The picture above is my standard social media profile picture. It’s a self portrait that I shot in August 2010. Why have I been using the same profile picture for over ten years? An excellent question, and one I have been asking myself recently.

I’m not a particularly vain person, so I don’t think it’s the obvious – signs of aging from the last decade. The conclusion I’ve come to is that is has to do with stagnation. I really don’t feel like I have made much creative progress over the last several years.

Back in 2010, I was laid-off from one position and had a brief window where I produced a lot of creative work before finding a new day job. While financially problematic, this time was the most creatively rewarding of my career. Since that time, I have continued to work in a creative field, but there is just something different about creative work done for yourself.

Over the next several years, my intention is to work my way back to a place of creative satisfaction, and maybe even independence from the dreaded day job. Through the posts on this site, I will take you along on my journey.

I will cover a variety of topics related to mid-life change, including: creativity, writing, building an audience, health, finances, etc.

I will also cover topics that specifically interest me, such as photography, alternative social media platforms, and open source software adoption.

If you find any of these topics to your liking, I would love it if you would follow along. If I’m lucky, it won’t be too long before I’ve overcome stagnation and I’m ready to shoot a brand new profile picture.

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Before you go spending a lot of money driving people to your website, or through the doors of your bricks and mortar business, you had better be sure that they will have an outstanding experience once they arrive.

This is not one of those situations where you can fake it until you make it. If your customer service is not locked down, the rest of your marketing is doomed to fail.

There’s an old saying (sometimes attributed to Abraham Lincoln) …

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

A great customer experience is your very sharp axe, and that’s why I want you to think of customer service as a marketing tool.

Customers will overlook a lot of problems if they receive great customer service, but no matter how great your product, poor customer service will doom your business.

Five steps to using customer service as a marketing tool

Step 1: Customer Experience Audit

Before you can get to where you’re going, you have to know where you are. So start your journey to an improved customer experience by evaluating how your business is doing right now.

If you are mostly internet based, you can just set up a gmail account and submit a lead. If you’re customers come in through phone calls or in person, you will probably need to recruit a friend to mystery shop. If you receive customer leads through multiple channels, be sure to mystery shop all of them. This will help you identify breakdowns in each of the channels and give you a better picture of where you stand.

Step 2: Make a plan

“Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.”
– Pablo Picasso

Next, you will want to evaluate the results of your mystery shops and identify the weaknesses and the strengths of your current system. Then put together a plan to build on your strengths and improve on your weaknesses.

Did you find that some employees are better at handling some tasks and others are better at other tasks? Did anyone stand out as a rockstar?

Take every piece of data that you were able to collect, analyse it, and determine if it is useful.

Finally, assemble your thoughts into a document, a memo, a manifesto, a powerpoint, or any other format that will help you communicate your vision.

As you fill out your plan, don’t forget to add specific details, not just broad concepts. For example, the concept, “we will reply to every customer inquiry,” is much less useful than this statement: “We will reply to every customer inquiry with thoroughly researched and complete answers to all customer questions, and we will do so in fifteen minutes or less.”

Step 3: Invest in training

“You are your greatest asset. Put your time, effort and money into training, grooming, and encouraging your greatest asset.”
– Tom Hopkins

That word invest doesn’t have to mean a cash outlay. If you, or one of the rockstars on your team, have the ability to train the other members of the team, by all means tackle your training in-house. You and your rockstar employees will have a much better handle on the unique demands of your customers than any trainer from the outside.

But if this is your plan, You will still need to invest the time and attention, as well as the training materials, necessary to have a successful training campaign.

If you need a lot of help, and you don’t think your customer experience issues can be effectively handled in-house, it is time to call in an expert, or at least seek out some professional advice. Obviously, professional trainers or consultants won’t be cheap, but you have to ask yourself, “how much money am I wasting marketing to customers who contact my business and are turned away by sub-standard customer experience?”

Step 4: Insist on consistency

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
– Will Durant

Have you ever eaten at Chick-fil-a? Did you notice how the person taking your order replied when you said, “Thank you”? I’ll bet they replied, “My pleasure”. They always reply, “My pleasure”. Every. Single. Time. That consistency comes from training and a focus on customer experience.

Now, I’m not necessarily saying that your team should behave like a bunch of automatons when dealing with your customers, but I am saying that there should be a set of expectations they are expected to meet with every customer. Every. Single. Time.

Every internet lead should flow through the same series of steps. A phone lead would follow a slightly different process. And a walk-in would have a different process again. But every customer interaction should be held to a very high standard, and should yield some expected results – customer name, contact info, product/service they are interested in, follow-up expectations, etc.

Step 5: Track your progress

“What gets measured gets improved.”
– Peter Drucker

After implementing your plan, it may take some time to really see visible progress, in terms of sales and positive reviews. It will be helpful to set up some milestones to ensure that your business is on the right track. Perhaps break your training into a series of modules and track your employees’ progress through the modules. Also, plan out a series of mystery shops at regular intervals and keep score – not necessarily to single out individuals, but to keep track of overall progress. Customer Experience is a team effort and you will succeed or fail as a team.

The payoff

As your team improves, you will start to see improvement in terms of lead to sale conversions and post sale reviews. This will be followed by improved customer retention and customer referrals. That is the ultimate payoff for your Customer Experience campaign … a steady stream of repeat customers that are more than happy to refer you to their friends.

Have you started using customer service as a marketing tool? If so, what strategies did you use to get there? If not, what’s holding you back.

***

Photo courtesy Todd Quackenbush / Unsplash

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But how can I figure out what these shared experiences are, and when they will occur? How can I add them to my content plan? There is a simple and ubiquitous tool that can help with this. And there is a good chance you already have one nearby, right now…

Using a calendar for content idea generation

One of the biggest obstacles in creating consistent high quality content is idea generation. This will be a major topic on this site for a long time. But today I’m going to address the lowest of the low hanging fruit – the calendar.

Now, I’m not talking about a calendar app for your smartphone. Nor an editorial calendar plugin for your blog. This is old-school, much like the word “nor”. I am talking about a printed calendar, with dates all laid out in monthly blocks. A calendar where you can look forward and look back. And most importantly, where you can see as many national, regional, and religious holidays as possible at a single glance.

What makes a calendar so powerful for content idea generation? It is universal. It’s part of our collective consciousness. Let me illustrate…

Once the days warm up, we all think about summer days and vacations. When the leaves turn, we think about shorter days and hunkering down for winter. Once winter sets in, we think about the holidays and spending time with family. As soon as we get past the holidays, there is a brief period of consideration for the upcoming new year. And then, when you just can’t take any more cold weather, we think about spring flowers and being able to get outside again. And the cycle starts over (I wrote this from a northern hemisphere perspective, but I’m sure you folks south of the equator go through a similar cycle).

So what does this all mean for your content creation? It means that you have a structure in place. A set of constraints you can work within to create timely pieces of content that will resonate with your audience. By simply looking at a calendar, you’ll know what is likely to be on your prospects’ minds when they reach a certain date, or month, or season.

Even if your product or service has nothing to do with the weather outside, or the time of the year, or whatever holiday is coming up next, you can still weave those themes into your content. And thinking about those themes should trigger ideas for your next piece of content.

Let’s look at this calendar concept a little more tactically…

I am writing this article in the middle of February, 2017. So let’s look back at last month (or eleven months into the future) and do some content idea generation for a fictitious small business:

• The first thing I notice about January is that there are few major holidays in January. Here in the US we have Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but that’s about it. Now Dr. King is one of my favorite historical figures, so this would probably be an excellent opportunity to talk about the things he has taught me and how they apply to my business. The key to an article or podcast or video about a significant historical figure is to keep it respectful and “non-salesy”. People will definitely take offense if you try to use their hero’s name to hawk your widget.
• We have one major event that we absolutely can’t pass up – the new year itself. This is a great calendar event to weave into our content. Chances are our product or service makes someone’s life better. The new year gives us an opportunity to point this out. We could write about resolutions, or how we hate resolutions. We could record a video about making life better in 2017. It might be the perfect time for an infographic about planning for a successful “fill in the blank” in 2017.
• This January, we also had a really big event that it might be better to let sail right on past … the inauguration. Politics is almost always a sticky subject, especially if you are writing for a business blog. No matter what you write, it’s virtually guaranteed that half of your customers/prospects will disagree with you – some of them vehemently and vocally. My advice would be to spare yourself the headaches and steer clear of politics on your business website (unless, of course, politics is your business).
• Here in Colorado, and much of the US and Europe, January is a cold and dreary time. This is another theme that we could exploit in our content plan. Maybe provide a list of indoor activities that our product could facilitate. Or write about why this is the perfect time to implement our service because the prospect won’t be distracted by summer fun.
• Finally, there are some great winter time activities that people, at least here in Colorado, absolutely live for. Activities like hockey, skiing, snowboarding, and snowshoeing. This would be a great opportunity to tie our product or service to one of these activities. Even if the widget is completely unrelated, maybe we create this tie through an analogy or a metaphor. Or we could use it as a personal story that will add flavor to an otherwise dry topic. The point is, people will have these activities on their minds. If we can add them into our content, our prospects will feel like we understand them and know where they are coming from.

So, what ideas have we generated for our timely January content?

1. Let’s start with an article about how our widget will help our prospects with a common new-year’s resolution, or maybe a resolution they haven’t considered.
2. Next up is an infographic about how our widget can be set-up and mastered over a month of long, cold winter days.
3. On MLK Day, we’ll release a podcast episode where we discuss the lessons we have learned from studying Martin Luther King Jr. and how those lessons influenced our business strategy.
4. Toward the end of January, we will publish an article comparing our widget to the rewarding nature of snowshoeing up a mountain, enjoying the view, and then running back down the mountain (if you’ve never done this, it’s an absolute blast).

There you have it, four timely content ideas generated from spending a couple of minutes looking at a calendar.

What’s the next step?

Take some time and go through the rest of the year. Generate content ideas for each month and add them to your content calendar. Finally, as each month gets closer, take a little extra time to do some more research. Maybe there are some funny holidays or “this day in history” dates you could add to your content. Did you know that January 20th is Penguin Awareness Day? This might not be the subject of an entire article, but it could be something you work into a social media post. And you will be far safer talking about Penguins than Presidents.

The beauty of working with a calendar to generate content ideas is that it eliminates the curse of the blank page. A connection to a date, or a month, or a season gives you a place to start. And that is usually all that’s needed to get your creative juices flowing.

***

Photo courtesy Gabriel Santiago / Unsplash

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When marketing your business, no matter how great all the rest of your content is, without great merchandising, your business isn’t going anywhere.

Merchandising Content: If you don’t get this right, the rest doesn’t matter.

There are many kinds of content, ranging from the mundane to the epic. If you think of your marketing content as a pyramid, today we are going to talk about the base of that pyramid. The one element that supports all the rest. Today we are going to talk about merchandising.

“But I am in a service business. I don’t have products to merchandise.” Guess what, even if you are selling a service, you are still selling a product. Furthermore, if you are selling a product, you are also selling a service – customer service.

Products and services are not so different as many would have you believe. And either way, you have to get your merchandising right. It’s your foundation, and usually, it’s the last content that a prospect sees before making a buying decision.

So what is merchandising?

The planning and promotion of sales by presenting a product to the right market at the proper time, by carrying out organized, skillful advertising, using attractive displays, etc. – Dictionary.com

I like that definition, but it’s a little broad. For this discussion, we are going to discuss merchandising content:

The images and descriptions that outline the many features and benefits of your product or service. – Me

Alright, let’s break that definition down a little:

Images

Here, we are talking about product images. Simple and clean, but professional in appearance. Easy to understand. This is not the time to get artistic.

If you are in a service business, we may talk about photos of your facility, or of your vehicles. If you are selling yourself (as a consultant, for example), then your “merchandising” photo may be a nice clean headshot.

If you are selling a product, especially a physical product, you will want multiple photos that show your product from every angle. If it opens, open it and take a photo. If you use it in conjunction with another item, show how they attach and how they interact.

The idea is to use your merchandising photos to answer your prospects’ questions before they even realize they have them.

Descriptions

You see that little “s” at the end of the word description? That “s” is not only there because you may have more than one product or service. Chances are, you will need more than one description for each of your products or services.

You may need a 100 character description, and a 100 word description, and a 500 word description. If your product or service is complicated enough, you may even need an entire micro-site. The point is, you need to have total clarity about your product or service. Can you sum it up in a few words? Can you go deep and give a thorough explanation that even a layperson can understand? That is your challenge.

Features and Benefits

Even though this phrase came last in my definition above, it is what you need to think about first. Considering the features and benefits of your product or service will guide you as you make your images and write your descriptions.

How can you illustrate this feature of your product with a photo? How can you describe that benefit of your service in only a few words? If you don’t clearly understand your features and benefits, you are flying blind. You are guessing about what will be important to your prospect.

Features and Benefits – Redux

That last sentence contained a critical phrase – “what will be important to your prospect”. As you are considering your features and benefits, you must remember to always view them as a prospect would. Avoid the mindset of the creator, retailer, or service provider.

Here is a quick example… Say you have developed a SAAS app (Software As A Service application) for project management. As the developer, the first thing that pops into your head is that we developed it using Ruby on Rails (a programing language). Do you think that your prospect will care that we developed it this way? Only if they are a developer as well. Now, what they may care about is what using this specific programming language means to them – greater security, ease of use, lower processor overhead, enhanced interoperability, etc. I have no idea if anything I just typed is accurate (HTML is the limit of my coding ability), but you can see how those features and benefits would seem far more important to the prospect than the name of the programming language.

Remember, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes and create your merchandising content from that perspective.

But why is merchandising content so critical?

Merchandising content is critical, foundational, because it is the content that is closest to your product or service. It is the deciding factor. After prospects work their way down your marketing funnel, your merchandising content is the last thing they will see before making their decision.

Depending on the business you are in, your merchandising content may be the content that gets syndicated to third-party vendors. Your images and descriptions could be published on eBay, Etsy, Amazon, or many other marketplaces. If you are selling an online course or digital product, your merchandising content could be published on JVZoo, or ClickBank, or distributed by joint venture partners. If you are in a service business, your merchandising content is the most concise and pertinent content you will produce, so that makes it the content most likely to be shared by your fans and friends.

All the other content you produce will serve the main purpose of driving prospects to your merchandising content. So if your merchandising is not rock solid, you have wasted a lot of effort. Your key take-away is that quality merchandising content makes the rest of your marketing more effective; it’s an amplifier. Poor merchandising makes everything else you do ineffective and irrelevant.

So, set aside some time, follow the tips outlined in this article, and create some great merchandising content.

***

Photo courtesy Joschko Hammermann / Unsplash

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So what went wrong? How could this have been avoided? Simple, you started with the thing – a railroad – rather than the idea behind the thing -transportation. Everyone wants transportation, but maybe they don’t want a train. Could be that your train is too expensive. Maybe they would rather drive. How about a hovercraft?

So, if you started out with nothing, just an idea, just marketing, and you built your business from there, you would know that the railroad wouldn’t work before you bought your first parcel of land. Perhaps your prospects would prefer buses. Maybe you could go ahead and build those perfect train cars, you just need to sell them to other railroads that are already successful. But you won’t know anything until you figure out your core marketing message and determine if it resonates with your target prospects.

Marketing is everything… and nothing. What is your core marketing message?

In the developed world we have reached a point of near market saturation. Almost everyone has almost everything that they need. Food and water, check. Shelter, check. A serviceable vehicle, check. A smart phone, check.

In order to differentiate your product or service, you have to appeal to their desires, their wants. So, how do we differentiate? How do we appeal to those desires?

We start with nothing. We start with marketing. Huh? Marketing is an idea. It’s a set of strategies and best practices and tactics. You don’t make it. You can’t hold it in your hands. But if you want to be successful, you had better have a core marketing message influencing every decision you make and each path you go down.

Planning

Before you start designing your next product or planing your next service, start thinking about how you will market it. How can you make it different than what is already out there? How can you make it better, or smaller, or cheaper, or more expensive? How will your service disrupt an existing market? What is it about your product that will make the big boys shake in their Italian loafers?

Next you need to do some testing. A little market research. Put up a simple web page and drive some traffic to it using Google Adwords. If your product or service is local, target local prospects only. If location doesn’t matter, open it up wide. Will people give you their email address for more information about this proposed product? How much would they pay for that service? You are looking for proof of concept, and it has never been easier to get. Use this research to determine what your prospects care about, and what they don’t. Refine your message down to the essential elements.

Once you have your core marketing message figured out, everything else gets a lot easier. You will know how to position your product – luxury, efficiency, simplicity, performance. You will know how your website should feel and what your ads should look like. You will be able to give that 30 second elevator pitch and have it sound like you know what you’re talking about.

Production

As you move into the production phase of the process, concentrate on those differentiating factors. If a feature doesn’t serve them, it can be eliminated. It’s just a distraction from your core marketing message.

As you build your service, keep things as lean as possible while still living up to your message. It is the one area where you can’t cut corners. Other features and benefits can be added later, but if you miss the mark with your differentiating factors your business will be adrift.

Execution

As you move through the production phase of your business and into the execution phase, you must keep your eye on the ball. All aspects of your business should fulfill your core marketing message.

If you are all about luxury, then your customer service must go above and beyond what is normally expected. If efficiency is your thing, then your e-commerce platform better be flawless and user friendly. If your products are based around clean minimalist design, then everything from your website, to your Facebook page, to your storefront will have to live up to those expectations.

You can not afford to have a disconnect between your core marketing message and your product or service.

Marketing your core message

So, your differentiating factors were built right into your planning process. You stuck like glue to your core message through the production process. And now your execution is on point – customer service, e-commerce platform, store design are all a perfect match for that core marketing message. Now what?

Now you get out your bull horn. You start broadcasting that message through every channel available to you. But don’t go about it all willy-nilly. You still have to stick to the principles that have gotten you this far. If your message is about quality, don’t run an ad about rock bottom prices. And if your are trying to differentiate yourself through your down home atmosphere, don’t put a bunch of stark, edgy images on Instagram.

Build yourself a solid base of good quality content on the platform or platforms of your choice. The content should echo the main concepts of your core marketing message. Write articles about how your luxury service is far above the bargain priced alternatives. Record YouTube videos that show how much more efficient your prospect will be once they start using your product. publish a podcast introducing customers to the homespun wit and wisdom they can expect when they visit your boutique.

Once you have established your core principles on your platform of choice, use creative marketing and advertising techniques to drive prospects back there. A clean, minimalist print ad can be used to drive customer back to you clean and efficient website. A wine tasting event can be used to draw people in to your luxury housewares storefront. And a silly infographic can go viral and lead people right back to your world class collection of cat videos.

Just keep pounding away at that core marketing message and your targeted prospects will start to take notice.

Wrapping up

I realize that this article was a little more esoteric and less tactical than my previous posts. Hopefully you found it interesting and informative. Let me know what concepts in the article you would like me to expand upon. I’m here to help.

***

Photo courtesy Samuel Zeller / Unsplash

The post Marketing is everything… and nothing. What is your core marketing message? appeared first on Jason Noffsinger.

A marketing funnel is much more chaotic than that, it’s actually more like that picture ^up there^. People enter the Underground station and face a plethora of choices on how to get to their destination. Will they take the escalators? The staircase on the right, or maybe the one on the left. Perhaps they will stop to grab a bite to eat, or pull some cash out of the ATM.

Your marketing funnel is the device used to get people to proceed down your staircase. To keep them from getting distracted. To help them find their path, and to help them find your product or service along the way.

You see that guy in the gray suit, standing on the platform right above the automated ticket machines? That is your prospect. He has started down your staircase, but now he’s a little lost. How do you get him to go right – right down the funnel to being a customer and a raving fan?

That is what this article is will cover. So grab a cup a coffee and dig in. This is kind of a long one…

What is a marketing funnel, and how do I get one?

The term “marketing funnel” is thrown around a lot, and it has different meanings to different people. There can be marketing funnels for your entire business, marketing funnels for each of your product lines, or marketing funnels for each of your individual products or services. I’m sure there are even more types of funnels, but you get the idea.

In this article, I will describe a general marketing funnel for a typical small business. And I will relate it to online content marketing. As you are here, reading about content marketing, I’ll assume this approach is the most applicable to your current situation.

Let’s think of our funnel as having four sections. The fat part up at the top is what we will call Discovery. Below Discovery, in a slightly narrower part of the funnel we have Know. As your customer passes through Know they move into the third section of the funnel, let’s call this area Like. If you can get your customer to move past the Like section of your marketing funnel, they will enter the Trust phase. Once you have successfully migrated your customer through these four phases, they will be at a point where they are happy to buy whatever you are selling (within reason).

Next, we will tackle each of the sections of our funnel individually, learning what keeps our customer moving down the funnel and what might cause them to leak out.

Discovery

The fat end of your marketing funnel is what I like to call Discovery. This is where all those people out on the internet find you, whether through a Google search or on a social media platform or even through virtual word-of-mouth.

So what leads to discovery? Great content. SEO focused content. Funny and interesting content. Creative content. This content gets indexed by Google, shared by your fans and friends, and leads to browsers on your website. So the trick is to figure out who your business should target and what types of keywords they are typing into the search engines.

This is not the time to worry about analyzing these keywords, or grading them, or making value judgments. Why? Even if these important “first impression” keywords are too competitive to rank in Google, they still need coverage on your website. You will need to create the content anyway. And guess what, if you are creating high quality original content, you will rank for important keywords that you would never have thought of, no matter how much research you do. The robots (algorithms) over at Google are pretty smart, they know good quality content when they see it. And millions of people come up with brand new search queries every single day.

As you fill out the content on your platform, you will get to a point where you need to come up with fresh ideas. This is where keyword research and analysis comes into play. But we are a ways off from that point. You are just getting started. Start writing about the things your customers are searching for and you will be well on your way to Discovery.

Know

So what do you do once traffic arrives at your site? How do you move your potential customers down the funnel from the Discovery phase to the Knowing phase?

To make this a reality, you need one small commitment from your visitor. You need an email address. An action that costs them nothing can be of immeasurable value to you.

Before I go on, I need to make something clear. Just because giving you an email address doesn’t cost your prospect any money doesn’t mean that you should abuse it. It is a lot of work getting someone onto your email list. The last thing you want to do is burn them by being aggressive or spammy.

Stepping off my soapbox now … Once you have a prospect on your list, you can ensure consistency of communication. You can let them know when you post a new video or write a new white paper. You can ask them about their biggest problem and help them solve it. In short, this consistency will help them get to know you.

So, how do you get people onto your mailing list? Well, that is the topic for another post, or more likely a full book. But I will touch on a couple of main points. First, you need some technical stuff like an email service and a landing page. Second, you will need a lead magnet. A lead magnet is a digital product that your prospective customer will gladly accept in exchange for her email address.

So you put up a landing page that has two functions – it describes your lead magnet, and it has a simple form to collect the prospect’s email address. That’s it. There is nothing else on the page, nowhere else to go. Once the prospect fills out the form, her email address goes into your database, you send her the lead magnet, and you can start building a relationship.

Use the email address to help your prospects get to know you. Send them emails when you publish great posts on your website. Point them to great resources from other websites. Make them look forward to receiving your emails.

Like

Ok, so you have a group of prospects on your email list. How do you get these strangers on the internet to Like you? It’s no different from what you would do out in the real world.

Step 1 – Be nice. Send them valuable information. Don’t waste their time.

Step 2 – Introduce yourself. Let them know about you on a more personal level. People don’t “Like” businesses, they like the people who work at businesses. Let your prospects know you are, in fact, a real person.

Step 3 – Ask about them. Ask them to write you back and let you know how you can help. What are their struggles related to your service? What product or service do they really need? How have products like yours failed them in the past? Start a conversation and see where it leads.

So, how do you go about implementing these three steps into your business? With a tool called an autoresponder sequence. Don’t let the long complicated name throw you. An autoresponder sequence is simply a series of emails that you set up in advance and send out to your prospects in a pre-determined sequence. The technical aspects of this are easily handled through your email service. The hard work comes when you set out to write your emails.

You should try to have at least a few emails in your autoresponder series, and you should space them out over the course of a few weeks. The key is to put in the work writing these emails. Make them long enough so the prospect gets a sense of your personality, but not so long that they are time consuming to read. And stick to the themes outlined in the three steps above. You can mix and match within the emails or make each email specific to one of the steps. Do whatever feels the most comfortable to you. This will be obvious in your writing and will help your prospect connect with you.

Trust

After your prospect gets to know you, they can move down the funnel to the trust stage. This is a critical point in your process. It is pretty unlikely that the prospect will ever pull out their credit card if they don’t develop this trust.

So how do you help them develop this trust? It’s just an extension of all the strategies listed above. You will need to continue creating content that speaks to your target audience. Keep in touch consistently with high-quality emails, and never take advantage of the email address that they so generously provided.

This is also the perfect opportunity to introduce a type of content called social proof. Here are just a few great examples of social proof…

• Social Media Likes, Mentions, Shares, and Reviews – these are all great ways to let your prospects know that your small business is an up-standing citizen. The only problem is, your prospects may see none of this social proof if they are not following you on these social media channels. So be sure to ask them to follow you in at least some of your autoresponder emails.
• Customer Testimonials – It would be a great idea to have a page on your website dedicated to customer testimonials. It’s even possible to set up a WordPress plugin to collect the testimonials for you. Once you have your testimonials page setup and your form built, it is just a matter of emailing your customers and asking them to let you know what they think of your product or service. Then direct them back to your testimonials page, and assuming that you are doing your job in terms of customer service, they will write you a quality review.
• Case Studies – Describe how your current customers are making more money, saving time, helping the environment, etc. Case studies are your opportunity to have others toot your horn so you don’t have to. They are like good old-fashioned word-of-mouth advertising, but better because they are highly relevant to your prospects. In reading them, your prospects will be able to envision themselves having the same type of success. They will understand that these other people or business trusted you, and were better off for having done so.

Wrapping it up

So there you have it. A 30,000 foot view of your small business marketing funnel. Of course, only a small percentage of your prospects will work their way all the way from Discovery, through Know and Like, to finally reach Trust; but those who do will be your best customers. They won’t have to be sold, they will be excited to buy. And they will enthusiastically tell their friends about your product or service.

And what about the ones who don’t make it all the way down the funnel? Don’t give up on them. Keep sending them quality content and trying to build that trust. They may just be slow movers.

In a future article we will talk about plugging any leaks that you may have in your funnel, but you need to remember that not every prospect is right for your product or service. A good marketing funnel is just as effective for sorting out bad prospects as it is for turning good prospects into buyers.

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Photo courtesy Anna Dziubinska / Unsplash

The post What is a marketing funnel, and how do I get one? appeared first on Jason Noffsinger.

Do you know what I can do? Well, I’m a photographer – went to photo school and everything. I’m a pretty good web/graphic designer – I’m doing a lot of that in my current position. I think my writing skills are alright, but you would be a better judge of that. The point is, we are all good at some things and not so good at others. 

I’m going to be throwing around the word “creative” a lot in this article. Don’t let that word intimidate or discourage you. There are many ways to build creative content for your small business. You just need to figure out where your strengths lie and then play to those strengths. Choose the platform that is right for you and practice, practice, practice.

Alright, with that out of the way, let’s dig in and get creative… 

What is creative, and where does it fit into my marketing strategy?

I view creative as a sub-set of primary content creation. Content is a blog post, creative is the small amount of refined copy that accompanies a print ad. Content is a podcast interview, creative is a thirty-second radio spot. Content is a well lit photograph of your product, creative is a beautiful photo of a person using your product in the real world. Content is a YouTube video displaying the key features of your product. Creative is an elegant 15 second pre-roll video that the viewer will watch all the way to the end (rather than clicking the “skip” button).

The real difference between the two is the level of patience and attention to detail used when creating them. A simple product photo can be created in a matter of minutes and can be replicated over and over. A creative advertising photo may take hours or even a full day to produce and perfect.

There are, of course, different levels of creative content. I think of these levels like a pyramid. The base of the pyramid is your primary, good quality, content. Creative content comes more and more into play as you move up the pyramid. The more creativity and attention to detail required, the closer to the top of the pyramid, and thus the less frequently used.

But I am not a “Creative” person. How do I produce creative content?

We are all creative people. It’s just a matter of how often do you exercise your creative muscles. And we are not talking about painting the Mona Lisa here.

The creative content needed to market a small business is reliant on making something that looks/sounds good, and clean, and effectively communicates your point. By following a few simple rules, you can start producing great creative content to help your business grow…

• Keep it simple. When you are putting together creative content, remember less is more. Whether you are designing an ad, shooting a photo, or recording a commercial, leave plenty of space to communicate your main point.
• Maintain consistency — as you are designing, stick to a limited set of colors, fonts, sound effects, ideas, etc., and use them over and over. This consistency will stick in the viewers/listeners mind.
• When in doubt, go with symmetry. As you are shooting photos or designing landing pages, keep things symmetrical unless there is a compelling reason to do otherwise. Your audience will expect things to line up and look orderly. Just using symmetry can be the difference between an amateurish ad or image and a professional looking one.
• Patience – Practice patience when producing creative content. This is not the time to worry about words per hour. Quality is the order of the day. It may take you much longer to create 100 words of compelling advertising copy than 1000 words of standard blog copy, and that is okay. Take your time and get it right.

Where does creative fit in the overall strategy?

At first, there may not be room for creative. Your priority has got to be the base of good quality, search engine friendly, customer focused content. Remember the content pyramid as discussed above.

But as you get the base of your pyramid built out, it is time to think about adding some creative content. Maybe every single article gets a beautiful (and shareable) header graphic. Maybe the time has come to upgrade the production value on your podcast. Have you thought about creating an infographic?

Creative content can be the missing element that pushes your content to generate social shares and online buzz. So creative content probably won’t be your highest priority content, but it should be one of your priorities.

Additionally, creative content can be the most fun to produce. It will give you a nice change of pace as you round out your editorial calendar. 

I will touch on these ideas more in future articles. This is just a primer to get your juices flowing and to start you thinking about the possibilities. As you consider the points above, think about your own personal interests and passions. Can any of them be turned into creative content for your small business? Almost everyone has an interest or hobby or past profession that can be accessed to help them create.

Do you have any examples of this? I would love to hear about them in the comments. Your example might be just what another reader needs to push them past their creative boundaries.

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Photo Courtesy of Ryan McGuire / Magdeleine

The post What is creative, and where does it fit into my marketing strategy? appeared first on Jason Noffsinger.

And what about those rainbows? What do they represent? How about enlightenment, or realization – the knowledge that Mr. Customer truly understands your product. He knows you, he likes you, he trusts you. And now he is ready to buy from you. He doesn’t need to be sold, he has learned what he needed to learn, and now he is ready to commit.

So, how do you “do” content marketing? Simple, be the waterfall.

Too Zen for you? Lets get down to the nitty gritty…

What is Content Marketing

The word content has recently become a buzzword in the marketing world. Someone, somewhere, coined the phrase, “content is king”. But why? Why is content king? What can it do to help your business?

Put simply, content is a tool that you can use to educate your customers and prospective customers about your product or service. Rather than trying to convince them that they should buy your widget, explain to them all – and I do mean all – of the benefits that they will enjoy from using it. Then let them reach the conclusion that they must buy it.

Content can be an article or blog post like you are reading now. Content can be a photograph or illustration of your product. Content can be a YouTube video describing how to use your product or service. Content can even be a podcast helping your customer get to know and trust you, the business owner.

Content has been around since the days of cave paintings, but until recently it was called something completely different. It was call teaching.

In the new world of marketing, people do not want to be “sold”. They don’t even want to be marketed to. They want to be taught. They want to be taught about your product. They want to be taught about your service. They want to be given all the facts, and then they want to make a decision for themselves. In today’s digital world, the best marketers and salespeople are actually the best teachers.

So what do I create content about?

This is actually the easy part. You already know what to create content about, because you know your customers. What are the questions they ask you everyday? What do you wish every customer knew before you talked to them on the phone? What single piece of information should they have before they walk through your door? All you have to do is start answering these questions and you will be well on your way to establishing a content marketing platform.

There are lots of gurus in the internet marking echo-chamber who will want to talk to you about keyword research, search engine optimization, and content marketing strategies. These are all great things to consider … once you have established your foundation of quality content. But to get started, focus on one, and only one, thing – answer your customers’ questions:

• How much does that service cost?
• What does the product look like?
• Which of your services will solve this problem?
• Will X product fit in Y space?
• How soon will I see results?

These, and a thousand more like them, need to be answered to your customers’ satisfaction. These questions can be answered in a number of ways: Articles are great for communicating complex ideas, video works really well for demonstrations, and audio is best for developing a “personal”connection.

Also, there is no need to only think BIG when it comes to content. 2000 word articles and 30 minute documentaries are great, but simple things can make a huge difference. Are your product photos properly lit and in focus? Do you have photos from multiple angles? How about product descriptions, are they thorough and well written? Are they specific to each product? We are now talking about basic merchandising. If you sell products, your merchandising is your most basic and most critical content. Product (or even service) merchandising is the engine that drives your marketing efforts forward. If it is not on-point, it really doesn’t matter how much traffic you drive to your site or how much your prospects know, like and trust you. If they don’t truly understand what you are selling, they are not buying.

What type of content marketing platform do I need?

There are three general types of content marketing platforms – written, audio, and video. If you are most comfortable with written content then a Website or Blog is probably best. If you are comfortable in front of the camera, and you have a product or service that is highly interactive or requires demonstration, then video may be the way to go. If you would prefer to be heard but not seen then audio is a great choice. The key is to build your platform on “real estate” that you control. In other words, don’t put a lot of time and effort into building a platform on someone else’s property.

If you build your platform on Facebook or YouTube or iTunes you could be kicked off at a moments notice with absolutely no explanation or recourse. So even if you are posting videos on YouTube or podcasts on iTunes, be sure that you are always referring your customers back to your own website and getting them to opt-in to your mailing list. These are assets that you control and that no one can take away.

After I build this platform how will it help market my business?

A content platform can help market your business in many ways. The most obvious being search engine optimization (SEO). Put simply, the more content you have on the Internet the more likely that it will be indexed and have traffic sent by Google and the other search engines. But, moving beyond SEO, the possibilities for content marketing are virtually endless.

Creating content for your website helps you generate collateral content for your various social media platforms. This content can also be repurposed into an eBook that can be used to generate email leads (lead magnet) or even sold in Amazon’s Kindle store. There is no better way to confirm your authority than to be “published”.

Compelling content gets “shared” online. This reality turns your loyal readers, viewers or listeners into a guerrilla marketing team that is out proselytizing on your behalf even when you are asleep. One caveat here – this only works for products or services that people are excited to talk about. If you are marketing a natural treatment for urinary tract infections, don’t expect a lot of social sharing. But don’t let this discourage you either. People still need your more pedestrian products, and the fact that they don’t generate a lot of online “buzz” means that each piece of new content you generate will be that much more likely to be promoted by the search engines.

Additionally, your content can and should be used by your sales team to help shepherd customers down the sales funnel. As your customers consume more and more of your content they will grow to know, like and trust you. This makes the process of “selling” far easier. If they continue to value your content, eventually the idea of selling can go away completely. They will be waiting anxiously to buy whatever you are offering.

That is the true beauty of content marketing, it can turn even introverted non-salespeople into great sales people through the simple (not easy) act of teaching.

I hope you enjoyed this brief introduction to the vast topic of Content Marketing. I will be covering all the topics presented in this article in much greater depth in the future, so stay tuned. Additionally, if there are any of these topics that you are particularly interested in, or are currently struggling with, please hit me up in the comments. Your feedback will help me prioritize my future articles.

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Photo Courtesy Jared Erondu / Unsplash

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