325: POCKET PR ESSENTIALS / Credibility before conversion - paving the way to a sale

Speaker A: Thank you for joining us here on Earn the Right, your audio platform for building reputation based authority. What we're all about is turning credibility into recognition and recognition into opportunity. This show is for credible founders, professional experts and solo practice owners who have earned their stripes and are ready to amplify their voice. The podcast is made up of four different tracks. Now, they're different tracks, but they are all interrelated. Today's track. Today's track is Pocket pr, uh Essentials. Think of Pocket PR Essentials as your audio playbook for mastering pr, uh, content and digital communications in a way that's strategic, sustainable and respectful. So let's get into this particular track. Pocket PR Essentials. Pocket PR Essentials. Episode number eight, Credibility before conversion. Paving the way to a sale in episode five and six. You might recall it was a double header and we focused on the vexed issue of marketing versus pr. The black, the white and the grey. Lots and lots of grey. In this particular episode, I'm going to revisit that theme in a general sense with a focus on the customer journey and how people buy today. Now, if you're running a business, particularly if you're in B2B business to business, or more specifically you run a services based business business, then it might be the case with you that the path to purchase for your clients or your customers can be somewhat, maybe complex or convoluted. I like to use the technical term zigzaggy. The fact of the matter is, you know, it's really hard to expect a client journey or a customer journey to be nice and linear and ticks all the boxes and goes down the sales and marketing funnel. It just doesn't work that way anymore. And I think a real problem is with businesses and with business owners. And I, I get it. I'll just preface this with I say I get it. There's often a, there's a, just a short termism, um, about running a business. And that means we need sales, we need sales, we need leads and sales now. And you know, there's going to be times when that is your imperative. And um, of course I'm not, you know, buying into that, you know, but I'm talking about if you're been established for a while, you're running, you know, your, your enterprise is a sustainable one. You, you know, you're, you want to grow though, and you need more leads and sales to keep things moving, to keep the lights on. We all do in business. But unfortunately sometimes when that's what we look at doing and we throw our Efforts behind, you know, our uh, short term bid to grow leads and sales. Unfortunately when we do that, we neglect the very things that underpin the achievement of those commercial goals that we so desperately seek. I'll give you five examples here. Number one is increased brand recognition and top of mind awareness. And not just surface level awareness, but recognizing your business for who you are, what you do, what audience you serve, the services or products you sell, and you know, what it is that you stand for as a leader of that business. Second one is enhanced personal or organizational reputation. Often in a small business it's both because you as the business owner, the leader, your professional, personal brand is just as important as the reputation of the business itself. Number um, three, growing influence and authority in the marketplace. Particularly being seen, you know, having as an authority in your area, your area of expertise, that's always going to be very, very important. Particularly again in uh, services based businesses. Heightened advocacy and loyalty among core buyers and influencers. And for a lot of you it might be the reinforcement of a uh, credible thought leadership or knowledge or industry leadership positioning in the marketplace or the community where you operate. So they're just some of the factors that I believe that act as forerunners to commercial outcomes. It's not just one, it's probably more a combination of a number of those factors and that acts as a solid forerunner to commercial success. Now of course these will differ from entity to entity, from business to business. It just really depends on how long you've been established for. What sort of products and services you uh, sell, how expensive are you, are those products and services you sell, what's the competition like around you? There are a lot of things that we need to consider, but as a general rule I need to talk in generalities to a large degree and I think you find that this is really the case that we need to do a lot more before the sale. I mentioned in one of the earlier episodes about before the funnel. If you're someone who believes in the marketing funnel and you know, there's a lot of, lot of people who do and there's a lot of reason to suggest that it still works today, albeit has its opponents. But I like to talk about before the funnel and everything that we talk about in this episode is really about building that ramp towards the sale, towards the customer journey, smoothing the path to purchase. I call this credibility before conversion, establishing our bona fides, before the calls to action and the, you know, the sales process begins. You may have also heard the phrase brand versus demand, similar sort of a concept Been around for a while and it started at the really big end of town around advertising. And do you spend, how much advertising do you spend? This is a big brand I'm talking about to build your brand. And you might see a lot of ads out there that are there to their brand building ads versus what you'd call demand generation ads. Ads designed to generate demand for businesses, products or services. So brand versus demand in your instance for a smaller business, same deal. How much effort do you put in brand and reputation versus how much effort do you put into demand generation? My uh, contention is that the whole brand and reputation side of things is something that you can be doing using PR content and digital communications. You can be doing this, this type of activity all year round, 365 days of the year. It just keeps going. And so what you're doing is particularly with content, you're building assets that will work for you over a period of time. And so by deepening relationships and building recognition for your brand and you know, uh, building relationships and growing, you know, your credibility in the marketplace, that's all part of the, I'm uh, using air quotes here, brand side of things. And therefore when we do the demand activities, the demand gen, when we're trying to convert prospects into paying clients and customers, that we do that in spikes of activity, think campaign like activity because it's really hard to go to market and be doing that all the time because you know, people don't want to be sold to you. You know, you really want to be, you know, making sure that if you do go out with demand gen activities, that if people check you out and they're going to check you out, that your brand and reputation stands up to scrutiny and that they get a really good feeling about you and therefore they're going to be more open to, to doing business with you and therefore hopefully converting to become a client or a customer. So really what we're saying here is everything we talk about in this micro coaching program is really about paving the way for greater growth in leads and sales or whatever commercial transaction you're aiming for. And this requires all year round effort, not just campaign bursts. So you lock in on top the campaign activity onto your more brand and reputation built activities. So credibility before conversion, paving the way to a sale or if you want to think of it as brand building versus demand generation, that's a really good way to look at it. And once you get a good feel for the balance of all that, that's when you can start isolating the right activities that are going to do the best, the best results for your business. It.