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[Music] hello and welcome to the loudspeaker your definitive guide on how to scale your startup this first tip for every fintech startup is what the media and press saying about us how are we being perceived by these people peer students are any activities that allow you to engage with the audience i don't agree with the fact that all publicity is good publicity here is where we talk to communications professionals from all around the world to let you know what are the best practices and cool ideas that you can implement for your startups so will can you share with our listeners a brief explanation of who you are and what vertical content does please sure so again my name is will blesch and i'm the owner of vertical content which is a content marketing agency and what we do is we basically help businesses accelerate growth uh generate qualified leads convert those leads into sales find the right employees and reduce customer churn through affordable content marketing and that's what we do awesome you seem like a great guest for this episode because today we'll be looking at how to produce content that turns leads to sales and prior to this call we discussed a few points that you wanted to discuss and the first is know your audience like the back of your hand do extensive market research how can a business get to know that audience better and how should market research be conducted okay well i'm sure many people you know they've heard about the need to build out a customer avatar which is essentially you know a fictional character that embodies the major characteristics of the people most likely to purchase uh your product or service now you want to you know you want to be able to effectively target the people who are going to resonate with your brand it's the whole idea that you only need 1 000 true fans to be a six-figure earner um that was an idea that was put out by kevin kelly back in 2008 and it went something uh like this you know to to make a six-figure income you realistically only need 1 000 people to purchase 100 of product from you every year so you don't have to talk to everybody you have to talk to the right people at the right time with the right message and to do that you know you've gotta you kind of gotta dig deep you need to learn things like what's their world view do they lean left or right politically what are their beliefs about money about society about religion you need to get a handle on their hopes and on their fears you need to know what keeps them up at night worrying and you know sleepless um what are their beliefs about love and life and family some people might make fun of of some of those things but absolutely all of them can factor into a purchasing decision so in terms of carrying out that market research i'd say that one of the best ways to do that is to conduct a focus group you take people who are within your target uh audience's demographic and you then sit down with them and you talk to them one on one you get to know them you pay attention to the little things that they say and you record everything and by the way if you don't know how to get demographic info the u.s census bureau has a site that i think is called quick fax that you might want to check out anyway another way to get the information you need is to conduct paid surveys and if you're limited on budget then i would personally recommend doing some quick and dirty research by checking out forums and groups online you know you can learn a great deal by checking out posts in relevant linkedin or facebook groups and reddit subreddits people talk a lot and they say what's actually on their minds um another place you could find valuable information for free uh are sites like quora yeah i love reddit so definitely like you mentioning that um really resonates with me and i think that reddit is a fantastic place that if you find the right audience you'll get people that really do want to engage with you and discuss the things that you're interested in so it's just really knowing about like picking the right place and to be honest like you mentioned there are other places as well i mean i'm only mentioning that because um that's what i gravitate towards social media and that's what i'm familiar with but i also would love to ask you can you explain to our listeners why it's important to know the stages of a content marketing funnel and the stages of the buyer journey and what they entail sure so first of all the stages of a content marketing funnel are pretty much the stages of the buyer's journey um there's three stages which are awareness evaluation and conversion sometimes these are also called awareness consideration and decision but they're all pretty much talking about the same thing they're just using different terminology some content marketing funnels add in a couple more stages which are loyalty and advocacy and these essentially happen after someone has made the purchase and they have become a loyal customer and a raving fan now before someone can buy from you they have to become aware that your company and your product exist the awareness stage is basically at the top of the content marketing funnel and content made for it is designed specifically to just make people aware that hey we're in the market and this is what we do the evaluation stage occurs after someone becomes aware and they're trying to make up their minds about whether to purchase from you or from a competitor or whether they need what you you know what you offer at all content made for this stage is designed to educate the customer more deeply about the products or services that you offer now here's where you can take kind of a deep dive and discuss the importance of particular offerings your benefits and features and then compare and contrast them to other similar things on the market and then there's the conversion or decision making stage which is at the bottom of the funnel where customers already know about you and your offerings and content that you make assumes that knowledge its whole purpose is to push the customer into making a purchase decision i think you did a really good job of summarizing that there because we had a whole episode of that dedicated on the previous episode where we talked about um top of the funnel to bottom of the funnel we analyzed the whole uh funnel in each stage and that was a nice little summary but if anyone is listening and they want to get more in-depth uh analysis then definitely check out that previous episode if you're interested in seeing how publicized can grow your startup sign up for a free pr assessment on our website and for a limited time only exclusively for the loudspeaker listeners you can receive an seo assessment as part of your package for any tier of service at no extra charge with this special promotion to find out more visit publicized.com ls promo for my next question to you i would love to know what advice do you have when it comes to recruiting or sourcing writers because obviously you want to put the best content out there and that's going to take some like top level skill and talent when it comes to to writing if we're looking at writing specifically sure well i'm kind of prejudiced on this issue um i think that there are clear benefits to working with a content marketing agency like mine for a number of reasons that include being able to work with writers who are specialists in the industry you have what amounts to one-stop shopping you don't have to pay salary or benefits work is guaranteed and the value that you receive can be considered a long-term asset to your business with that said though there are a lot of different places you can find freelancers online there's some rather popular platforms out there that i won't name because i don't personally like them i think they're a race to the bottom for the writers who are on them and i believe the services that riders provide should be valued uh you know way more than many business owners actually do you know writers uh rarely get paid what they're actually worth and if you're talking about hiring an employee to be a writer um again you can find quality people on many of the major job sites out there a better bet though would be to niche down to whatever industry you're in and do a simple google search who comes up when you hit enter you'll likely find people you know that are that are highly qualified um who are specialists in uh your specific industry like what you know whether you're high tech biotech whatever you can find writers who specialize specifically in what you do whether they want to join your staff is another question entirely yeah i thought that was quite funny about how you mentioned those sites that we won't name because i started my career in content creation on those sites however i will say i completely agree with you and back then it was fine because i was getting started as a writer and i just accepted whatever i could get but it is very much a race to the bottom and i think that that's kind of reflective of like where i was at on my journey you're going to get those people that are just starting off that maybe don't have the the most expertise or maybe they don't have the skills if if you're looking to to get writers as a result of like just focusing on price and just going to to the bottom so i completely agree now that i've i've spent years within content creation i've seen that happen and yeah i think you're absolutely right there now i want to ask you what should be the overall tone of the content you are writing and how should that be decided i think that all comes back to knowing your audience you know you're not going to talk to vegans and people who believe in the corporate values of facebook the same way that you would talk to people who went and joined parlor or who are survivalists right your tone of voice needs to match the mentality and the world view of the people that you're trying to reach um and that kind of goes back to the whole you know talking about the you know finding the right kind of writers um you need to find people who are going to be able to match um your your corporate tone um to the people who are going to want to actually buy the stuff that you sell yeah i think that can sometimes be hard to nail down perhaps but like you said it all comes back to knowing your audience and the avatar and then once you've got that that focus group i'm pretty sure that would be uh easier to nail down yeah finally i would like to talk about ctas a call to action what should this look like and what should it ask of the prospect well i think you you just need to let your prospective buyer know what to do next that's your whole call to action but i also think you need to stay away from being boring um everyone in their neighbor has stuff on their websites um on their you know their their buttons throughout their websites whenever you're trying to get somebody to buy something and all they say is like buy now click here call today and uh if you use that stuff you know that's fine those things are in the market because they do work but it's way better i believe to be as clear as possible you know uh you could try something instead of just buy now you could say like buy now because this sale ends at midnight tonight or um instead of just click here you could be click here to download that whatever amazing thing you know you really wanted to learn about um click here to do that um or instead of just a call today you could be call today and get 50 million dollars off on your next purchase of whatever your call to action should be clear on the purpose you know it needs to it needs to show why they should be doing whatever it is that you want them to be doing um and then it should always tell the buyer what to do next you have those two things in your call to action then you've got a pretty good call to action yeah they seem like pretty strong components i have to say i've definitely fallen for uh or not fallen i would say but the by now before midnight offer i think uh we can all relate to to that maybe if you're smart enough to see through these sorts of things then it might not get you but i do remember i think i bought a vpn and it had that offer of like by now before midnight or sale on today and i bought it and then i went onto the site next day and had the same thing so it just seems like every day it just cycled through the sale is going to end today and it's just going to count down until midnight and then just starts again i guess now well i'd love to know if people do want to get in touch with you and reach out and like use your service perhaps for content or just keep up to date with what you're doing on social media how can they do that uh actually they can find me on linkedin number one um just you know you can just type in my name which is william blesch um i think i'm the only william blesch on linkedin so that that helps but then you can also come to my website to my business website which is .verticalcontent and you can learn all about what we do and how we help businesses there we will include links in the description there and i just want to say thank you for joining me today will sam thank you so much for having me [Music] you