The Secret to Creating High Quality Content

Lesson #6 The Secret to Creating High Quality Content

Now we’re going to talk about how to maximize your customer’s chance of really getting what you’re communicating.

First, let’s do a quick recap of everything we’ve learned so far:
• We have identified our ideal customer by narrowing our niche
• We have used deep conversations or surveys to find our what our customers want
• We have figured out what is valuable to them.
Now we need to put it all together and create content that gets people to take action.

Why does marketing aim to get people to take action? Because it is through a series of action steps that your prospect will learn what you’re trying to teach, and begin to believe in what your product can do.

Teaching is selling

Have you ever wondered why so many online tools and software are available for free use? Well, it’s the same reason that restaurants give out free food samples. It’s a “try before you buy” strategy.

This effective tactic has two functions:
1. It filters out those who will not ever buy from those who potentially will buy.
2. It creates word-of-mouth marketing, because people are more likely to remember trying something that they enjoyed and pass the information on to others who are potentially interested.
In both cases, your real prospects will self-qualify by showing some level of interest.

Your marketing must TEACH your prospect to BELIEVE in the idea behind your product.

As a marketer, you want to make sure that a prospect has the highest probability of becoming a customer. As human beings, we rely on experience as our most powerful teacher. We learn and believe in something when we start to do it. And nobody can learn something completely by just doing it one time. It is through repetition and practice that we truly GET IT. So how do you get prospects motivated to engage with your products, and to do it multiple times?

Let’s dive into the specific steps of creating high-quality content.

Become your customer and speak their language

Experts and teachers have a tendency to use jargon that is familiar and comfortable for them. They often forget that others may have no ideas what they are talking about.

Think of the first time that you went into a foreign restaurant. You didn’t know where to start, what to order, how to use the utensils properly, or any of the etiquette associated with that culture.

That’s how most of your customers feel when you start using jargon. To make matters worse, most of your customers have already heard all of the marketing lingo out there; they are already skeptical of the solution you offer, especially if you sound just like everyone else.

In order to make someone understand the value of what you’re saying, you have to go beyond the information itself. You must eliminate misunderstanding by connecting the dots for your prospective customer. As we have discussed here at Profitable Knowledge, it all starts with your perception of how to help someone.

You need to speak their psychological language in order to meet them where they’re at emotionally.

Your customer has to feel that you “get them” regardless of what is really going on.

As marketers, you need to be able to empathize with what your customer sees, thinks, and feels. If you can do that, you can learn to speak in their language and win their trust.

This is the MOST VALUABLE SKILL you can learn in business, or in life. If you can learn to “shut yourself off” and develop imaginative empathy with others, you can create a rapport that establishes trust and influence.

On the other hand, if your customer is talking A and you’re trying to sell them B, you get nowhere! If your customer is admitting how painful it is for them not to each what they want, and you try lecturing them about exercise, you will cause them to shut down emotionally. From your customer’s perspective, your solution actually feels like a barrier, a roadblock to where they want to go. The challenge is to get your prospects to BELIEVE that your product will get them the results they want.

The bottom line: Your product’s value depends on how you communicate.

The way you communicate your ideas, techniques, and solutions is content marketing.

Required Reading: Why Content Marketing Can Get You More Customers.

It is your job to make your customer’s buying experience the one they want, not what you think it should be. You must become the customer’s advocate in this process.

Three tips on clear, effective communication:

1. Give them what they want

This is the starting point, the foundation, of your marketing—What does your customer want?

No, not what you think they really want or need. What do THEY think they need and what do they want?
• People don’t want home security….they dream of a steel gate for their home, passwords for entry, and security guards who arrive when the alarm goes off.
• People don’t want a website…they want a way to collect payments while they sleep, and to wake up the next day to find their bank account growing by leaps and bounds.
Like top copywriter Gary Halbert said, “People don’t want to lose weight, they want to know what to eat at Krispy Kreme to lose weight.”

Giving people a vague approximation of what they want, based on what you think is possible is one thing. Giving people what they specifically want is something else. Which do you think they prefer?

Ask your customer for their expectations if you want to give them an experience that will lead to referrals and word-of-mouth marketing. If you discover that those expectations are unrealistic, you can deal with it at the beginning of the process, instead of finding out after a huge problem has evolved.

Do yourself a huge favor—ask your customer what they want. Not only will it improve your relationship with them, you’ll see your efforts return dividends in the form of more sales.

2. Be specific with words

Eliminate words like “innovative” or “cutting edge” (what does that mean, anyway?) Instead, say that you are the first to [INSERT DIFFERENTIATOR] or that you help [THESE KINDS OF PEOPLE] to get [THIS RESULT].

Don’t say you save people money. Show them how much money you can save them in percentage or cash value.

Use what you learned in lesson 5 on the three value metrics to communicate in specifics:
• How much time your customer can save?
• How much labor went into your product?
• How much money does your service equate to in dollars?

3. Show them reality

This is where you cut through all the industry jargon and connect the dots for them. Here’s an example: Do you know what someone means when they say “4G” or “LTE” ? How about “download 100 hi-resolution pictures on your mobile phone in 1 second”? You guessed it: they are the same thing.

Which one sounds better:
1. “We can help you increase traffic to your website using social media and SEO.”
2. “We’ll get you 100,000 visitors to your website per month by 90 days from today.”
The one most people prefer is the one that sounds like you can touch, measure, and track the results.

Profitable Knowledge Exercise: 3 steps to creating your content

It is time to create your content. Whether it be newsletter, video, or other products, it’s important to remember that people rarely learn something the first time they hear it.

Instead of continually bombarding them with all new ideas, it’s much better to take your BEST concepts and develop many versions of them. This way you will have different perspectives, angles, and methods for teaching the same core concepts. Use this exercise to identify one of your best strategies or techniques.

STEP 1 – Focus on the most pressing emotionally triggered problem.

STEP 2 – Identify different ways of looking at the problem.

STEP 3 – Create a step-by-step concept or technique using your BEST strategy to solve that problem, avoid pain, or achieve your prospect’s desired outcome.

Here’s an example: Let’s say I’m teaching “productivity.”

STEP 1 – PROBLEM: Getting nothing done after working for hours.

STEP 2 – STUDY THE PROBLEM: Do you feel like there are not enough hours in the day to get your work done? Do you have uncontrollable urges to check e-mail or browse the web, and end up wasting several hours a day? It turns out that most people who aren’t productive exhibit a lack of day-to-day planning. The don’t have clear goals to keep them focused, and allow their environment to dictate where they direct their attention.

STEP 3 – OFFER A SOLUTION: I’m going to show you a three-step process to instantly boost your productivity.

What I have done is to teach one thing: remove all distractions and focus on a single task.

I can expand by going into detail on the psychology of attention deficit, the benefits of the 60-minute work cycle, the success of people who use this technique, etc. The idea is to find different methods of presenting and connecting your strategy or technique with the result that our prospect wants, or pain they want to avoid.

In our next lesson, I’ll show you a method of describing your expertise so powerful that your prospects can’t help but want to start working with you immediately.

Oh, by the way…

If you found this page via a link on the Internet, or a friend forwarded it to you, this is lesson #6 to a free online course delivered via email on how to use solid Internet marketing strategies to build a business doing what you love and make a living.

You can learn more about it HERE.

Using your BEST strategy, come up with the best concept or technique to solve that problem