectations, you will produce a clientele that sees value in your work.

The best news is you will have developed a returning and referring clientele that pays, stays and refers.

When it comes to boosting your online business, choosing the right combination of digital marketing tactics spells the difference between success and failure.

There are many options from which you can choose, and you only have so many resources you can dedicate to this marketing effort.

You can get a custom website designed for your business, hire SEO services to increase your presence, or utilise social media platforms to reach a bigger audience.

Whatever your choice, content marketing is king, so you must create valuable content on a consistent basis if you want to succeed.

Using copywriting skills for your content is another way to ensure that your business is achieving the results you want.

To get started with the process, it’s helpful to know exactly what copywriting is and why it’s important.

Today, we’ll share our top 10 copywriting tips to get your content efforts up to scratch.

Content is the Key to Connective Marketing.

Your content should first and foremost be useful to your audience. It should entertain, inform, and intrigue, helping to build a real connection.

Remember that the work doesn’t end when you hit the “post” button, it only just begins.

1. The point of your content should be to start a conversation.
2. To get more calls,
3. to increase website traffic,
4. to bring people in the door so they can face-to-face with you or your employees.

It’s all relationship-building. It should also be consistent – there are so many competing factors for our attention, and our attention spans are even shorter than they used to be.

One of the worst things you can do as a coach consultant or small business owner is “radio silence”, even just for a few days. 

So, what happens when you know you need to create some content, but you sit there, racking your brain, striving to come up with something you haven’t thought of before while staring at a blank screen? 

Writer’s block can hit us all if we let it…but I have good news – there are ways to avoid this entirely! 

End the paralysis!

If you follow this advice, you’ll never again panic when you have to create a video, write an article, blog post, or web page.

Here's How to Beat Writer’s Block Before it Even Begins

Storytelling marketing is using narrative to communicate a message to an audience.

The message should make the viewer feel something that drives them to take action.

It is considered an art form requiring creativity, insight, practice and skill. It is not an overnight practice or a simple tactic to use in your marketing strategy.

It’s an ongoing process that develops your brand and makes you stick out from the crowd by connecting your audience to your brand on a deeper level.

But first, why is storytelling important?

Think about an intriguing author, someone who writes stories that captivate you all the time. They’ve mastered storytelling to get you hooked. This is what you want to aim for in your storytelling marketing; the same hooking reaction with your audience.

Build your brand through storytelling marketing.

But first, why is storytelling important?

Connecting with other people is one of the highest forms of human beings’ communication. And good storytelling is the key to it. If you’re telling a story and another person is engaged in it, you two are in sync with each other. Storytelling is the trigger of communication, and that’s why it’s so powerful.

Storytelling evokes a certain psychological response from people, driving them to engage with your brand.

This engagement is the key to successful marketing on social media.

In this podcast, we will explain how to grow your business’s brand by using storytelling marketing on each of the popular platforms.

Ways To Really Engage Your Brand’s Followers On Social Media

At the end of the day, your REAL goal as a coach, consultant or small business owner, is to help your clients.

You want to spend as much time as possible changing lives and solving people’s problems.

You don’t want to waste countless hours each week trying to navigate the complex world of online marketing…

And you certainly don’t want to spend another minute on the phone having to beg people to hire your services.

Fortunately, you don’t have to.

Truly Engaging Your Social Media Followers

Many business owners find our new world of social media marketing and brand building to be completely confusing.

After all, their success in these mediums depends on knowing who is following them, what those people are interested in reading about, and then delivering those things on a regular basis.

Marketing via social media is as much about showing your audience the human side of your brand as it is about espousing the quality and benefits of your product or service.

And while the latter is very important and is often done well by coaches, consultants and business owners, showing the human side of the brand is usually more of a challenge.

1. So why is true engagement on social media important to a brand’s success?
2. Why is it important to a brand’s reputation?
3. How can you master engagement on social media?

Here are a few tips for those who find themselves spinning their wheels when it comes to this new-fangled social media thing.