Advertising costs and social media changes add to the confusion, so many small businesses struggle to get noticed.
But advertising isn’t the best way to generate leads anymore.
Watch our conversation on YouTube then subscribe for more great content!Shelley and Toby get together for a tactical meeting of the minds to discuss the most effective and efficient content marketing strategies for encore entrepreneurs.
What is content marketing? That’s when you develop and publish high-quality content to give value to your target audience, to speak to their challenges and their needs, to position your business as the solution, and to engage your audience through creative storytelling
Quote from the Livestream
Content marketing is a substantiation of how we approach not only our business but how we treat the content that is produced because of that business.
When you’re starting a business, you want people to know that you exist.
We feel the best kind of marketing to start your business is content marketing.
As you look at your business and review what you can do to produce revenue, decide where you’re going to invest your time that has the most return.
Marketing is one of the most valuable investments you can make in your business.
There’s a trade-off in marketing. You can spend a lot of time or a lot of money doing it.
For example, sometimes it’s easier for me to hire someone from Fiverr to do graphics work. I may have the skills to do it, but there are other things that I need to do.
With learning new marketing products, I will invest the time rather than having somebody else do it because those products make our job easier.
Marketing is a significant part of the business that you want to grow.
How do we get visibility and credibility?
We start with an intentional content marketing plan.
You know who you’re talking to and you know your message.
That message should resonate with the people you intend to reach out to.
We want to reach out to encore entrepreneurs. They may know how to run a business, but maybe this is their first time running a business out of their home or running a business that is mostly online.
What they need to know is who they’re talking to and what their message is and how they can intentionally infuse their content marketing with that message.
Spreading your message on social media intentionally means you choose the site where your target audience is most likely to be present.
We focus mostly on YouTube and LinkedIn.
Use video so people see your face and your body language. They hear your voice; they see the pictures, graphics, and information that you put up on the screen, and it helps them to get to know you and your message more thoroughly.
I love looking at the camera because I always feel like I’m connecting with my audience.
Once you produce a video, you have the content necessary to produce a podcast, a blog post, a newsletter, and a book. We’ve done that.
It gives us the ability to produce a lot of content on a lot of different social media platforms with just one starting element.
Some people don’t watch videos. They listen to podcasts because they like to multitask. When you’re speaking your message into somebody’s ears, it’s an intimate bonding experience.
When you are a guest on other people’s podcasts, you gain additional visibility and credibility.
Blogging and newsletters are the best methods to reach readers.
People opt-in for your newsletter. That means they’re a warm audience. They want to hear from you, so email them at least once a week to encourage a relationship to grow.
You can publish a book, and that gives you authority in your industry. It is a business card with thump. It’s impressive to people that you have enough knowledge about a topic that you wrote a book on it.
Ads are very expensive.
I was in a workshop this week and they were talking about how to create Facebook and Instagram ads. It requires experimentation to see what ad is going to work and what demographic will respond.
They suggested spending $10 a day on these ads to see what works.
That seems like a lot of money to me for an experiment.
For them, it’s not expensive. Although they spend a lot of money on ads, they’re not experimenting anymore. They’ve gotten to a place where they know what works. Every ad they send out brings in more customers. That is an excellent return and a good reason to do paid advertising.
Start off organically by publishing content and social media posts.
Find the elements that work best by making tweaks and doing A/B testing to see what gets the best response on your weekly content and posts.
When you know what content works best, who your most responsive audience is, and you have products or services that sell well, then you can start paid ads.
Facebook has made a lot of changes in the past year, especially with privacy concerns and tracking on iOS with Apple iPhones.
There is a lot of noise and competition in advertising on social media.
There are a lot of ads out there and people use ad blockers because they don’t want to see ads, so they may never see your ad.
But ad blockers won’t keep them from seeing your content.
Either we have to spend time building content and distributing it, or we have to give Facebook money to try for those same results.
Our experience with paid ads is we’re not getting profitable results.
The best way to generate leads is through a good content marketing strategy that will increase brand awareness and help you develop a pipeline of qualified leads.
Content marketing helps you stay consistently top-of-mind while saving time and money.
We get leads through our content marketing.
We hear from people who see our videos; they see us doing this work; they hear what we’re talking about, and they say, I want to do that too.
They get in touch with us because we provide our contact information with each piece of content.
Content marketing is the best way to generate leads.
For you to be successful in sales, your marketing efforts should result in leads that become progressively more qualified.
The first thing to do after seeing that we offer what you need is to schedule a call by going to consulting.agkmedia.studio. At the end of that call, we will know if we are right for each other.
We’ve got a process that we lead people through to help them make up their minds. That includes a written proposal that outlines how we can work together to achieve your goals.
You need some kind of marketing pipeline to turn leads into prospects and then into customers.
The further you get them down the pipeline, the more likely it is they’re going to do business with you.
Content marketing helps lead your audience through the pipeline.
Content marketing is when you develop and publish high-quality content to give value to your target audience, speak to their challenges and needs, position your business as the solution, and engage your audience through creative storytelling.
You’re engaging people with a livestream, and the resulting video, and you’re doing it almost face-to-face.
Compare that to just 20 years ago, when establishing the beginning of a relationship with your customer meant printing a newspaper ad in the back of the classifieds.
You were fortunate if you could afford a full-page four-color ad.
A magazine ad was even better and much more expensive.
Perhaps the customer saw the seller as they appeared in a television ad.
But you were far removed and surreal.
With current technology and content marketing, you’re seeing us as we are.
We know what we’re talking about and you can see that for yourself.
I can’t imagine any time in my 45-year career that advertising to our prospective customers could be more in line with what I love doing, and it produces the results that I expect out of it.
We do not expect content marketing to provide immediate leads and customers.
However, we have had clients who remarked after their first show that suddenly they were coming across people saying; I didn’t know that’s what you did. I need to talk to you about that.
Those people already knew our client, but now they know more about what they do and that they provide a service they can use.
Although that can happen quickly with people you already know, it takes time to build rapport with customers you don’t know yet.
Content marketing takes consistency and months or years to grow trust.
You must have a website up for at least six months with the same type of content before Google indexes it and serves your content as an answer to people’s queries.
Search engines look all over online to see who you are and if you are talking about the same things in all the places where you show up. That is how they determine if you are running a legitimate business worthy of trust.
If the search engines trust you, then it is likely that your prospective customers will learn to trust you with the help of the search engines.
It takes time to position your business as an industry leader.
Put out content in various formats, such as videos, podcasts, blogs, and social media posts. When they all match up, search engines and your customers see and respond to that with clarity and trust.
You can show up on many sites.
We’re on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. People can find us there and we say the same things and share the same content on all of those sites. So they know we are a legitimate business and this is what we do.
It takes at least 16 to 20 touchpoints with somebody before they’re going to reach out to you.
Constant repetition of your content that explains what it is you do, how you do it, how you solve those problems, and who you can help is necessary for people to find you.
A series of touchpoints will help them feel comfortable and interested enough to reach out to you.
Searching for Topics On Google
When you search for topics, you’ll see the results will include YouTube videos.
Google and YouTube both realize if you’re going through a learning process on any topic, it’s easier for most people to learn through videos.
You can watch our videos, and it’s guaranteed that you’re going to learn something.
That’s superb for gaining credibility and trust with your prospective customers.
To have credibility, people need to believe that you can solve their problems.
The next step is trust. People will not do business with you until they trust you are going to do legitimate, ethical business with them.
Talk to any content creator and they will tell you their biggest challenge is consistency. That means staying consistently on message, and getting content out every week, or every day.
Sometimes, they run out of things to talk about. They run out of time to get things done. They have to learn new software or work on new products, so it takes time away from being consistent.
How can you be more consistent?
I suggest employing the Content Consistency Framework and Schedule.
What does content consistency do for you?
When you are consistently creating content, every week you will gain focus.
You will gain clarity and you will develop stronger offers over time because you are practicing and perfecting your presentations.
You’re getting feedback from your audience so that you can make your content better.
You can reach more people through consistency. People who didn’t see you three months ago might see you today because you were consistent. They wouldn’t have found you if you’d stopped producing content.
Momentum will lead to opportunities.
Jen and I have been livecasting together for 11 months on the Women Conquer Business show.
What opportunities have come from that?
Nothing in the beginning. It took a while for people to see us, to get used to what we talk about, and to learn about who we are. Then they started reaching out.
Momentum leads to those opportunities.
You keep putting out more and more content. More and more people see it. Build up that momentum so they recognize you. You are top of mind when they need what you offer.
Someone may bring you an opportunity to be a part of something amazing because you’re livecasting every week. They know you’re serious and committed.
Opportunities will pop up, and you build trust by continuously showing up with your aligned message.
Every week you’re sharing a message that aligns with your audience’s needs and concerns. They trust you because you show up every week.
A good way to stay consistent with all of your content is to have deadlines.
We send our newsletter every Tuesday. That means on Monday we need to have our shows titled and scheduled.
That is the schedule for being consistent. Each task has a deadline, and every show is scheduled to go live at the same time every week.
People find your content when searching for information on the topic.
Know what your customers need, and what they might type into Google. Then take that information and create a presentation.
Giving your audience live visual information will increase engagement. That’s why we live stream every week.
If you want to talk to us, if you have questions, show up live, ask your questions in the chat, and we will answer them.
Transparency builds trust
We’re live and real. We are paying attention to you, and we are honest and open about what’s going on in our lives.
Sometimes stuff happens when you’re livestreaming, and you’ve got to roll with it. The doorbell or the phone rings. You forget what you were saying. You push the wrong button.
Viewers enjoy the fact that you are live and imperfect – just like them!
This is the framework you need to stay organized and consistent with your content marketing.
It shapes your thought leadership. You can map out several pieces of content for the next several months by talking through a theme. That will shape your thought leadership and people will know your ideas and how you come at things differently.
It builds credibility and trust when you have a content marketing plan in place.
It guides you to show up and stay on message.
When you know your plan and your framework, it encourages action.
Insert calls-to-action in every piece of content along with your contact information.
It’s free to have a video chat with us by scheduling a time at consulting.agkmedia.studio.
We offer free downloads, including tools, infographics, and courses that you can download and use for free.
That encourages our audience members to take action and you can do the same thing.
Ultimately, you want to send them to your website where they can access everything you offer.
Blogging
Blogging can help you publish information that search engines are most likely to find, index, and serve to users. It’s full of your keywords and your topics, and you become known for that topic.
Companies with blogs average 67% more leads than companies without a blog.
Content marketing strategy is not just meant for solopreneurs or encore entrepreneurs. Big corporations use these strategies as well.
They’re doing it because they see the value in it and you can use content marketing to stay competitive with those bigger companies.
Our content marketing framework is all about having a consistent strategy for producing and distributing content, and much of the distribution is automatic.
Repurposing content by using the audio for a podcast and the text for blogs and newsletters saves time and effort.
We’re creating all the formats on many social media sites. The more formats and sites we use, the more likely it is our ideal client will discover us.
Our content marketing framework includes repetition.
We do a live stream at least once a week.
We enhance those touch points with additional repurposing of content.
Our content marketing schedule goes with the framework.
We establish our minimums to produce all our content marketing each week.
We have them broken down into weekly tasks, which I put on the calendar.
Then there are campaigns such as building a course, taking part in a summit, or running a panel like we did this year in January.
These things take extra planning because more people are involved.
A campaign needs to be broken down into tasks that go on the calendar as well.
If you go on vacation, you might need to do some batching. That means you record your show in advance and then schedule it to come out at your regular time so you’re consistent with your output.
Stand out online as an authentic expert, connect with your target audience and quickly create engaging content every week when you get my How to Create, Publish, and Distribute Content Consistently Course.
Beginners and encore entrepreneurs can learn easily the steps to use the Content Consistency Framework and Schedule for Weekly Content Marketing.
Succeed as an entrepreneur with a simple, effective content marketing framework for your business.
SOMETHING SPECIAL IS COMING!
Get on my email list for all the information about a super special Thanksgiving/Black Friday Event at news.agkmedia.studio
Are you struggling to create and convert leads? Are you overwhelmed when you think about how you can stand out in the online market?
This show is for you, the encore entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants, thought leaders, and speakers – how do you gain visibility and credibility online so your ideal clients hear your message and reach out to connect with you? Expert livestreamers, Shelley Carney and Toby Younis of AGK Media Studio provide tips, tools, and strategies for creative, fun, and effective content marketing through weekly livestreaming, podcasting and blogging.
Visit with us live every Thursday to ask questions and solve problems related to creating consistent quality content to promote your brand and business.
Get our fabulous new short course and learn How to Create, Publish and Distribute Content Consistently. Go to http://course.agkmedia.studio and use the coupon code AGKSAVER before November 18, 2022 to get it as our gift to you!
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