How to Create Content Your Buyers Actually Need [Endless Customers Podcast Ep. 3]

This transcript has been generated by AI and not checked for accuracy. 

you think about empathy for the questions worries fears issues concerns the buyer has yeah this is often times The Great Divide between the companies that crush with their online marketing certainly they ask you answer versus the ones that do not

welcome back to the show my name is Alex Winter and we are joined today by a keynote speaker bestselling author partner here at impact as well as a few other businesses Marcus Sheridan welcome back to the show 

welcome back here we go again right here we go again I love having you on the show thanks for being here yeah man let's do this let's do it so today we're talking about content and specifically content that your buyers or potential buyers actually care about so I think this is a really important topic because most people think all their content matters and everything that they put out is going to change the world and is going to drive business and do all the stuff and all the things right but that's not always always the case and it's not totally true so what does it mean when we talk about content that actually matters and that's really going to drive revenue and meet your customers where they are yeah I mean you know if you look at today we have more types of content than we've ever had and in fact you know when I started with they ask you answer myself with my company 2009 MH um short form video vertical video didn't exist there wasn't such a thing right right and so we've really evolved uh so in so many ways we've been ticktock ified right as a society yeah attention spans are shorter attention spans like you know people are less patient right I mean attention spans are actually still the same scientifically it's just that we're less patient as a people and what's what's what's going on is we have trained our brains to like they it wants IM immediacy immediacy but that's mainly when we're just passively viewing content when we're buying something when we're looking for something when we're researching company something we don't have the Tik Tock brain at that point most of the time what we're looking for is the answer to our very specific questions our fears our worries our concerns when someone is looking to become the voice of trust in their space and really get serious about content you have to start with that mindset would our buyer actually want to know this one way that you can also almost do a litus test if you will for this is does our sales team deal with this question right now if they don't deal with the question well then there's a pretty good chance it's not a priority especially at first what do I mean by that so let's say I was a pool guy back in the day because I was right right if I had written an article or made a video that was five fun games to play in your fiberglass swimming pool it might have done fine people might have read it it might have been enjoyable but guess what nobody ever and I did like thousands of sales appointments seriously in my time as a pool guy no one ever said to me Marcus what like some fun games I can play in my swimming pool so if they didn't ask me that as a salesperson that's not content I'm going to put on my website at least most of the time if you're trying to increase trust traffic leads and sales right now if you just want traffic and eyeballs which there's not anything necessarily wrong with that if you want to do something on Tik Tok that's really creative or something like that try to get that Viral effect viral effect mhm then yeah do something really creative you know take a baseball bat to your fiberglass pool shell and so show people how strong it is that that's fine that's fine sure but that's I'm not going to use that necessarily in a sales appointment right and so you want to start with the questions that your sales team is actually dealing with and of course you want to start with the big five I mean the big five is Magic yeah what is the big five especially for our viewers and listeners that don't know or haven't heard of that before can you just give us a quick snapshot of what that is the big five and we've seen this at impact are the five subjects that buyers most consistently research when they're making a buying decision B2B B Toc MH so as buyers consumers if I said to you if you're listening to this right now what's something you always research when you're looking into a product or service a company you're going to say price probably immediately you're going to say reviews probably immediately those are the top two that people immediately say yeah so those are two of the big five the other big fives are we got number one cost and price number two we've got problems and what that means is fears negatives worries concerns okay so any problem is when the buyer gets serious about buying something what happens in our mind is um if I do make this purchase if I do make this decision how could it blow up in my face right okay so for example the pros and the cons yes what are the problems with a fiberglass pool are fiberglass pools ugly right that's a problem right right is a fiberglass pool going to pop out of the ground right is it going to crack and leak or something all right number three comparisons we love to compare man so versus comparisons think about how many times you've been online and you compared One Thing versus another that's my favorite feature on Amazon is looking at the different yeah it's your it's your go-to right yeah we like to be able to stack stuff up against each other so as to so as to really feel like okay I've done my due diligence here right then number four we've got reviews thing about reviews is we don't just want to see positive reviews we want to see The Good the Bad and the Ugly we also want to know who's it for who's it not for and then who's it not for that's one of the most powerful and almost no one does it that's true people tend to shy away from those those types of comments and questions that's right almost Nobody Does it and um you know uh perfect case point yesterday I was actually talking I was speaking at an event and I was uh I was picking on this Automotive dealer because he has a good sales system and they do a lot of video and I said but there's one thing you haven't done when you do a review y'all are like everybody else in the automotive space and that is you give us all the reasons why the car is awesome but you don't say now let me explain to you who this car isn't necessarily a good fit for right and I asked the audience yesterday when I was speaking with them if a salesperson said now let me explain to you who this wouldn't be a good fit for what would happen in terms of your emotion towards that salesperson everybody's like oh I totally would trust a guy trust them way more yeah way more absolutely yes and then I looked at the person I said so does your team do that he said no no we don't right and so that's that's the Great Divide so we've got cost problems comparisons reviews reviews and then we've got best and best of course is anything where we're looking to rank anything where we're looking for extremes ranges so could be best could be most could be top could be loudest could be quietest right like what's the what's the best TV I can buy right now or what's the best refrigerator what insert whatever that's right so any any extreme right any anything that we can rate or scale out but we just call that best and everybody's listening to this has searched best plus a phrase thousands of time probably by this point on Google so those are the big five and here's what's interesting buyers are obsessed with it they want to know it businesses as a whole don't want to talk about it so it creates a paradox of once and this is why most companies don't resonate with the marketplace this is why your website traffic probably isn't growing this is why you're not getting the leads that you'd like to have from your website because you're not talking about that which they really want to know you know one question I love to ask audiences when we look at the big five I say what percentage of your website right now the content on your website relates to those five things right there and the average person will say less than 10% less than 10% and it needs to be in that 60 to 70% range if you're going to become that big-time thought leader that go-to voice of trust in your industry okay you need to be in that range because amongst those five alone there's literally hundreds of potential question questions searches queries articles videos that you could be producing that are going to help people get closer to making a buying decision so how How could somebody this is fascinating I love this How could somebody that's a marketer or on the marketing team or even businesses small business whatever size business you have how can you tell the difference and how can you start to make content that's in and around the big five and not content that doesn't matter that's weak for instance yeah well you you get very specific and you say okay let's uh let's take each product we have or each service we have and then you start with the first of the big five and you brainstorm all the cost questions around that particular product or service you can go all the way through the big five now when we do a brainstorm with a client at impact we guide them through this process because a lot of times people screw this up we add a couple of other subject areas that that really um we find also resonate well in the marketplace which is how to how do questions and what type of question like what is questions got so you've got the big five plus two how and what style questions okay and then you do a brainstorm now what's great about this is you could go to chat GPT right now and you could say Okay chat GPT I want you to follow Marcus sheridans they ask you answer methodology I want you to do a brainstorm of potential uh search queries that people would have online and therefore blog articles titles that have to do with choose your service or product and I want you to specifically focus on subjects around cost price comparisons reviews things talking about problems fears Etc that someone would have that they would ask about with respect to that product or service okay now you can do that and and then give it a number and I want you to come up with at least 50 ideas you're going to be like oh my goodness this is amazing in terms of a Content ideation tool man tools like chat gbt AI they're amazing for that they're actually very very effective just give it the right prompts that and that's the key because I think sometimes the excuse is well I'm not a writer or oh I that's not my forte I'm not really well versed in this and there are tools now with AI that really can help you get 90% of the way there because I think another thing too is you shouldn't just copy and paste right out of GPT you should still try to make it in your own voice and that's why I'm you know generally speaking what I am a big believer in is you can first do the brainstorm that we just discussed with your sales team and subject matter experts without the help of AI then you bring in AI after that because doing the exercise as a team is very smart because it gets everybody thinking like a buyer it's actually very very healthy to do and plus then they just get more excited take more ownership about it so then you can use the AI and then when you're when you produce the content go to the subject matter expert first because what we're going to see more and more o more and more of is generic answers to generic questions what does AI not do a great job of let's say you went to chat GPT and you got it to write an article and the article was about how much does the fiberglass pool cost right well uh it's going to give you probably a decent explanation but it ain't going to tell you no stories right and it's not going to be human sounding right it's missing that human element yeah so what you need to learn to do is you really need to learn to integrate that human voice MH it sounds something like this you know one of the questions we get here all the time at river pools is okay you know Marcus be honest how much is a fiberglass pool really going to cost me and if you've been researching fiberglass pools you probably know there's a huge range as to what you might spend one neighbor of yours spends 50,000 another neighbor spends 250,000 you're saying what's the difference can anybody just help me answer this question and give give me a solid budget well in this article we're going to do just that I mean we're going to explain what drives cost up what keeps cost down we're going to explain why some companies are expensive why some companies are cheap and then by the end you'll have a great sense as to what a fiberglass pool is going to cost you now I could have done that by the way for any product or any service in the world and would have sounded just like that right it didn't have anything to do with the fact that I used to sell pools I can do that for anything that's how you sound human that's how your content should sound your videos your articles because that's very human sounding it's very personal sounding the companies that get more and more personal in the future that content is going to resonate more with the marketplace and then when you integrate story into it like real stories of you your staff your customers experiences that's powerful right so you say well how would you integrate story into like a cost article I might say you know recently we gave a quote to one homeowner and it was for a very large pool but it came in at under $880,000 well how did it come in under under $80,000 well they didn't have a lot of additional expenses they got a very little bit of patio they didn't have uh any type of retaining walls you know and they kept it pretty basic they just wanted more space but not a lot of bells and whistles and that's an $80,000 pool right and so all of a sudden you're like okay and that's an actual story from a client you see GPT ain't going to do that for you right right and so you now which by the way you could actually prompt it to give you stories but For the Love of All that's pure and holy don't please just don't just don't don't do that make those stories your people make it specific to your area your geography the culture of where you are your industry your Niche right there's ways to send signals that a human wrote this so make sure you're doing that and people are going to be more and more hungry for that and if you look at like where YouTube is going they've come out and said with their algorithm we're looking for more and more content that says I did this that's what they they want to share real stories real experiences yeah it's true you said something earlier too that really resonated with me and it's just thinking about the buyer and really getting into their shoes so for the sales team for the marketing team or the Rue Squad if they're really functioning optimally to think like the buyer and I feel like that's not something that a lot of companies do so can you talk a little bit about when we're we're positioning content that actually matters it really comes back to like you have to think and be in your buyer shoes yeah like when you think about empathy for the questions worries fears issues concerns the buyer has yeah this is often times The Great Divide between the companies that crush with their online marketing certainly they ask you answer versus the ones that that do not some CEOs some organizations are so far out of touch with the way their buyer thinks that they just struggle to make that person feel like you get me you understand me that's exactly what I was thinking because those are the phrases they should be saying when they're consuming your content but often times what's going on we're trying to sound smart we're trying to be self-serving you know the moment you try to sound smart you start to look stupid to the marketplace I'm really serious about this you somebody once told me it's dumb not to dumb it down I didn't get that at first but it's so true like you want to communicate really well online just look for communion with your audience communion has the same root as communication bringing it together right understood and so right and knowing your audience because you would position an article I would imagine for let's say it's a medical group where you have a bunch of phds the language is going to be a lot different than if you're talking to a roofing company per se or or something that's more of a blue collar style job right yeah so it's you bring up a good point that's why like when you're doing a a video too especially you should see in your head who you're talking to you should know what that person is like essentially their their Avatar sure you know this is this matters because if you're talking to that person like you would in real life I'm going to speak differently to like you said a PhD than I would a fifth grader totally but both have their place right and it's knowing that how often do you as you interface with companies you coach and train a lot of companies do you see business own owners and sales teams that really think they know their audience and they couldn't be more wrong they they're telling themselves the story of like this is I know this this is how we need to do it and they could have they're missing the mark entirely I mean generally every single company we deal with underestimates their C their their buyer in terms of the information they're looking for how much they'll consume wow what they're specifically searching one activity I love to do especially with sales teams is we'll talk about the big five and then I'll say let's do some brainstorming with Google and we'll go on there and I'll say okay let's choose one of your products and we'll put their product in and then we'll put the word like verses afterwards and then we'll watch what Google does right and Google suddenly shows you like 10 different searches that people are doing where they're comparing this versus that and every's like what people are searching that they're saying that like yeah man that's the market right there right that's the market right but you see a lot of this comes down to the curse of knowledge because we're so informed and familiar with the thing that we sell the thing that we do we become less and less familiar with what it is to be an uninformed or ignorant buyer those that can maintain a sense an appreciation for ignorance and I really mean this they do the best when it comes to Marketing Online because they can resonate at the at the most basic way the most understood way with their ideal buyer with their ideal customer and that's pretty cool thing but a lot of people don't exercise that skill they don't take the time to get into it it's also why like like sometimes I'll do brainstorms with business owners about the questions that people have and I'll say okay so what are the biggest fears that your buyers have specifically how they search that online if they can't come up with an answer and this is not uncommon I'll say if you can't come up with an answer right now what's it mean and they have that like moment swallow the pill and like I've lost touch with the market like yes you have about time to go on a ride along with sales team you know what I mean so you have to constantly look to put yourself in the shoes of your audience extremely well said great advice um for everyone out there watching how can they get in touch with you if they have questions about the big five or if they want to just connect with what's going on in your world you can find me on LinkedIn on the socials I'm pretty good there so make sure we're connected you can email me Marcus Marcus sharon.com you can hire me to come speak at your event or to your team uh but either way I hope to see you if you're watching this at some point IRL in real life y'all thank you for shedding some light on how to create content that actually matters and thanks for being on the show love talking with you yeah my pleasure awesome and everyone out there thank you for watching we will see you on the next [Music] episode