Your marketing should follow a cycle. Your following is…or should be constantly growing as you talk to new people, reach out to others via social media, and network in your local community. This means your audience will never get tired of what you are dishing out even if you do.
Marketing can be tedious and content creation can seem like a much more massive task than it really is…But here’s the secret you do not need to create new content year after year, month after month, or week after week.
Having a content library you can pull from is incredibly important. However, to build a well-balanced library there are 3 steps to the content marketing cycle you must understand. These three steps follow right along with your sales cycle. A sales cycle typically works like this.
> Customer/Client discovers your business.
> Customer/Client follows your business and finds value in the content shared by the business, they develop a sense of trust for or towards the business.
> Customer/Client makes a purchase from the business.
The average sales cycle for a business is 90 days. However, this may change depending on your business and the product or service offered. A luxury home builder is likely to have a much larger sales cycle than a grocery store or nail salon.
Take the example of my own Business Coach Megan Lockhart of Hello Life Academy, her 1 to 1 Golden hour calls ($195 CAD) usually have a 90-day cycle for purchase, but her coaching program which is a nearly $10,000 investment has anywhere from an 18 month to 4-year long sales cycle.
4 YEARS! That is a long time to wait for a sale. However, what is important to recognize is that she has managed to build a sustainable business model by putting out consistent content that appeals to the constantly growing network of people she surrounds herself with. In addition, she continues to see growth to her list as a result of this consistent content she is sharing.
So what are the three steps to the content marketing cycle?
Step 1: Introduce yourself to your audience
I have a few ways I do this in my own marketing. For example, my legal name is Brittany, but my business name is Leeann Minton Virtual Assistance. People are always curious, but for one reason or another don’t ask the story behind it, so I share how Leeann is my middle name and Minton is my grandmother’s maiden name and I combined the two as a pen name in my teens.
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For the full story behind the name please click here.
I also get questions about how to get the copyright for things, but I am not a copyright expert I am a copywriter/content creator. I write content I am not a lawyer. So I discuss the difference between copywriter and copyright in my marketing a lot. I also share my why the story that brought me from freelancer to business owner.
Check out my about me live series here.
Ask yourself the following:
What feels most natural to you when it comes to introducing yourself?
What are you comfortable sharing about yourself?
What does your audience want to know about you?
What is your why?
What is your role?
What do you do?
Create multiple posts showcasing your story, your why, and defining your role and what it is that you do.
Then create a number of templates in your brand colors and place a combination of selfies and professional photos in them so your audience begins to recognize your face as the face of your brand.
Don’t have a defined brand in terms of colors? Message me I have a list of individuals I can refer you to.
Regularly re-introduce yourself to your audience and followers. As your audience grows there are likely to be individuals who signed up to your list or clicked to follow your page or group, but were not 100% sure who you were or what you stood for.
By constantly introducing yourself you also remind those who do know you of what it is you do, so that when they are looking for someone with your skills they can instantly think of you as the go-to person.
Finally, showcase the work you have done. I created a landing page for a client just before the new year who was launching a course. I shared the completed product on my social media so people could see what I was capable of.
Step 1 is almost a two-part step because beyond just introducing yourself you want to build relationships.
You can’t introduce yourself if you are not meeting new people. Check out this post on Building Relationships through Content to learn how you can build an audience to introduce yourself to.
Step 2: Educate and Give Value To Your Audience
Marketers and coaches talk a lot about providing value to your audience. However, no one really ever tells you what providing value really means. After all, you don’t want to teach others how to do what you do, otherwise, why would they need to hire you?
So how do you provide value to your audience, what can you teach them that will still require them to hire you?
You must teach them what they need to have or know BEFORE they can work with you!
As a copywriter and content creator, I need my clients to have a website, social media pages, and a plan for their content. I need my clients to know the purpose for their content, who their audience is, and what exactly it is they are selling.
As you explore what your audience needs to know or have to work with you, reach out to those in your network who do those things or help with those things. Ask them questions about what they do and feature them on your page. This is how we also build partnerships and collaborations.
Create checklists or handouts walking your clients through what they need to work with you. If you haven’t downloaded my Copywriter Checklist this is a great example of a checklist that provides value to an audience without teaching them how to do what you do.
As you build your content library create posts centered around your top tips. Put together graphics and images to go along with them, don’t be afraid to keep the same tip and just change out the image. When you develop an opt-in (an item or piece of information provided usually in exchange for providing an email address). Create multiple graphics you can use to promote your opt-in. Even if you have multiple opt-ins create multiple graphics for each opt-in.
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Giving Value to your audience doesn’t always have to be in the form of education either. It can be introducing them to someone else in your industry who does something that they may also need. For instance, I occasionally have people come to me who need a web designer or graphic designer. Sometimes I come across people who need an editor more so than they need a copywriter.
Talk about others share your connections and relationships.
For more about bringing value to your audience check out my post on How to Bring Value to Your Audience?
Step 3: Sell to your audience
Launches should be a natural part of your content process. Develop calls to action for your smaller service offerings. If you are a coach and do 1 on 1’s create posts centered around this topic. If you have a book or a product showcase it.
You don’t need to be launching a huge course, group program, or major sale in order to talk about how much you charge for things.
Practice selling the little stuff so when it comes time for that big price tag offer you are confident in your process. Treat every little thing you sell as if it were a big massive luxury grade product/service.
When people connect with you online in a business sense they already know you are an entrepreneur and likely are going to try and sell them something at some point. As you go through your marketing cycle. Each person who connects with you should be able to find information regarding who you are and what you do, followed by something crazy valuable that educates them, and finally ending with what they can purchase from you that is going to help them solve their problem.
When you create your sales posts be sure to describe the problem your product/service solves. Follow this up with how your product/service solves the problem. If you can fit it in, explain what qualifies you as the person who can provide the solution, how much it costs and where the product/service can be purchased.
A sales post is a call to action. You should have a call to action on all of your posts whether it’s your introduction post, your value post, or your sales post. A call to action can be anything from tell me xyz in the comments to click the link to sign up for my newsletter. A call to action can even be “click here” to buy now.
Read my post What I Know Sales Not To Be to learn more.
When you are doing a big launch for something, it is understood that you are likely going to be doing a lot of sales posts for a while as you gear up for the big sale or start date of the program. If you are in product sales and are hosting a sale that is to last for a certain number of days your audience will expect you to be posting a ton about the sale during the course of that sales time and leading up to the start of the sale. During these types of big launches and events do not be afraid that you are posting too much if people unfollow you because they felt you were posting too much about your new program or upcoming sale they were not your ideal client/customer anyway.
Check out this post to learn more about The Secret Behind How often to post…everything?
There are 3 Steps to the Content Marketing Cycle if you would like to learn more about these three steps, please join my Facebook group Focused on Content Creation and Check out the Units Section for the live video recordings where I discuss these 3 steps in even more detail.
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