Authority Content is defined as “the act of consistently creating and distributing helpful information and stories to gain the attention, engage and influence a clearly defined audience with the objective of identifying who would benefit from your products and services”. In this video David Jenyns introduces this type of content marketing.
Eager to learn more about Authority Content Marketing? Post your thoughts, comments and insights below. Check out our blog for more workshop recordings of Authority Content.
Video Transcript: This is where I want to introduce the idea of authority content marketing. I’ll read the definition. It’s the act of consistently creating and distributing helpful information and stories to gain the attention, engage and influence a clearly defined audience with the objective of identifying who would benefit from your products and services. Let’s unpack that a little bit.
The act of consistently, so authorities do things consistently. Just doing one round of videos is not enough. You need to be dripping this content out. You need to be consistently posting blog posts, you need to be consistently engaging with your community. That consistency is key.
Distributing helpful information, so that is a big change for some of those old SEOers. We have to be creating the high quality material that answers people’s questions. This addresses effectively what Hummingbird is going after. So you need to create useful content and stories; you know I like a good story.
To get the attention, that is the first thing that we have to do. Then we need to engage someone so they continue to consume. Also influence, that idea of trust is important. We need to build up that trust of your defined audience. So we think about upfront and we’ll talk about, what content should we be creating that will be the seed that will feed all of these other things?
You need to think about who that target market is and create the most relevant content for them. I even like to swim up a little bit further upstream sometimes. I’ll think about, what would someone be thinking about just prior to them becoming my client? They might not be searching exactly for my business yet.
Maybe if I’m in the wedding industry and I’m an MC like Tim was talking about, I might be thinking about creating a fairytale wedding. How do I do a fairytale wedding? That might be the information I’m looking for. So you swim a little bit further upstream, create relevant content at that point, then you capture them early and build the trust. Then you can continue to market to them down here. We’ll talk about how to create that helpful content.
Obviously the objective here is to create useful and relevant content and build up that trust. We can’t help everybody in our business, we can only help some people. We want to identify those people we can help, those who would benefit from my products and services. That’s really key. You don’t want to be selling someone something if it’s not the right fit for them.
We’re in a transparent web here. If you send something to someone and it doesn’t fulfill their needs, and then you don’t have good customer service, that word spreads. Again, it comes back to the fundamentals of having good products or services.
I want to give you an example from a gentleman who is in the room right now. He called me up and we had this little bit of a discussion. The whole purpose of what we’re doing is we’re creating this good quality content, we’re building the trust so we can stay top of mind until the point at which someone is ready to do business with you. That’s what we’re doing. That’s why we consistently do it, so we’re front of mind.
What I want to do is become the trusted adviser and don’t always go for the sale if it’s wrong. This gentleman, Evan, called me up and we had this discussion. He was waiting for me to sell him on the idea of SEO and why he should get SEO services and why I should be selling him SEO services. I unsold him and we went in a completely different direction.
He said, that’s a bit weird, you didn’t sell me, because you thought you couldn’t help me. I said, do you want to hop on the line and let’s have a Skype recording? Let’s get a testimonial because I am collecting the proof whenever I can.
So at the breaks, we’ll start collecting videos. At lunchtime we’ll be getting testimonial videos. There will be prizes for people who join in with testimonials. I have a recording with Evan saying, Dave didn’t end up working with me because he didn’t think we were the right fit. That’s a testimonial that I have on my website. It’s basically saying, Dave wasn’t right for me. What a powerful testimonial!
Now Evan trusts me even more because he knows I don’t just do things just to make money. I do things because I know my integrity and what I say is important. In the transparent web and the world that we live in, you just need to make sure that you’re delivering.
At the core of this and we talked about the idea of video being that seed piece of content, video is central to this strategy. Whether it’s you who presents or whether it’s a spokesperson in your business or you get other presenters, at the moment if you think about windows of opportunity, video is still quite wide. It is closing, more and more people are doing videos. Just like SEO, there will be a point where it is not as effective as it used to be. But videos are still a great way for a variety of reasons, not just for traffic, but also for trust building.
I get so many people who pick up the phone and say, I feel like I already know you. They’ve watched twenty different videos of mine, they’ve been on my email list for six months, they’ve watched this and they’ve watched that. Just like Tim was saying, how he had people call up and say, can I call you Timbo, because that is the way he refers to himself on the podcast. People feel like they know you. To build up that trust, video is the best way to do it.
What is the biggest asset or the most important asset they we have? As humans, what is the most valuable asset that we have? Time. We can’t get the time back. Video is the only thing that I know that can duplicate you. If time is the limited asset, we can use video to duplicate us. This is why video is so powerful and important. You should be using video in every part of your business. Time is the most valuable asset, you can only point it in so many different directions.
We use it internally for documenting our systems and processes and procedures. When we set up the room for a shoot, there is a video of someone going around the studio showing how to set up the room. Someone can watch the video on how to set up the room rather than have me retell it. Not only that, I can do it perfectly once.
You can can and clone yourself. Get your best salesperson to give their best sales message and get that on the website. The traffic opportunity is closing. People used to talk about the idea of old school sales letters, direct mail as one of those things you could mail out because you get infinite scale. You can mail it out and you can get a sales message out to lots of different people and it’s your best salesman in print.
Learn how you can use the Authority Content Marketing System to improve your business. Visit www.authoritycontent.com now.