A quick question for you….
Do you answer your customers’ questions on your website?
Actually, scrap that, do you answer your prospects’ questions?
Properly.
Questions about product range, what works best for whom, features, benefits, comparisons with competitors, even….dun, dun, durrrrrr…PRICE?!
Be honest, are you actually HELPING your prospects to make better buying decisions?
I have just been briefed to help write some USEFUL content around electric cars by the team at ElectriX – they understand that helping prospects leads to customers.
Look at their first question on their homepage…
| (also, if YOU have an electric car and would like to share your story with me and my client, drop me a line and you could be the next case study!) |
Is an electric car right for me?
Not sure if an electric car is right for you or your lifestyle?
Take our quiz and we’ll help you work out if you’re ready to go electric.
Do you see what they are doing? They are building TRUST (and a pipeline of leads).
Marketing gold-dust!
Or do you worry that if you dare speaketh the truth, your prospects may go elsewhere?
If that’s you (and I admit I have MAJOR room for improvement myself) you should read on to discover what I learned when meeting Marcus Sheridan, the author of “They Ask You Answer” and why you should get better at being useful.
If you STILL haven’t read this book, please do or, call me and I will explain it!
Then I will ask you to buy it. Again.
Not only will it potentially change the way you see marketing forever, it will also introduce you to the concept of Content Marketing and believe it or not, PR too.
That’s two crucial skills you can get to grips with in 2022.
I draw parallels with TAYA and PR because when PR is done well, it tends to use very similar tactics aka the Expert or Authority model.
This lifts your offering way above your competitors and can help you to carve a niche of your own. No more competing on price. Sound good?
As a journalist (before I moved to the Dark Side of The Force) I was constantly seeking fresh angles on stories. I also needed fresh faces, new tones of voice, different opinions and simply a new take on the topic.
Above all, I needed experts. Folk who knew their onions.
Step forward TAYA
If you take on board the principles that Marcus outlines, you should find yourself creating content that is actually REALLY USEFUL for people.
Believe it or not, proper PR is all about being just that, except you have two audiences to influence, your customer and your customer’s media outlet/s.
NEWSFLASH – A journalist’s role isn’t to promote you!
It is to sell their newspaper, website, show etc to their audience so they inform or entertain or both. Thus they can increase audience share and start to generate sales for the ads team.
The machine feeds itself.
The problem is, too many people ‘having a bash’ at PR don’t see where they fit into the relationship. In fact, they don’t see a relationship at all, they see an opportunity to sell.
Now, don’t get me wrong, that opportunity is there, you’re just going about it the wrong way.
Remember what PR stands for….Public RELATIONS.
So, to play the game, you need to start to give as well as take.
In this case, your offering is your NEWS (sometimes) and your VIEWS (increasingly common).
Think of newspapers as VIEWSPAPERS
The media needs experts.
Correction, it CRAVES experts.
They need professors, authors, speakers, business owners, consultants and all manner of other Talking Heads to interpret the news for the audience.
That is where you come in.
If you are an artisan baker, I don’t need to know about your snazzy new recipes BUT it would be really helpful to me if we could discuss the ‘rise’ of gluten-free loaves (excuse the pun).
If you are a butcher, you may have been impacted by people switching to diets with less meat as part of “veganuary”. You might also point out that people want MORE choice and transparency over provenance and quality over quantity as they seek better animal welfare.
So there’s a butcher and a baker, ‘what about a candlestick maker?’ I hear you cry!
Well, maybe you are partnering with artisan candle manufacturers (you should) or you are making them from recycled materials or you have seen a rise in enquiries from people wanting handcrafted seasonal decorations.
Do you see the pattern? You are adding value to the media, not trying to sneak in a sales pitch….even though you secretly are…shh!
It is this approach, being a really useful resource, that is at the heart of TAYA and once you grab that, you only have to tweak it a little to make it work in the media. Then it all gets VERY interesting!
If you are interested in how you can implement the TAYA principles into your PR or would like to learn more about how to become an authority figure in your industry, let’s set up a chat.
Here’s to 2022!