Ok, it’s not often I take such a strong stand on something, so get the popcorn at the ready for this one. There is an influx of ‘ready to go’ business tools everywhere you look. Whether it’s social media captions, blog posts, Canva templates and I’m going to give you a bit of a danger warning run down of where these ‘so called’ time saving practices can help your business and which ones are doing more harm than good!

You see content has the opportunity to be so powerful, driving lead generation & sales into your business (and work on auto pilot too!) So, it’s important to become purposeful & intentional about your content and get it right, rather than view it as a tick box exercise.

It’s time we step away from the ‘just get it done’ mentality and instead worked smarter to make business decisions that aren’t based solely on time saving, but also on the end result. 

Social Media Captions

Imagine if we were all running around with the same logos and colour palettes? You wouldn’t stand out, would you? So, when it comes to social media captions, don’t be tempted to let it slide.

Tone of voice & brand personality is one of the things that makes your company you… And if you’ve got copy and paste social media captions, you aren’t going to be showing any of that brilliant DNA of yours.

Sure you can “insert your offer here” or “insert your customer problem here” but if you honestly read it through, would it even show the smallest glimmer of your vibe? Nope.

If you struggle with idea generation, try social media prompts instead. This way your vibe can shine, you’ll stand out and you still save time. Or if you really struggle to write, speak with a copy writer who can take on the caption writing for you and do so in your tone of voice.

Blog posts

When it comes to sourcing blog posts for your website, make sure you’re getting them from a copywriter. Again for the same reason as the captions. Your tone of voice is part of your brand and if you’re using ‘cookie cutter’ posts that you’re adding a couple of lines to, not only are you missing the mark entirely, but Google frowns pretty heavily on duplicate content on websites.

Content isn’t just ‘stuff’. It’s helping lead generation and sales in your business for years to come… So, spend the right amount of time to put one together. It’s well worth the effort for both your audience and the search engines.

If blogging is something you struggle with, check out my FREE downloadable blogging checklist, to ensure every post you put out there is 100% supercharged and doing its best for you.

Canva Templates

I LOVE Canva, there’s no denying that… But when you’re using Canva, you have to make sure you brand any templates to your own colours and fonts. Don’t’ be tempted to fall down the time saving rabbit hole and use them ‘as they come’, because that’s when you start to look like everyone else and where’s the point in that. You’d have been as well saving your time and not bothering.

Even if you buy your Canva templates from Creative Market or Etsy… If they don’t come customised for you, take the time to do this (you just do it once) and even move the layout around a little. That way your brand stands out.

Not everyone is a natural born graphic designer, and that’s fine!  But get it right once and that time saving you were seeking is yours time and time again.

Looking for more ways to streamline your content strategy, then check out The Content Academy… My monthly membership for savvy business owners who want to scale online without the overwhelm.

For business owners, knowing how to generate leads consistently (and passively) can feel like the ultimate challenge.  Especially if you’re in a competitive market and it seems like everyone is offering lead magnets promising the world in exchange for that all important email address. So how can you stand out and have your ideal audience saying ‘heck yes!’ at your lead gen idea and have those email addresses consistently dropping into your sales funnel?

Solve their biggest problem

Don’t just throw an ‘ultimate guide to X’ together and create literally an ‘everything you know on the topic’ freebie. People don’t want the A to Z, what they want is the A to B. Show them how to solve something.

This doesn’t have to be an ebook either. This can be a webinar, masterclass video. Something you probably already have in your arsenal, you just don’t fully realise the potential yet.

Give a personalised experience

Ok, so this one isn’t so passive, but works really well.

Say you’re a social media manager, you could give someone a quick 5 min video review of their Instagram account. Make 3 simple, but massively transforming, suggestions about their account. This can take someone from freezing cold to asking where to sign up for your services in literally 24hrs.

Run an online quiz

Bring your brand personality alive with a fun (but effective) quiz. This is a fun way to get people to engage with you and is like those Cosmopolitan magazine quizzes you used to fill out in your 20’s!

This can be anything from ‘What Sex in the City Character are you” to something more linked to your offerings, like “What type of content planner are you?”… You get the idea! There’s a number of software’s you can use, but Typeform is really easy to get to grips with.

Industry experts interview

These are super popular… It shows great dedication to your business industry and your desire to help and support and gives a heap of value to your new audience.

Chances are you may already have some interviews you carried out on podcasts, YouTube videos or maybe even a Live that you saved to IGTV. Dig them out and use them as a way to start capturing leads in your business.

1 day access to X

Perhaps you have a course, or a membership. A great way to generate leads for that offering is to offer 1 days access for $1 or even free. I would highly recommend charging (even if it is just a dollar) to act as a micro commitment and detract the freebie hunters.

Or indeed if it Is a course, what about a taster module?

Templates

Templates are another great lead generation piece. Say you design Canva templates, or Adobe templates… Using these to attract people to join your email list will work wonders and also giving them a taste for what you can do for them.

Filters & presets

Similar to templates, if you’re a photographer or help improve their own photography skills at home, giving Lightroom presets or Photoshop actions, will save people soooooo much time! To give someone the gift of time, will really make them a super fan!

If you do use video transitions in Premiere Pro, or After Effects projects to do cool text, or even luts to colour grade… Again, people will LOVE YOU!

Sales email copy

This is another huge time saver for people. Not everyone is a natural born writer and can struggle to put together even an Insta caption, so imagine when it comes to sales copy on web pages or email sequences… Eek!

Giving your proven email sales sequence, or your sales page layout, will be a massive draw and have people signing up to your email list on the double!

Checklist

As humans, we love that satisfaction of being able to tick things off… Hugely satisfying. So offering people a checklist to support a ‘how to’ i.e how to audit your Instagram profile. Where people not only get the knowledge, but also the checklist to support it as they go about carrying it out. Really beneficial (and something people can use again and again)

Workbooks

Similar to checklists, a supporting workbook to a knowledge piece really adds value. Because if a lead magnet not only gives the information, but aids the execution of it, it’s one above what everyone else is doing. So look for opportunities to go one step further in your industry.

If you’d like more support with your lead generation process and learn how you can automate your sales cycle in your business… Check out The Content Academy, my membership for creative business owners to support you in setting up and running a successful sales cycle in your online business, so you can SOAR!

Content marketing is something that bamboozles many business owners & entrepreneurs. But once you understand the buying cycle, you will feel like you’ve put glasses on for the first time and you’ll be saying ‘ah ha’ when you finally realise just how powerful your content can be for you (and doing a lot of the hard work for you.)

It’s easy to get into a cycle of ‘showing’ just as a tick box exercise. Loosely showing people your products or services, perhaps what you had for lunch and marking it off on your to do list (hurrah!!)… But, that’s probably not getting you the result you expected – Hence why you’re reading this! So, let me tell you how you can unlock the power of your content and use it to properly support your business growth… Like the sound of that? Great!

First things first you’ll need to understand the buying cycle, which in short is the process (or cycle) people go through when they first realise they need what you sell and when they buy.

This can be simplified into 6 stages:

Which I like to simplify into my 3 stage D.N.A method – Discovery, Nurture, Action.

Now typically people focus on creating content for the awareness stage AKA “hey, look at me” and purchase “here’s what I sell”. But now that you see these different stages infront of you, you’re probably already thinking “ah ha”… Because what about that bit in the middle, right?

Here’s 3 things you need to think about when you’re planning content for these stages:

1. Are you attracting people with the right content?

So, sure you may well be used to going out with content that says “ here I am and here’s what I do”, but these days you need to think beyond that. You need to attract people in a way that really wows them.

Start thinking about the problems that your business solves for people. Make sure you get that across in your discovery content, to really grab attention and instantly relate to the people you want to attract.

i.e Instead of me saying “Hey I’m Pamela and I can help you with your marketing”… I could say “ Don’t you just hate it when you get to 4pm on a Friday and you’ve not posted a thig on social media”

The aim with this stage is to get them to say “Gosh, that’s me!”

2. Are you nurturing through your content?

So this is the bit people often forget about. These days it’s not enough to only provide content for discovery & action, because if you leave people to fill that nurture gap themselves, they’ll simply fill that gap with someone else’s content to help them consider & realise they have to buy a solution and you can lose the sale.

Start thinking about those problems you solve and start to provide valuable content that illustrates the ‘why’ and ‘how’ you solve that problem.

3. Are you selling through your content?

Now this is a default ‘easy grab’ option for quick content creation AKA “buy my thing”. But again go a step further here. Don’t just tell people what you sell & the price of it,… Tell them why they need it. Think testimonials from other customers, demonstrations, the transformation they’ll have… What the end result it AKA the utopia!

This is just one of the things we cover inside my 1:1 content coaching. Where we work together to create and implement simple & manageable marketing strategies for your business to help you scale online.