69. Turning Content Into Your Best Salesperson

Transcript

Welcome To the High-Performance Marketing podcast, a show focused on helping small business owners connect with their ideal customers using simple marketing and quality content. I'm your Marketing Guide, Ali Garbero.

Do you ever find yourself walking into a room and you can’t remember why you walked in there? Or even worse, forgetting words? At first I thought “well this is it, this is how my mind starts to deteriorate toward dementia.” But that’s not the case at all. It’s actually pretty common and due to the fact that we are constantly going from one mode of thinking to another, scrolling on social media, transitioning from a phone, to a desktop, to text messages, to emails.

The continuous change is definitely causing some serious issues with our attention spans.

Which means that as business owners not only do we have to find effective ways to stay focused and productive but that we are also fighting harder than ever to capture the attention of our audience.

The good news is that all of these same things that distract the lifeblood out of us, are the very things that lead to sales. Think about it - social media content, ads, emails, text messages.

On today’s episode of the Podcast let’s talk about how we can use content and it’s Dr. Evil like powers to to build trust, establish long-term customer relationships and of course drive sales.

First let me start by sharing a quick piece of data with you. In today’s market an average of 70% of the buying decision is made before your prospect ever speaks with anyone at your company. And this applies to both the business to consumer and business to business space.

How are these buying decisions made? By conducting online research of course. Think about it, when was the last time you bought a car, a camera, a kayak - anything. Most likely you went to Google, maybe Youtube or Amazon. You started your process with research - not by calling Best Buy or Costco right? I mean those were old school ways of doing research.

The modern consumer now reads up to 30 pieces of your content, some even go as high as 300, before they buy your product or decide to hire you out for services.

Now that you understand this buying shift, which department in your organization would you say, has the greatest impact on the actual sale? Is it sales or marketing?

I hope you can see that it’s marketing. Because if your marketing team isn’t writing blogs, emails, articles, or creating content for social - then how will anyone ever find you - unless you really like interrupting people during their day, calling them or showing up at their house to sell your product or service.

Yet most often, during a recession, or when a company needs to cut back on spending, they almost always cut out marketing first. I’ve even been told “sorry, Ali, marketing is just an extra and we don’t have budget for it right now.” That is such counterproductive thinking. And here’s why -

If you hope to compete in a digital marketplace it’s pretty clear that you’ll need to lean into content creation.

So I’m going to share a few ways you can do that because I know that as a small business owner or entrepreneur, it’s really hard to actually make time to create content for your own business - all the time.

Here’s a few ways to get started if you haven’t and to get ahead if you’re already doing it.

First your mindset around content should shift from “this is a marketing extra” - to” holy cow, if I create really great content, I’m literally building a salesperson - who never takes a day off or sleeps.” Content, when created and used strategically, plays a pivotal role in creating revenue for you.

And think about how lucky we are in our current business environment. In the past, content creation was limited to traditional media, such as newspapers, magazines, and television. But we’re well aware that that's not the case anymore. With the emergence of the internet, content creation and distribution is possible for