The customer doesn't care about you,
doesn't care about your product.
They only care about their own needs.
How are you going to break through and get their attention?
You have to solve those needs first.
(upbeat music)
The important thing to realize with marketing today
is that the script has flipped.
In the past, we focused on
selling a product and service,
and all our marketing revolves around
that product and service,
and that's the exact wrong way to go about it.
What if you think about it from the opposite way?
What if you said, look,
what we wanna do
is build a relationship with a group of people -
customers or audience, whatever it is.
Well, how do we do that?
We deliver them valuable information.
You could do that through your website.
You could do that through an email newsletter.
You could do it through a podcast.
You're not selling anything in those channels.
What you are is you're building relationships.
And if you deliver value every single day,
that group of audience,
they will come to know, like and trust you.
And then when they know and like and trust you,
then you can sell all the stuff you have to sell.
And that's what you're seeing
the smart, innovative companies do today.
(upbeat music)
So, there's a really great example
in Hamilton, Missouri.
Small business - they sell quilting equipment -
and they were looking for a way that they could
expand their reach,
but it was very difficult to do that
by just talking about,
"Oh, we've got these great quilting supplies.
You - please buy them."
Well, nobody's gonna pay attention to that.
But what they created was
every week, they would put on a quilting tutorial
and teach people
how they could create quilts quicker.
So, they created a video
and then another video,
and after about a year,
they had over 200,000 subscribers.
They went from a small,
couple-million-dollar-a-year business
to selling over $40 million a year.
It's a quilting supplies company.
It's amazing.
How did they get to be this big?
Just through
consistently delivering value through YouTube.
(upbeat music)
One of the biggest mistakes that
businesses make is
they feel they have to be everywhere.
"I wanna do the podcast,
and I wanna be on LinkedIn,
and I wanna be on Twitter,
and I wanna be on Facebook."
But you know what's gonna happen?
You're gonna be, at best,
mediocre at all those things.
And the thing is,
to break through all the content clutter,
you have to be remarkable.
So, it goes back to asking yourself,
if you stopped creating all the content that you create,
would your customers notice?
It's a tough question, right?
Most people have to answer that honestly and say,
"My customers probably wouldn't notice
if I stopped sending my email newsletter."
That's a problem.
We want our customers to miss our content.
But what happens is
most organizations just create
a mountain of stuff, of meh.
It just basically keeps us busy.
It's not making an impact on our customers.
It's doing nothing.
You've gotta make some decisions,
and strategy is all about saying no.
So, what I want ya to do is start saying no
to some of those things that you're doing lackluster.
Just get rid of those things
because we can't be mediocre anymore.
(upbeat music)
So, let's say somebody wants to build an audience.
So, what we want to do is we wanna figure out
what is our sweet spot?
So, on the one side is
what is your expertise?
And you have to match that against
what is your audience's desire?
Who is your audience -
that very specific audience you're talking to -
and then, what keeps 'em up at night?
What are their pain points?
And then bringing those two things together
creates that sweet spot
that you could actually start talking about something.
And then, what is that hook,
that point of view,
that differentiation that you can do
to break through all that content clutter?
Then you can choose what platform
you're gonna do it on.
So, for example,
if you've got people that are really good on the radio,
maybe it is a podcast that makes sense.
If you've got people that really look good
on a television screen, maybe it's a YouTube video.
But you've gotta figure out
why will this story resonate
and break through all the clutter,
and then you can figure out
where you're gonna publish.
(upbeat music)
The bottom line for you to start:
really figure out the pain points of your customers,
and then, just do one thing.
Focus on one thing.
Be great at it.
Build an audience there,
and then once you build that audience,
then you can move on.
(music fades)