Every piece of marketing content should do three things.
First, it needs to get the audience’s attention.
Second, it needs to keep the audience engaged all the way through to the end.
But if that’s all you do, it’s no different from any other type of content. The key difference between content and marketing content is that marketing content is designed with the very specific purpose of getting an audience to take action.
Even though the line between content and marketing content (or content marketing) is pretty blurry, there are some key differences coaches should be aware of.
Content is designed to be consumed by the audience. We see this in blog articles, YouTube videos, and podcasts. It’s entertaining or educational, and there’s nothing wrong with it. But, not all content is marketing content.
Marketing content is different because it’s designed to get the audience to take the next step with you.
Marketing content is content designed to sell your next step, whatever that next step may be. When you get it right, it’s unbelievably valuable.
The line between content and marketing has become really blurry. It’s nothing new, and you’ve probably heard me say this before. If you haven’t, then just look around you.
Take newspapers as an example. In the ‘olden days’ when everyone still read newspapers, you’d have a news story on one page and a very separate advertisement on the next. Sure, there were some smaller ads sprinkled throughout, but readers could immediately distinguish between ads and news stories.
Did you know that sales are almost never lost at end of sales meetings?
Most coaches don’t understand this, though. They put all their attention into the close and ignore the beginning. They think if they can only deliver the perfect pitch to the prospect at the end of the appointment, they’ll win them over.
It’s almost as if they’re presenting closing arguments in a courtroom to persuade a jury.
How twisted is that?
When a prospect hires you, what are they buying? Your product? Your program?
Sure, but only to a degree. When a prospect hires you, they’re really buying certainty.
Ultimately, certainty is a combination of clarity and confidence.
When a sales appointment doesn’t end in making a sale, it’s usually because the prospect doesn’t feel certain about you or your coaching program.
When a sales appointment doesn’t end with conversion, most coaches think there was a problem with the way they closed. They believe they must have done something wrong at the end or they’d have a new client.
The thing is, sales are almost never lost at the close — they’re lost at the very beginning.
On the last post, we introduced how important the first three to five minutes of a sales appointment are to making a sale at the end.
When a one-on-one sales appointment ends in rejection, it can be really frustrating. It’s completely natural to think back over the entire appointment to try and figure out where it went off the rails.
Did I say something wrong or offensive?
Did I appear too pushy at the close?
Was I too passive?
Most coaches replay the appointment in their minds and truly believe the sale must have been lost somewhere at the close — after all,
Hey Rockstar, Taki Moore here from Coach Marketing Machine. Live in Santa Monica. Today, I am going about how to wear the right underwear as a coach.
And we’ll be talking about how to wear the right underwear as a coach, specifically, how to design the perfect business model for you. So one of the risks we have often is we look around what other people are doing and blindly following someone else’s tactics. We end up following somebody else’s business model like how I started.
Thousands of studies have been conducted on consumer purchasing behavior. You can find hundreds of books on the subject of why people buy, why people don’t buy, and why people fail to make a decision at all.
The findings are really interesting, but if you want a detailed summary, go look for it somewhere else.
When you boil it all down to its essence, there are really only two reasons people don’t make a purchasing decision.