Marketing Advisor, Mentor, & Educator

Kevin C. Whelan

marketing

Come hell or high water

Once you decide to publish content, having a “come hell or high water” mentality makes things a lot simpler.

When you publish on a pre-determined schedule no matter what, it forces you to create content with whatever time and ideas you have available.

Committing is a forcing function that allows you to be consistent and ultimately create good content most of the time.

Sure, forcing yourself to publish even when you don’t have a lot to say may occasionally produce mediocre content. But more times than not, you’ll find a way to create content that resonates.

You won’t let yourself ship poor content too often, believe me. And most of the time, what you have is better than nothing.

So ask yourself this: do you publish content, whether daily, weekly, or monthly with a “come hell or high water” mentality?

You may not need to take this approach, but it does help build the consistency is that’s what you’re seeking.

The ‘Golden Goose’ approach

There are two ways you can find new clients.

  1. You can look for Golden Eggs (prospective clients) by reaching them directly.
  2. Or, you can find more Golden Geese (audience aggregators and influencers) by offering value to their audience in exchange for exposure.

The ‘Golden Eggs’ approach works well, but it is a very slow process. It’s a one-by-one method and is hard to scale.

The ‘Golden Goose’ approach is where you have more leverage.

If you can do things like training, webinars, guest podcasting, conference talks, community involvement, and/or guest writing in your niche, it’s a chance to get in front of a LOT of prospective clients at one time.

It’s a lot more scalable but it does still take work and preparation. What doesn’t?

That’s one of the reasons niching is so valuable. Most good niches have a place where they get together, usually around making connections and learning new ideas.

If you’re out looking for new business, see if you can take the Golden Goose approach.

Here is a related post on how you can create those opportunities.

The constraints being a fractional CMO (audio)

This is a preview episode of the private podcast that comes with a free Mindshare Community membership. Join today for more members-only content and community.

If you’ve done any fractional CMO/freelance head of growth/managed advisory work (as I like to call it), you’ll quickly notice how much it limits your time to work with multiple clients and do your own marketing.

In this episode, I unpack a few topics, questions, and constraints brought up by member Rob in a private discussion (with his permission to respond via podcast).

Rob currently does some execution work and is getting opportunities to do more involved fractional CMO work. As a result, it’s difficult to find time (and justify spending it) to market himself.

I talk about things like:

  1. My thoughts on selling days per week/month
  2. The risks of selling most of your time to a small handful of clients
  3. Hiring marketing managers instead of being the one to manage
  4. Focusing on selling advisory level as soon as you can
  5. What to do to market yourself when your time is limited
  6. And a lot of other limits, constraints, and ways of dealing with fractional CMO work in your business

Give this a listen and let me know what you think!

—k

Why FAQs are so great

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on your product or service pages are like magic.

That’s because they make it easy to add tons of important details to your page without overwhelming the reader.

Here are some of the main benefits I see in using FAQs:

  1. They’re easy to skim and either read or ignore depending on the person reading.
  2. They let you pack a lot of information on the page that would otherwise bloat the core sales copy.
  3. They’re a great place to position your product or service in terms of who it’s for/not for, what it does/doesn’t do, and how it works/doesn’t.
  4. They preemptively help you overcome objections by dealing with common push-back you may receive during sales conversations.
  5. They help manage expectations about how the product will be accessed or consumed, expected results, and/or other details that people may not be thinking about.
  6. They let you highlight key information that may get buried in the rest of your sales text.
  7. They can serve as “fine print” by outlining the scope limitations and terms of your offer.
  8. EDIT: They’re also great for SEO, especially when you use the questions as a heading element (h2 or h3) as it lets you use highly optimized keywords and common questions in a way Google recognizes as important. H/T to Alex, Luke, and Frank for pointing that out!

You can easily add or remove FAQs from a sales page without hurting the conversions. That’s because people can skim what they need to and ignore the rest.

People like to see you’ve thought of everything. It builds trust in you and the purchase decision. FAQs let you show that without creating additional friction.

By putting more content in the FAQs, you can focus your sales copy on the key information that matters instead of having people glaze over long paragraphs and miss the important parts.

Do you use FAQs on your sales pages? If not, this might be the reminder you need.

Write to capture the value of your ideas

If I didn’t write every day, I’d probably write a LOT less frequently. The deadline keeps me going—even when I don’t feel like writing.

And if I wrote less frequently, I’d probably come up with fewer interesting ideas. Not that all my posts are hits. They’re not. That’s not the point.

The point of writing daily is to force yourself to think about and clarify your ideas. You then use those ideas in your education and advisory work, which is where you capture their value.

It also lets people see how you think—which is the very thing you get paid for. In some ways, it’s a sample of what it’s like to work with you.

You don’t need to write daily, but the more you write and publish, the clearer your thinking will be and the more ideas you’ll have.

As an advisor, those ideas are where your value comes from.

Write to capture that value.

162. Three ways to get clients to take your advice

This is a preview episode of the private podcast that comes with a free Mindshare Community membership. Join today for more members-only content and community.

In order to be successful as an advisor, you need to be able to:
  1. Prove you’re worth hiring for your knowledge in the first place
  2. Reinforce why you’re worth listening to after they hire you

If you have difficulty selling advisory services, or if clients stop listening to your advice during your engagements, it might be due to one of the three things I talk about in this episode.

Give it a listen and share with a friend who might benefit!

If you’re reading this via email, click here to listen to this episode on the web or join Mindshare to listen to more episodes of the private podcast.

Growing by referrals

Imagine your business could only grow by word of mouth.

Every new client had to be referred by someone who worked with you.

What would you do? Would you ask your current and past clients for referrals? Would you offer an incentive?

I don’t know the answer here, but I’d probably start by asking my clients if they knew 1-3 people who might benefit from my services, and if so, whether they would be make warm introductions.

Naturally, I’d also try to over-deliver on my services, but I already try to do that anyway.

What else would you try? What works for you already?

Hit reply if you have any good ideas. I’ll share them with the readers.

Most people won’t buy today

Most people won’t buy from you today.

It doesn’t matter if you have perfect a message, offer, and audience. If they’re not ready now, they won’t buy today.

But they might buy someday.

Which means to win the business of most people, you have to have two things:

  1. A clear and compelling value proposition for a specific target market
  2. A way to stay in front of the right people until they’re ready to buy

Getting clear on your target market and offering things they actually want is your first and most important job.

You have to know what problem you’re solving and they need to know that’s what you do.

As for the second part, that’s where content marketing excels. The value you share over time gives you permission to stay in front of them.

No value, no attention.

So if you want to grow your advisory business, there’s almost no better way to do it than content marketing done consistently for a long, long time.

Build relationships and keep showing up.

Frequency, recency, and potency

I was listening to Zig Ziglar’s audio book, Secrets of Closing the Sales. It’s a fun listen, albeit a little old school.

One thing in the book that stood out was when it he talks about three factors that lead to lasting sales impact in business:

1. Frequency: how often people are reminded of you and your services.

2. Recency: how recently people were reminded of you and your services.

3. Potency: the level of impact your appearances make on people.

Daily publishing is great because it keeps a high degree of frequency and recency.

These alone give you an advantage.

There are even cognitive biases toward preferring the most frequent and recent things we encounter. But let’s leave that aside for now.

Furthermore, if you’re skilled or lucky enough, daily publishing will also make a reasonable dent on the potency scale.

Not every time you publish, granted, but the total experience should make a reasonable impact.

So if you plan to publish less frequently, it will also affect your recency advantages. Which means your potency better be high to make up for it.

In other words, you better make a decent impact to have similar advantages to more frequent publishing schedules.

There’s no single way to succeed and a trade-off to every strategy.

Documenting everything you know [EP. 160]

This is a preview episode of the private podcast that comes with a free Mindshare Community membership. Join today for more members-only content and community.

As I wrote about the other day, one of the most critical aspects of scaling a consulting business without hiring a team is to generate assets from your ideas and expertise.

In this episode, I break down how and why you should aim to document all your ideas and processes in your business to help you create leverage and grow without working harder.

If you’re reading this via email, click here to listen to this episode on the web or join Mindshare to listen to more episodes of the private podcast.