Today we’re going to take a big huge magnifying glass.
We’ll gather every ray of light that comes from your business, your people, your philosophy and focus them into a single white-hot point of irresistible clarity.
This will make everything you do a thousand percent more effective.
The first step is to figure out exactly what you want prospects to know about you and your company. I’ve got a detailed process for doing this, but you can start by asking these questions:
- What are the 5 most common positive things clients say about your business?
- What is the single most positive thing you hear?
- What is the biggest problem you solve for your clients?
- What are the 5 things you have to explain most frequently about your business?
- What are the 5 most important things you wish prospects or clients knew about your company?
- What makes you different than your competitors?
- What is the “Secret Origin” story of your business?
- What would be at least one interesting personal fact about you, which is unusual and would surprise most people? How is that relevant to the work you’re doing?
This is a start. There are several more questions you could add. You could double the numbers. I could probably get a full page of ideas out of you for each of these questions.
So now you’re looking at a big pile of issues, ideas, anecdotes and facts. Next you need to do some mind mapping. Find the common thread or threads among all of these. Tie an interesting fact or story to something important you want your prospects or clients to know.
In the end you need to boil it down to just a few key talking points, which you’ll go back to again and again.
Now for the hard part. You’re going to make one or more videos and blog posts for each of those key talking points. If you can’t think of enough material to do this, use all the other bits and pieces you pulled out through the questions you asked above.
Each blog, article, or video will support one or more of your key talking points.
Now for the fun part. Take all the leftover facts, anecdotes, and ideas from your questions. For each one, brainstorm at least 10 pithy quotes or statements. Come up with 10 benefits to your clients that are related to each one. Write 10 headlines.
By the way, the definition of a headline is something that will make the person who sees it want to see more. There are three sure-fire elements that will make this happen: Curiosity, self-interest, and news. Write your 10 headlines.
Putting it all together
Let’s look at what we’ve built so far:
- A handful of key talking points
- A set of articles, blogs, and videos that explain and reinforce your talking points (From now on we’ll call this your Backbone Marketing content. This is one of your most important assets, and you should learn more about it here)
- A collection of facts, ideas, and anecdotes
- Around 30 benefits, pithy statements, and headlines for each of these facts and anecdotes.
Now we’re ready to talk about social media. It doesn’t matter which platform or platforms you’re on, you have just one goal for everything you post from now on: You want it to reinforce your talking points and drive traffic to your Backbone Marketing content.
How do you do this? By front-loading your social media.
Each individual item from your pithy statements, headlines, benefits, facts, ideas, and anecdotes will become a tweet, a Facebook post, something you can copy and paste into a comment somewhere.
There is software that will do this for you, or you can just put everything into a spreadsheet and have your intern copy and paste as much as you want on a daily basis.
If you’ve done your homework, you should easily have 100 or more little things you can post by now. If you go back and brainstorm once a month, you’ll never run out of content and most of your social media will run on autopilot.