Do you ever spend ages creating a social media post or email … but barely get any engagement?
Maybe you only get a few likes or comments, and hardly anyone opens your email that you spent hours crafting?
Do you ever wonder … is it worth all the effort?
It’s so discouraging when you have poured your heart and soul into something, making it as good as you can, and adding as much value as you can and getting very little response.
A lot of people ask me if creating content is still effective in attracting clients?
By content, I’m talking about things like emails, blogs and social media posts.
Think Of The Buyer’s Journey
If you think of the buyer’s journey, there are different stages that the buyer goes through. Buyers go from awareness to being problem aware, through to being solution aware. It’s very rare that someone will see a social media post and sign up with you right away.
Content is good for keeping you top of mind. It’s good for inspiring a small step of action or for educating people on what you do. It’s like a drip-feed. You give little pieces of education and inspiration so that you open people to a new way of thinking.
Typically content isn’t good for converting people. If you think of it as a pipeline, you’ve got all these stages that people go through before they actually sign up and pay money to you.
Content is just little bits to keep you on top of people’s minds and to slowly build trust. It’s almost like adding a little bit of money into a bank account a little at a time, and then when you’ve got enough money you spend it.
If you think about posting content in this metaphor, a piece of content is not usually enough to convert people into paying clients.
Social media is not designed to sell to people and this is where many business owners and coaches get it wrong. It’s too fast and a lot of people try and fast-track their sales process. This can end up putting people off because you’re selling too soon.
Build Trust First
Trust needs to be built first. Someone is not going to turn into a paid client from a social media post because not enough trust has been built up in their trust bank account. It’s almost like trying to make a withdrawal before you’ve put enough into that account to withdraw the money from.
Content keeps you freshly on top of people’s minds. It’s good for grabbing attention, but it’s not good for maintaining attention. In order to trust people, you need time for trust to develop.
Research shows you need about 7 hours’ worth of time with someone before you trust them. So if you’re creating social media posts that take one minute for someone to read, you have to do a heck of a lot of those posts in order to build up those 7-hours of trust.
If you’re creating 1-minute posts, this means you have to create 60 posts to get an hour of attention, so you need to do that for 7 hours, which means you’ve got to create 420 posts!
How many people have you found that actually transfer money into your bank account because they saw one of your social posts?
How often has someone signed up for a strategy session or discovery call in your calendar by reading one of your blogs? It doesn’t happen very often.
Live Video Is Powerful
Written content still has its place. But studies done by Livestream show that 79% of people believe that live stream videos provide a more authentic interaction with the audience.
Live presenting, like doing Facebook Lives are so popular now, and people are drawn to watch something real-time, rather than a polished piece of footage.
Audiences spend about 3 times as long watching live-streamed videos, as opposed to watching traditional pre-recorded videos. This is a pretty powerful statistic. Live interactions are more authentic and relatable. It’s not all scripted with multiple takes and lots of editing.
People who are willing to show up on camera and share their expertise build their businesses faster. It takes courage and it takes preparation because you have to organise your knowledge. The more you show up on video, the better you become.
Your positioning changes in people’s minds when you show up on video prepared and with your knowledge organised. It elevates you and your positioning in the minds of your community.
Facing Your Fears Propels You Ahead
The fear of public speaking takes a lot of people out of the game before they’ve even begun. If you’re courageous to step out into the world of public speaking you immediately differentiate yourself from many of your competitors, who are not willing to do it.
Public speaking and learning to present live is a hugely valuable skill. You can do live videos from anywhere, at any time and these days you don’t need a full-on studio. You can just do it on your phone or laptop.
When you do a live video, or run a live event, as opposed to a pre-recorded video series (like an evergreen webinar for example) people give you their time because you’re offering to educate them.
Building Trust Through Education
Educating people is a way that people will give you their time and it helps to build trust. The more time you spend with someone (like a friend or family member), the more you trust a person. It’s logical right?
It’s the same in business. The more time someone spends with you, the more they will trust you. You aren’t going to trust someone you’ve just met on the street. So you need to spend time with people to enable the trust to be built.
When you hold an online event, it’s a win-win situation. You are giving a whole lot of valuable content and educating people for free. People receive free education and in return, they give you their time, which leads to trust-building.
This is the underlying principle. It can’t just be content on its own. And you can’t do an event with no content either! Basically, you’re taking a whole bunch of strangers on social media and you’re asking for their time.
When you do a live event you can take someone from ‘cold to sold’ much quicker. If you do content in small amounts, it could take months or even years for people to trust you.
When you do a full-day event, it can convert people straight away because you get that 7-hours of trust-building in one day.
This supercharges your leverage from taking months or years to build trust, to being able to build trust within a day. Or you can do it through a few different shorter webinars over a couple of weeks.
1 – Compelling Content Is Not About What You Do, But How You Do It
When it comes to content, it’s not a case of just pumping out content. It’s HOW you’re creating your content. Is your content compelling, engaging and inspiring? Do you know how to influence people through your content?
Being able to influence people through your content is a skill and it’s a craft and it’s well-worth learning.
I’ve had people book into my calendar from one social post. Many times I’ve had people book into my calendar from watching one Facebook Live video.
More often though, people have watched a few videos or read a few posts or maybe gotten a series of emails before they book in for a session with me. Not everyone is ready straight away to purchase.
So it’s not just the words you put on the page, but it’s how you actually craft your content.
Are you speaking the language of your ideal client? Are you waking up their desires and speaking to them emotionally? This is one of the most important parts of great content. You need to be able to move people emotionally with your message.
2. Content alone is rarely enough to attract clients consistently
Content alone is rarely enough to consistently attract clients. Content plus presenting is the most potent combination to attract clients to you fast. Content is not there to convert. Content is there to attract, engage and remind people of you.
Conversion events are where you not only get someone’s attention, but you maintain their attention. You build trust and position yourself as an authority. You’re able to overcome people’s false beliefs, inspire people to action, and you’re able to get people emotional and feeling the energy that you just can’t get from a social media post.
There’s so much power to doing both content and presenting events. It’s multi-dimensional and it’s a series of steps.
If I was to condense it down to what has helped me the most over the past 5 years as a business coach, it’s the combination of creating compelling content and presenting and running conversion events.
You need the content to support the event. You need the event to contain your content. When you get it right, it’s a powerful combination.
You can’t do an event 5 days a week, but you can post content 5 days a week. You can’t do events all the time because they are exclusive.
So you’ve got content in between big events. This is a real winning strategy. So few people are actually willing to do this because it takes work. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme. It does take work.
But if you develop these skills, you never have to worry about money again, because you just keep getting better and better at these skills. You can go anywhere in the world and get clients and make money.
When you get the combination right, you’ve got an asset. You don’t have to keep creating endless posts over and over. You have a signature event that just gets better every time you craft it. It’s like a book. It becomes an asset.
People ask me how can I run a whole day online event? I never thought I could do a whole workshop online. But fortunately, with the pandemic have come some blessings also. One of these is doing online workshops and webinars.
We’ve realised how super accessible online events are. I’ve been running online full-day workshops for over a year now and they are incredible. I’ve been able to have people from other states, cities and countries attend my events, which I never could have done with live face-to-face events.
I’ve undertaken 6-day and 4-day courses online, where you are online for 10 hours a day. You have to take stretch breaks, have a little dance party and also have people connect in breakout rooms.
You need to have people actually doing things and participating during the event. No one wants to just sit and learn and be spoken at for 8 hours. You have to include people to participate.
If you do these events well you can connect up-close and personal with people, which you can’t necessarily do with a room full of people in a live event. You can build intimacy and get really personal with people that you can’t do in a massive live event.
One-day events are one of my favourite ways to build my business. You can give people so much value and help people. And it helps you to build trust with people more quickly.
3 – Content + Presenting = The Most Potent Combination To Attract Clients
Learning to create online events gives you a rock-solid strategy that you can rely on for your business. You just have to commit to learning how to do it.
Years ago I attended a conference and I remember watching all the speakers on stage and I thought that I want to be one of those speakers, instead of just watching them. But it takes facing and overcoming your fears.
When you can commit to creating more live presentations, like live video and live, online events, it takes away needless hours of churning out endless content.
So if you would like to know how to create really compelling content, how to run a profitable conversion event, and also how to set up a client attraction machine that is automated and seamless, I am sharing it all for FREE in my upcoming 1-day event on Saturday 15th May…
How To Attract A Steady Stream Of New Clients.
Find out more or register here
If you want to take a day to actually get things done in your business, not just learn information, but actually work on your business, this event is for you.
You don’t need to be an extrovert, you don’t need to be a techy. I’m not any of these. I was simply willing to learn, show up and take a risk, and present.
And that’s the key here. All you need is a willingness to do it, a willingness to help people, and a willingness to get over yourself!
Let’s be honest, it’s not about you, it’s about a message that you have to share.
The world needs you.
See you there!
Kat
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