🎶🎶 Anchors aweigh, my boys! Anchors AWEIGH!!! 🎶🎶
Ok. Admittedly, that’s a little lame. 😂😂😂 But we can’t help it!! We are so excited to continue our series on the Anchor Theory 🛳⚓️🛳⚓️ – to help you kill your content marketing game by 🌊🌊🌊 flooding 🌊🌊🌊 your sales pipeline with easily created content!
Sound too good to be true? Well, if you can’t trust US, here at C+P, then who CAN you trust?
When’s the last time you’ve watched writing transition so smoothly – from the United States Navy and a classic 1945 flick starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, right into The Simpsons and a requisite mention of alcohol…?? 🍺🍷🥃
We think the answer is never, actually. 🤣
In all seriousness though. See what we did above? We bounced off our anchor content piece (our weekly podcast, the 4 AM Report) and created kooky-fun, rich-media-laden content, that probably has you still reading along wondering what’s next…which is TOTALLY on brand for us (er, if you hadn’t noticed).
This series we’re focusing on in November is all about how easy it is to spin the *EFF* out of your anchor content – and quickly and (relatively) easily end up with loads of related marketing content.
And this episode is all about sending a tsunami of content through your sales pipelines.
We share:
💫 Steps to widen your network – and stay in touch with – the type of people you WANT to work with.
💫 How to pour that tsunami of anchor content into your sales pipeline without getting spammy!
💫 And how to use email effectively by knowing your audience, and only sharing anchor content they’ll appreciate.
Oh. And an added bonus? Google LOVES that 👆👆👆 shizz. Like, a lot.
If you need a recap about what the Anchor Theory is, check out last week’s post on the blog.
Or, read on for a sampling of what we talked about this week!
The Spray and Pray Method is Gone
“If you take a look at our sales pipeline, for example, we rarely ever go in cold with something, it’s not like you can go strike up a conversation with someone and hit them up with like, ‘Hey! Here’s how much we charge to produce podcasts for a year!’ That’s not a successful sales process. We take two approaches, to sort of widening our network and staying in touch with the type of people that we want to work with. One is LinkedIn (or an alternative, whichever really, people could pick). And the second is that we use email to reach out to people through introductions and things. We’ll pull out specific points from some episodes, we tend to, at a top level, theme different things for different months. We have a digest – our newsletter – that goes out once a month. So, an overarching theme, then within that theme we’ll pull things from various interviews, we also have a blog post that goes with each episode, we have a bunch of social posts that make separate smaller (but still related) points. And we rarely have to rewrite something if we’re reaching out to someone, because we’ve already gotten to know them.”
Just say NO to Spam!
If we see a conversation on LinkedIn, something to do with podcasting, we’ll go and join it. We engage. We’re trying to develop relationships. Now, if you had to sit and write that ad hoc, on an ongoing basis, you’d be on LinkedIn all day, and feeling poorly about yourself! Not everyone can write on the fly like that. It’s exhausting. When you’re in that stress of, ‘What can I say that’s smart, and gets me noticed? And, you know, is concise and succinct? And that isn’t spammy?’ That can be exhausting, always trying to work your head around that. Instead, when you take the Anchor Theory/content approach, which is very based on ‘these are the things we’re talking about.’ And then you have a much more evolved, intelligent way of striking up conversation, as opposed to just being one sided, you know, going into a room and just shouting out! For instance, say someone’s talking on LinkedIn about the ROI of a podcast, you would see that, and you would chime in and comment. Like, ‘Oh, actually, we worked out an interesting way to measure ROI beyond just the numbers, a more qualitative, emotionally intelligent way to measure the ROI of our podcast!’ Then you could copy and paste a little bit out of that blog, (because you’ve already written about it) you take some of those key messages from the piece, you contribute to the conversation, and it seems really natural and organic.”
Take Time to Develop Relationships
You wouldn’t want to just dive right in (to a conversation) – if we’ve just discovered you on LinkedIn, we’re not going to immediately put a link in the comment. We’re going to nurture that relationship a little bit. Hopefully with commenting, posting, liking some things, maybe there’ll be some back and forth between other people in the thread, and then maybe it would be time to take it a step further. Then at that point, maybe we would direct them to something we had produced. This is NOT an immediate gratification game. It’s not something that could happen right away. It’s something you do need to work for. And you want to know your targets. Who do you want to get to know? And nurture? Say there’s a small business owner, the corporate lead someone else, right, we kind of create that little avatar – we thought about what their pain points are right now in fall 2020, their challenges, you know. Then we map out how we can help with these challenges and pain points. And then, we’ll look at our big, big, big collection of content that we’ve produced over the years, and we start mapping out pieces of content that we think would be appropriate for those audiences to see. So, we did take some time, we did some leg work, and you should do that type of targeted mapping too. Sort of ‘key message’ map your audience – who’s in my pipeline, who’s not, who would we like to see, what kinds of questions do they typically have in the process, and what might we have by the way of content, which can answer those questions, right? If you are B2B, going after a few specific targets, and a few specific industries, rolling up your sleeves, and engaging this way…the broadcast only model is basically dead, you need two-way communication, the conversation to bring them in now.”
You’re going to hear a lot more from us this month on the Anchor Theory, so start thinking about your own content, and the extendibility of it. There’s much more to learn about the sales pipeline in this episode as well, so have a listen if you can!
Check us out over on Apple Podcasts – subscribe to us – you won’t regret it!
Plus, if you’re losing sleep over a particular marketing/business related problem during this Covid-19 economic uncertainty, or if you have a guest idea on the topic, let us know. Drop us a line at C+P Digital.
And as always, sweet dreams…well, hopefully!
