James here. Welcome to the podcast business success by design. We have been off the air for a little while. stuff was going on but I am like delighted delighted to get by now listen to these podcasts, we're going to talk about content marketing, and more specifically, education based marketing. It's something that you all should be doing. And if you're not doing it, you really need to get on board and start doing this stuff. Right? It is by far the best, fastest way for you to get your expertise in front of your potential client, your ideal clients, your prospects, and show them what you got mentioned just how much you know what you can do. And so on.

So, I thought for this podcast, what it would do a little bit different is maybe do a little bit of training right and take you through what we see is really the seven biggest sins that people make when they're doing content marketing. 

So here's the first thing like number one. Number one, trying to appeal to everyone, right?

Does not work. What tends to happen is this when you're looking at marketing, and you're putting it out there the question you have to ask yourself is Who is it that this is going to have an effect on people you look at it and go, Oh my God, you're talking about me? Right? If it's too broad, too wishy washy. No one name no one is going to look at this and go, Holy crap. This individual knows who I am. 

So what ends up happening is you have this like umbrella. So it's wide enough to cover everybody, but it isn't attractive enough for anyone to be wondering right? So here's what you want to do. You really have to think about it imagine in your marketing that you are talking to one person, right so we always go through one person, one problem or the power of one so what I really want you do from now on is when you're getting putting your marketing together, When you do it is think about the one specific person the one specific problem and the people who have that specific problem.

And the people who are your specific audience, Feeling that you are the expert, right? They have an expert on this stuff and it's just for me. You're going to get the attention. You're going to captivate you definitely want and what we're going to build this what we call rabbit attention, and you're going to be able to influence them in that way. So this is one of these things where you're gonna resist, right, you're gonna be thinking about well, if I get too specific, we're gonna miss an opportunity. Or, you know, whatever guy's telling it. The more specific you can get on the person and the problem in your marketing, the better your marketing is going to be, and the more you're going to get in terms of bang for your buck. So, sin number one trying to appeal to everybody he's got to stop it.

Number two, not understanding of prospects or buttons right. It's not it's really more understanding your your your prospects or once it's understanding your prospects real hot buttons, right. So what is understanding what really keeps your prospects up at night? Right we make we tend to make the mistake guys of marketing by gut feel, right in BGF.

You write about the things you think the prospect cares about. But what we do know is that typically, the thing that we think the prospect is thinking about isn't the thing the prospect is thinking about. An example would be an actually happened in real life is a coach a little while ago was running a workshop and really getting ready to promote it had tried to promote it really hadn't had much luck, and then sent me a piece to say look, James, can you take a look at this you know, that nothing's going to happen instantly. Within about a nanosecond overnight, yeah, I know what's wrong. And what was wrong was the target market for CEOs. But the workshop was all about work life balance. Now I'm not saying that work. Life Balance isn't something that CEOs think about. But I can tell you, it's not what's keeping them up at night.

So we need to make sure, right, we need to make sure that the thing that we're writing about guys is actually what's going on. And honestly the best way for you to find out is pick up the phone, pick up the small talk to past clients, talk to people that you know, have some of the questions, right people who are in your market, the people that you might want to be dealing with, right because you have to get in their head. You've got to get inside their head you need to be able to have a cold, deep empathy. If you can imagine yourself walking in their shoes, and you're never going to be able to create marketing that really, really taught. So identify the right buttons make the phone calls, figure out ask the question, what are the top one, two or three things that are keeping you up at night?.

Number three, only going for the sale. I can't tell you how many times we see marketing pieces that are designed to educate. But the call to action is like boom, you'll buy my thing or, you know, have a phone call. There's nothing inherently wrong with a call to action that says hey, book a call. If the person reading your content is someone that you've had some dealings with in the past or the new you or you've been marketing to them for a while, but if you did education based marketing to a cold list, a cold audience, that phone call is going to be something you just don't want to do. We need to end what we want to do is engineer the next step. Right?

You want to make sure that whenever they get that thing, that you're already telling them what the next thing is that you need them to do. And it might be Hey, we'll watch this video, we'll go on this webinar or whatever it might be, but you have to think about what it is that you're wanting to do. Right. So you'll often create a moneymaker will create something that gets them an answer to a problem doesn't answer all the problems is not designed to answer all the problems, right? There's going to answer a problem and when they get that problem we're gonna give them another thing to answer the next problem, and so on and so forth. Right. So we want to take this two step marketing approach, where we start to build the trust and confidence.

Deadly Sin number four - NOT segmenting your audience!, You must segment your audience and know who your audiences and know who's taking really comes into its own because you're going to design that next step based on who your audience is. All right. So you want to you're gonna have a mix of what we call Hard and Soft offer no harm, no foul, it's certainly gonna be Hey, come to call and we do all the time, right? We do it right. In the webinar, we're saying, Hey, here's the offer. You could call we're going to spend you know 30 minutes together with these four things. But, but typically people come in on the webinar have enough confidence in you to want to go and Spain, you know, 45-50 minutes, maybe even longer. But a cold audiences want to do that, right?

They're looking at everything as risk and reward. How much risk Am I taking and what sort of word forgetting and little risk is definitely going to be Hey, I give give me my name and my email, and I get a thing. High risk is a good call. Because in their mind guys, all they're thinking about this is a sales call.

So think about two two step marketing. Think about who the audiences think about hard and soft offers. Right, depending on who is taking the thing in the first place. Alright, so that's the number four. Unintentionally suppressing response What the hell's that? Look, you're putting good stuff out there. You're putting a lot of work in your magnets. You're doing a lot of work in your pages and all this kind of good stuff. And then what you do is you create a way for me to interact. That actually puts me off wanting to interact. One of the simplest things is probably asking for a phone number, right? So like name, email, phone number, whatever. I want to be very clear about those guys. There's going to be times where you want to do this, especially for getting close to the bottom of the funnel and the top of the funnel, we don't give a crap phone number, right? I totally get that and what is the mood for them further down your funnel, then yeah, we may want to get a phone number we may want to ask them information about their business, how big it is what the revenue streams are, did other employees right? We may want to do that at some point. What you have to be very careful about is suppressing that response too early in your process. Now, again, other people don't say now you're going to defer at the beginning. You don't want people coming to your last that may not be suitable, that's fine. We're always going to create steps or gatekeepers in the process to start weeding people out. You're going to do that just as a matter of course, but don't don't stop people getting in unintentionally. So take a look at what are you asking for is easy, is an easy process to just eliminate email. You will have to meet multiple clicks to get to the point for giving the information. So we want to make this as easy as humanly possible for people to come in right and make it really safe for them to meet that response. Right to respond back to us.

Deadly sin number five, too much or too little content? So this is a little bit subjective. Not gonna lie. But we have to watch that we don't give people too much stuff. And then hope they've got enough time to digest it. Because the reality is most people aren't doing anything that you don't want your shit. For the most part, best intentions. Right is that they're gonna get your thing and they're going to keep it there. Right? And then we're not going to look at it. So if you give something it's like 55 pages, the chances are, you're gonna look at that, right? You got to understand that our job is to understand what people need and they just give them enough to satisfy that need. No more, no less. Right? Because we see like, tell them what they need to know.

But not everything that you need to get it. If you're a coach a space if you're a coach, right? Is your your propensity is to try and give people as much help as much information as we possibly can. But in reality, we're not a disservice because it's just too much effort to do anything. We did. Go and watch the video so we want to make sure you want to look out engage for yourself, is this we more than the need at this point? Or have I given them not enough for them to actually be able to do anything? Take that next year? I guess guys only you can really ask you that can answer that question. You're going to know you're gonna know by looking at your stuff. Am I giving away too much or is it too little?

One of the things that you can do, right, and I've seen this done before, as if it's something that as Kenda takes up as actually the beginning. Ask the question if you're already at a certain stage, you can jump past the next 5-10 pages and go to page you know go to page nine, go to page 12. You don't need to read all the stuff that we have in here just jumping into a page. And, you know, that allows people then to realize that hey, I don't need to read everything to get the result. So if it is a fairly lengthy document, break up and they ask you for the equation, if you already know this as this go here, if you know that not do it, right. Don't make them read the whole damn thing if they don't have them. So that's number five.

Number six is not having a clear next step. Guys, I hate to see it.

The people you're putting stuff out to have the foggiest idea but what you want them to do next unless you tell them right we want to make it clear. So you know we see this so much where an actor right or below and I've seen something and I like and I go and I download it and I get an email saying here's your thing. And that's it. Like there's nothing happens. So, you need to give people information. You got to tell them what you want them to do and never assume the prospect knows what you want them to do. So one of the big things that we've started doing that has been working incredibly well for us and stairs on our webinars now in our webinar, the offer at the end of any of our webinars, we will never sell anything or offers always Hey, if you like this, you want to do a deeper dive. You can call we'll get on the phone and we'll work through these four things. Right.

That's what we offer at the end of the webinar. We hope we do this when you register for the webinar. The Thank You page is a video on my calendar. And on the videos in here listen, greet your registered for the webinar is amazing. I'm looking forward to seeing you there. But listen, then the webinar we're going to offer you the chance to have a call. There's only going to be five slots. You can actually book a call right now. You don't have to wait for the webinar. You can book a call right now. Watch the webinar that no you've already got one of those slots. And what we find is we find that those five slots will typically get booked before the webinars even showing it since see.

That's my point about having that next clear step. Tell them what you want them to write down what you want them to do. It's It's amazing. I mean if you can believe that your prospect already knew we should.

Now number seven. Last one, guys. Number seven is follow up failure, right. Again, you do all this work, you build your lead magnet you do all the stuff someone comes in gets your thing. And then crickets. Listen, this got your thing and that's it. You're not fooling so we want to make sure it restarted and a lot of this through direct message was restarted.

Again, working really really well. We want to make sure that anyone who takes an action on our staff, we have a system to follow up what I would advise you to do is actually map out and build out your follow up system before you do anything. Right. You see again, you see this other thing people just hey, I'm going to thing. I'm going to start talking groups or emailing and the build up a way of following up. Suddenly the friends have got you know, 125 leads of people who just got the thing, but they're fine to try and figure it out before we know these people are sitting in limbo, right and there's this little thing. It's called the law of diminishing intent, the law of diminishing intent.

Basically what that means is, the longer you leave it to follow the law, the lesson claim no one is going to care. So when we do anything we don't we're fulfilling attention right or first attempts, you're gonna get nothing and we did what we're going to we're going to get that video we're going to watch it. But if we don't do anything on that time, the chances of us coming back to it to take that action gets less and less and less and less. Until eventually we forget who we got it. Right. How many of you on this map so the map, forgot your wallet. So we want to make sure that the follow up system is already in place before we do anything in the marketplace. Because the minute someone takes our thing within a short period of time on top of what 24 hours. You've already got a follow up saying hey, you've got the thing.

That's awesome. Have you watched it yet? Have you read it yet? Is there anything else that you need, by the way for one of the people to get the call? Hey, that thing you just downloaded by the way there's actually a training that goes along with that. If you want to get hold of it just ping me back and let me know and I'll send the link and it will watch the channel. We have to have the follow up on place. So there you go, guys, that's your seven deadly sins, right several of them. Seven, Thrall trying to be everything to everyone and not understanding your prospects.

The real hot buttons will be going after the sale. Right Stop it. You're going on a date. We're trying to determine it based on the first day, right? We're going to nudge them a little bit. We're gonna give them some love some tension. Before we do any of that, unintentionally suppressing that response. Make sure you're making it easy for them to give you the information don't make it hard. Sure you can make it harder later on in the process and that's okay. That's okay. given too much or too little content, I got to make that judgment. Right. You have to make that judgment. Remember, give them what they need. The other thing that you know know having a clear next step.

Gotta have a clear next step guys. Don't assume they're gonna know what to do next. You've got to tell them, you got it, tell me what to do, and then have a system for fall. Don't launch anything into the market. Until you have a system for falling. Alright, well now we can go see if animals apply to you to get what you're doing. And if they are good at fixing them. Go and get them fixed. So how does one says it right some deadly sins of education based marketing. Hey, listen, we've all done some of them. We've all done some of yours truly included. Which is why I thought we put it together. Right just to
kind of get you thinking. So guys, listen. First one back in a while. I'm glad to be back, but if you need anything, Gia Lawson at the Packers llc.com You can also go and ask to join our private Facebook group. business success by design Fitness on Facebook. Come and join us. Right we do trainings every single week.

This is not a peer driven Facebook group. Right?  We're not going to you guys to drive this..I am the driver. I am in there every single day. And every week we do trainings on one thing we heard about their business and their clients. So that Alright guys, thanks again for tuning in. Hopefully found this useful. Feel free to leave comments and I will talk to you very very soon. Alright guys, take care