Month: July 2020

If you’re a social media manager, you need to plan out your entire month of posts. Never leave it to the last minute, trying to come up with new and exciting post ideas day by day.

By creating a social media content calendar, you ensure that all of your posts adhere to your content strategy.

But creating a social media content calendar takes skill and know-how. You need to understand what a social media calendar is, why it’s useful, and how you can go about making one.

What is a Social Media Content Calendar?

If you’re a social media content manager, the first thing that you need to know about your content calendar is that it is an incredibly helpful tool that will let you plan out your social postings on a monthly basis.

Here’s an example of a social media content calendar:

If you’re not already using a social media management tool, then a social media content calendar is usually an excel file, with various tabs assigned to different social platforms. Remember, the posting requirements differ based on the platform you’re using. Facebook has different restrictions than Twitter. Twitter restrictions will be different from Instagram, and so on.

One of the best features of a social media content calendar is that it can help you keep track of themed days of the month.

That can mean two different things.

You can create your own themed days, like Inspirational Mondays or Workspace Wednesdays. It’s a great idea to have these days because you can create a hashtag around them and see if they catch fire.

The other meaning behind themed days of the month is national days. Every day of the year is “National (Something) Day.” There’s everything from National Bunny Day to National Bread Day. Creating social media content based around these holidays can generate interest. Keeping track of them in your content calendar is a great way to plan around them.

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The social media content calendar helps you plan out your content and schedule ahead of time using a system. It can also help you keep track of the images you’re going to share, organizing them week by week and day by day.

Why Should You Use a Social Media Content Calendar?

Every business that wants to maximize their social media presence should be using a social media content calendar. There’s a reason that 92% of content marketing professionals use social calendars.

A social media content calendar can help you address the challenge of declining organic social media reach in two primary ways.

If you’ve tried to create a social media presence for your business, there’s one thing you probably noticed straight away…

Social media sites are crowded.

Every business is trying to get a piece of the social media pie. That’s because social media is the ideal marketing hunting ground. Practically every demographic has some kind of social media presence, from teens to senior citizens and everyone in between.

Because of this, the social media platforms themselves have seen dollar signs where business marketing is concerned. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t make any money if your organic post goes viral. Facebook and other social media giants want you to pay to boost your posts and purchase ads. That’s how they make their money.

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This was confirmed by Zuckerberg himself in 2018, when he publicly stated that Facebook users would be seeing fewer organic posts from businesses and brands.

One of the only ways to get noticed with organic posting is to approach your social media strategy with a plan.

And a content calendar helps you keep track of that plan.

The social media calendar will help you keep to schedule, a crucial element if you’re looking to make a splash in the social media world. Remember, the more consistently you post, the better your exposure will be. Customers get used to regular postings, and will seek you out in time.

But in order to establish that routine, you have to post on a regular basis.

And you need to plan out your content platform by platform.

You need to keep track of what you are posting and where. The calendar represents an easy record that you can go back and look through.

This record also helps you figure out how you’re doing in terms of social content. If you have a huge influx of comments and follows, you’ll want to remember what you did in order to duplicate your results.

The calendar can help you determine where these spikes occurred and what content was going on each platform.

It’s also important to keep track of the time that you’re posting, and check your results. Remember, different platforms experience high traffic at different times. That means all of your posts should not go out at the same time across every channel.

Finally, another great benefit of a social media content calendar is that it can be easily shared with team members for convenient collaboration.

Creating a Social Media Content Calendar

Creating a social media content calendar takes a lot of effort. There are a number of steps you’ll have to take before you write the first line of content. There’s a massive amount of work that goes into creating the perfect social media strategy. Your calendar is just one part of that overall project.

Let’s look at the steps needed to make a social media content calendar one at a time and see where to begin.

Step 1: Information Gathering

You could consider the information-gathering stage of your social media content strategy to be an audit of your current social media needs.

In order to improve, you first have to figure out where you are, where you’ve been, and what’s preventing you from getting to where you want to be.

The first step to a good social media audit is determining which platforms you’re currently using and what level of success you’re seeing for all of them. You should take the time to review your results for at least the last six months and use them to rank all of your social media platforms in terms of success.

When you see all of this laid out before you, there’s a decision to be made. Moving forward, you need to decide if you’re going to eliminate anything from your lineup. For example, if you’re seeing no movement from Google+ whatsoever, try to figure out why that is. Are you not posting enough? Are you posting the wrong content? Are you posting at the wrong times?

Or is your audience not on that platform in large numbers?

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If you find that no matter what you do, Google+ just isn’t going to deliver, then it might be time to shut down your Google+ account, or at least put less effort into it.

It’s important to feed the strong, so if you’re getting a lot of interaction on Instagram, that’s where more of your effort (and by extension, marketing budget) should be going.

When you look at all of your social media accounts side by side, you should be contrasting and comparing them to one another.

Are these accounts uniform in terms of branding?

You need to present a united front when it comes to marketing. If your Twitter account looks wildly different from your Facebook, particularly your profile and header images, that could be jarring for potential customers. You want all of your branding to blend. That includes your social media sites and your website.

Do you have access to every account?

Sometimes when an account is neglected for a long period of time, an organization could misplace the login information. It’s important that you don’t have any duplicate pages sitting out there with outdated information. If customers were to search for your business and find that page, it makes you look bad.

When auditing your social media, you also need to figure out what kind of audience you’re reaching (if any) and what kind of audience you want to reach.

You should have a good handle on your ideal customer. Are you creating content specifically with them in mind?

Information on your demographic should be included in the social media content calendar. You can set that up as a static reminder in the heading of your document. That way you never forget who you’re speaking to when creating content.

Step 2: Demographic Study

When creating social media content to go in your calendar, there are a few key questions that you need to ask.

Who are your customers?

What do they want?

Once you understand the demographics you serve, you’ll be able to create better content that is geared specifically toward their interests. Once you’ve done that, it should be a simple matter to get them to participate in discussions.

Does your existing demo differ platform by platform? You need to figure out where the eyes of your audience are. Once you know that, put more effort into placing your content there. Don’t expect your customers to come to you. You have to go to them.

All of the content in your calendar should be tailored to each platform that you’re posting on. This is not a one size fits all approach. Content created for Twitter will differ from content created for Facebook.

Once you know what your audience is looking for and where they are looking, you can create tabs in your calendar file for each specific social media site.

Step 3: Create a regular schedule

The purpose of your social media calendar is to keep your posting to a schedule. Before you can start filling out content, you first have to decide what that schedule is.

How often are you going to post? That’s a question that can only be answered by understanding your audience. You don’t want to annoy them by popping up in their feed too often.

What time will you post?

As we mentioned above, this should differ on each platform, but (in general) here’s a good place to start:

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Step 4: Decide on Your Content Voice

What kind of content do you want to share? Should it be serious? Silly? Both? If you’re going to create both, what is the ratio you’re going for?

You also need to decide if you’re going to be creating posts that are designed more for engagement, and how often you are going to “shill” your products or services, if ever.

If your demographic seems open to creating user-generated content, you should invite that. Set up themed days for them to participate in. Try something like “Furry Friend Fridays,” where your Fans or Followers can post pictures of their pets.

Step 5: Create a Database of Content

Collect a library of useful articles, images, and concepts to share with your audience. Keep them in a folder and be ready to pop them into the calendar at a moment’s notice.

When you list this content, make sure that you mark any time-specific information. You don’t want to sit on a good article only to have so much time pass that it’s no longer relevant.

Step 6: Add the Content

Once you know when to post and what you’re going to post, it’s time to input all of that information into your calendar. You should have a set time where you do this every month.

For example, you could take the last week of the month to create a calendar for the next month. This ensures that you won’t forget to create the content and have to scramble to be ready for the month ahead.

Consistency is important in your preparation as well as your posting.

Step 8: Share Your Calendar

Make sure that you’re sharing your calendar with your supervisors and colleagues. That presents an opportunity to get feedback from the rest of your team.

Make adjustments to your content strategy based on calendar feedback. Sometimes it’s hard to critique yourself, and the people you work with might see things from a different perspective. Ask the sales team for advice. They speak with your audience on a more frequent basis and should have a good handle on what they’re looking for.

Helpful Tools

If you need a helping hand in getting started with your social media calendar, there are a number of online tools that you can turn to that will help you get moving in the right direction.

You’re going to want to use a pre-made template for your first calendar.

Here is a list of four templates that could help you get started.

• Hubspot Template
• com Template
• SmartSheet Templates
• Small Biz Trends Template

In Conclusion

All up and coming social media content managers need to develop a system.

And the most effective and widely-used system in play is a social media content calendar.

By inputting all of your social information ahead of time and keeping it organized, you’ll start seeing increased engagement and higher levels of brand awareness in no time.

The post How to Create a Social Media Content Calendar appeared first on HigherVisibility.

It’s been one heck of a year, and we’re only halfway through. Businesses are struggling in the pandemic, and there’s no clear end in sight to this period of chaos. Companies big and small need to figure out how they’ll continue growing and generating income.

But typical approaches to marketing and advertising are just not going to work.

Why? Because people’s needs have shifted drastically, and people are used to personalized marketing. A look at actual search trends over the last few months, compared to previous years, shows that interests across the board have shifted. So even if you’re hitting up the right audience, you may not have a clear understanding of what they actually need right now.

So what can you do to market effectively with an audience that is harder to connect with now?

Draw inspiration from an unexpected source: nonprofits.

I want to look at three staple nonprofit marketing channels that any business can adopt:

1. Nonprofit storytelling methods
2. Nonprofit email marketing
3. Nonprofit social media marketing

But first, let’s talk more about what defines nonprofit marketing.

What makes nonprofit marketing so special?

Nonprofits marketing takes place with limited resources, small teams of individuals performing multiple roles, and lots of competition (every other nonprofit that needs donations).

In that way, nonprofits are very much like start-ups or small businesses. These organizations need to do a lot with very little.

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On top of that, what they “sell” is immaterial: a social good. You can’t hold it, you can’t use it, and as a donor, there is usually no direct benefit to you.

So what makes nonprofits so effective at marketing? Their ability to connect on an emotional level. It’s arguably easier for nonprofits to connect with their audiences emotionally since these organizations serve a social good.

Still, every business has the ability to connect on a deeper level with their audiences, too. If that’s something your brand has struggled with before, now is definitely the time to take some notes!

Nonprofit storytelling

Storytelling is an effective way to communicate information. Data and statistics by themselves don’t evoke a lasting emotional response the way stories do. And winning people over emotionally is what makes them care about a cause. Or in the case of a business, its product or service.

Every product has a story behind it. A person who faced a problem, then discovered the product that was the perfect solution, and went on to experience oodles of success. Now, how do you tell a good story? Through visuals! I want to show you two very different examples. First, the World Bicycle Relief and its video on helping dairy farmers. Take a look.

Let’s break down the narrative to understand how World Bicycle Relief gets its message across.

A breakdown of the narrative

First, we are introduced to people who have a job to do. They face a challenge that they cannot overcome on their own. Then with the right tool—a bicycle—they succeed. With access to this bicycle, more things begin to fall in place. People can grow their cooperative, increase productivity and improve more lives. The initial benefit of the bicycle is compounded.

Why it works

Seeing real people describe this journey and their experiences moves us emotionally. We experience the feelings they do as they describe the impact a bike had on their lives. That sense of transformation and hope is something we enjoy as well, which is why the video sticks.

So how many bikes did World Bicycle Relief give out? In 2018 alone, World Bicycle Relief fund distributed 54,896 bikes around the world by raising over $15M! Not too shabby …

Videos are not the only storytelling medium out there. In some cases, they may be a little costly to produce or you just don’t have the team capable of doing it. Not a problem!

Nonprofit infographics are great examples of how data visualization can be used to narrate a story, too.

Just take a look at this infographic from The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN):

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Personally, I love this infographic. The illustrated icons are great, the colors are warm and vibrant, the color palette itself is funky and creative. It’s a pleasure just to look at! It’s also easy to read and take in.

But it’s not just a gorgeous infographic, it’s packed with data and a clear narrative.

A breakdown of the narrative

First, you’re introduced to the amount of harm human activity is causing to oceans. The figures are just staggering. You’re sufficiently shocked and concerned.

Then, you’re presented with the value of oceans, their importance to our survival, our economy, and our way of life. These are things you may not have known before (I certainly didn’t). The ways oceans sustain us is tremendous and made undeniably relevant to anyone reading the infographic.

Then, a ray of light: The solution is presented to us. A major problem can be tackled through minor changes in habits. There is no call for donations or volunteers—just some new habits.

Why it works

The infographic takes on a problem so vast we can barely wrap our minds around it. But it frames the solution in a way that’s so simple, we can get behind it. That’s it!

How does this all relate to for-profit marketing?

Alright, so how does any of this carry over into marketing a product and generating revenue?

In the context of a business, storytelling needs to zero in on a problem pertinent to your target audience. There are problems that a majority of small-business executives face, that differ from the problems that start-up marketers face, or B2B sales executives face.

Storytelling in marketing is a three-step process:

1. Identify the issues your target audiences deal with.
2. Position your product as that solution.
3. Illustrate life after discovering your product.

That’s the narrative you want to construct.

Being able to capture the experience of your target market lets you establish an emotional connection. You show that you really understand the problem your potential customer faces, and you have created a solution specifically for them.

Demonstrating that level of understanding of your audience does the two things I mentioned earlier. It acknowledges the shift in priorities that your target audience is facing now, and it continues to be personalized and relevant to just them.

2. Nonprofit email marketing

Many businesses can get complacent with their email marketing. It’s natural. There are a lot of channels that can be optimized to increase sales and revenue, but only enough resources to focus on a few. Marketing teams are often small and setting up effective email funnels or improving existing ones is difficult.

But the reward for your efforts is certainly there.

Oberlo’s email marketing stats post shares some insightful data on the topic. The global average email open rate is around 20%, which doesn’t seem too bad. However, optimized emails can get close to 50% open rates!

Open rates aren’t enough to make your business swim—you need to engage your customers and get them to take actions. Personally, I like the approach taken by St. Baldrick’s Foundation, a nonprofit that funds pediatric cancer research.

What they do really well is prime me to expect more emails from them (genius!). Their emails typically mention that I can expect another email sharing more information.

Here’s an example of the first email I got from them.

Simple but effective, and here’s why.

First, it’s considerate and human. This email is like a friendly neighbor saying hello as you’re moving into a new place. There’s nothing marketing-focused or sales-y about it.

The second thing it does? It primes me to expect more emails about their organization and the work they do.

That’s important.

Priming in marketing is key. It prepares your audience to see more content from you. You’ve planted a seed. They’re expecting something, they’re curious, and so they’re more likely to be receptive to what you share.

As an organization, this gives you the freedom to break up your emails, rather than being overly general or trying to address too many specific things all at once. Instead, you have the freedom to build out a specific campaign the way you want, and your audience is okay with it.

This is an approach carried throughout St. Baldrick’s emails. The subject lines tell you what to expect (while keeping things casual).
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That one sentence gives St. Baldrick’s the flexibility to educate me in small, bite-sized, digestible emails without overwhelming me. They prime me to see more emails in my inbox and generate anticipation by not telling me everything all at once.

The email copy also primes and nudges me in small, but important ways.

Something small, like letting me know they’re breaking up their emails “over the next few days” is also thoughtful. They don’t want to overwhelm me with information. They also don’t want to ask me for anything without educating me about their organization, the work they do, and the value of that work, first.

Basically, they want to win me over and in a way that’s not aggressive. Most importantly,everything about this email feels personable, human and genuine.

As a business, you can also craft email copy that helps you establish a human connection. Constantly selling is never a good idea. Being patient, sharing information, and providing value are what really matter.

Testing is an email marketing best practice and should be ongoing. With a number of different email marketing tools like Moosend or Mailshake, you can track open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates and compare the way campaigns perform.

On that note, I want to revisit an old marketing approach popularized by the ever-awesome Gary Vaynerchuk.

Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook

As a business, you can make the mistake of constantly selling through email marketing. But with a thoughtfully constructed funnel, you’re also in a position to give.

This is an approach Gary Vaynerchuk outlines in his popular and still highly relevant book, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. It’s forever-relevant as a marketing approach.

By giving things for free repeatedly, you accomplish the following:

1. Demonstrate clear value to your business and product.
2. Establish trust and credibility.
3. Amplify the value of paid products or services.

Oh, and increase the chance of conversions! Can’t forget that.

As people get used to your content, your insights, your products or services, you ingratiate your business into people’s lives. They start using your stuff, they rely on your emails, they discover how helpful you are, and they get used to your content.

That’s when people will pay for more.

With a considerate, human approach to copywriting, paired with a habit of giving, your email marketing game will take off!

3. Nonprofit social media marketing

Social media for businesses is a great way to craft a brand voice and brand identity. It’s a space where you can highlight the real people powering your brand, encourage conversations, and share insights.It’s a space to share achievements, show off a little bit, and demonstrate your value.

Plenty of nonprofits rock at social media marketing, while keeping things simple. Let’s go through a few great examples.

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

Here’s a post from the ACLU’s Instagram account.

There’s so much to love in this post.

In honor of Pride, the ACLU chose to highlight their LGBTQ staff members. With just a simple post, we learn so much about one of the folks working at the ACLU. Gerardo Romo is far more relatable to us, than the ACLU is as an organization.

The post also encourages people to ask him questions. It’s a great way to drive engagement.

This gives people the opportunity to learn about Gerardo, ask him life questions, tough questions, technical questions, silly questions, everything. In this instance, Gerardo represents the ACLU brand, its culture, its values and its mission in all of his responses.

In the same way, your team members can humanize your brand and make it relatable. It’s also a way to position your team members as thought leaders in the space you own. Even if you’ve ran AMA sessions on Twitter or other platforms, consider chatting about topics that don’t tie directly into your business.

Girls Inc.

Take a look at this post.

This post from Girls Inc. is simple, mission-focused, and authentic. Delaney shares her personal experience coping with this pandemic and social distancing. She highlights Girls Inc. as an invaluable support system throughout this time.

What’s important about this post?It validates the organization’s commitment to its mission.

For a lot of businesses, the mission statement is just that—a statement, and oftentimes a vague one. But your mission statement is an objective that goes beyond revenue and sales, it is an ideal that propels a company forward, defines its culture, the people behind it and more.

Highlighting how your brand upholds its commitment to its mission can win over new customers, especially if existing customers can speak to that for you.

Water4Mercy

At some point, you have to go in with the right hook! But there are smart ways to do it. Water4Mercy’s post is simple.

It compares our level of privilege and entitlement on this side of the world, with the hardships of those in developing nations to elicit empathy.

And then it encourages you to donate.

Why compare those two types of experiences first?Well, we can relate to our own experiences more than we can with the experiences of others.And so what the post effectively communicates is the freedom you had at seven years old, these girls don’t. You can change that. Framing the ask with that kind of comparison helps people empathize.

In the same way, when you understand what your target audience experiences on a regular basis, you can use that to create comparisons. What they deal with right now, versus what they experience with your product or service.

Sharing statistics, data, trends, or just experiences that are unique to your target audience will get their attention. Framing the solution that your product or service provides in the context of their frustrating experiences has a greater impact.

Take these cues from nonprofit marketers

If there’s one thing to take away from these nonprofit marketing approaches, is that extra step many nonprofits take to really get a point across. Sometimes it’s through a compelling narrative that draws you in, at times it’s very genuine and personable copywriting, and other times it’s different ways to highlight the brand and its values (not just the work it does).

These are just a handful of nonprofit marketing examples that stood out to me, and I encourage you to start following nonprofit organizations on social media or subscribing to their email lists. If you already have, then start taking a closer look at how they position themselves and their marketing copy.

Remember, most nonprofits aren’t doing anything costly or complex. They don’t have the resources for that. They’re also not doing anything way out there, just typical content marketing approaches with a dash of ingenuity and authenticity.

About the author

Jeilan Devanesan is a content marketer at Venngage, the online graphic-design tool. He writes on nonprofit marketing, content marketing and visual communication. He has written for CMI, Clutch, Classy, Nonprofit Hub and other publications. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

Posted by BritneyMuller

SEO has become more important than ever, but it isn’t all meta tags and content. A huge part of the success you’ll see is tied up in the inevitable business negotiations. In this helpful Whiteboard Friday from August of 2018, our resident expert Britney Muller walks us through a bevy of smart tips and considerations that will strengthen your SEO negotiation skills, whether you’re a seasoned pro or a newbie to the practice.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. So today we are going over all things SEO negotiation, so starting to get into some of the business side of SEO. As most of you know, negotiation is all about leverage.

It’s what you have to offer and what the other side is looking to gain and leveraging that throughout the process. So something that you can go in and confidently talk about as SEOs is the fact that SEO has around 20X more opportunity than both mobile and desktop PPC combined.

This is a really, really big deal. It’s something that you can showcase. These are the stats to back it up. We will also link to the research to this down below. Good to kind of have that in your back pocket. Aside from this, you will obviously have your audit. So potential client, you’re looking to get this deal.

Get the most out of the SEO audit

☑ Highlight the opportunities, not the screw-ups

You’re going to do an audit, and something that I have always suggested is that instead of highlighting the things that the potential client is doing wrong, or screwed up, is to really highlight those opportunities. Start to get them excited about what it is that their site is capable of and that you could help them with. I think that sheds a really positive light and moves you in the right direction.

☑ Explain their competitive advantage

I think this is really interesting in many spaces where you can sort of say, “Okay, your competitors are here, and you’re currently here and this is why,”and to show them proof. That makes them feel as though you have a strong understanding of the landscape and can sort of help them get there.

☑ Emphasize quick wins

I almost didn’t put this in here because I think quick wins is sort of a sketchy term. Essentially, you really do want to showcase what it is you can do quickly, but you want to…

☑ Under-promise, over-deliver

You don’t want to lose trust or credibility with a potential client by overpromising something that you can’t deliver. Get off to the right start. Under-promise, over-deliver.

Smart negotiation tactics

☑ Do your research

Know everything you can about this clientPerhaps what deals they’ve done in the past, what agencies they’ve worked with. You can get all sorts of knowledge about that before going into negotiation that will really help you.

☑ Prioritize your terms

So all too often, people go into a negotiation thinking me, me, me, me, when really you also need to be thinking about, “Well, what am I willing to lose?What can I give up to reach a point that we can both agree on?” Really important to think about as you go in.

☑ Flinch!

This is a very old, funny negotiation tactic where when the other side counters, you flinch. You do this like flinch, and you go, “Oh, is that the best you can do?” It’s super silly. It might be used against you, in which case you can just say, “Nice flinch.” But it does tend to help you get better deals.

So take that with a grain of salt. But I look forward to your feedback down below. It’s so funny.

☑ Use the words “fair” and “comfortable”

The words “fair” and “comfortable” do really well in negotiations. These words are inarguable. You can’t argue with fair. “I want to do what is comfortable for us both. I want us both to reach terms that are fair.”

You want to use these terms to put the other side at ease and to also help bridge that gap where you can come out with a win-win situation.

☑ Never be the key decision maker

I see this all too often when people go off on their own, and instantly on their business cards and in their head and email they’re the CEO.

They are this. You don’t have to be that, and you sort of lose leverage when you are. When I owned my agency for six years, I enjoyed not being CEO. I liked having a board of directors that I could reach out to during a negotiation and not being the sole decision maker. Even if you feel that you are the sole decision maker, I know that there are people that care about you and that are looking out for your business that you could contact as sort of a business mentor, and you could use that in negotiation. You can use that to help you. Something to think about.

Tips for negotiation newbies

So for the newbies, a lot of you are probably like, “I can never go on my own. I can never do these things.” I’m from northern Minnesota. I have been super awkward about discussing money my whole life for any sort of business deal. If I could do it, I promise any one of you watching this can do it.

☑ Power pose!

I’m not kidding, promise. Some tips that I learned, when I had my agency, was to power pose before negotiations. So there’s a great TED talk on this that we can link to down below. I do this before most of my big speaking gigs, thanks to Mike Ramsey who told me to do this at SMX Advanced 3 years ago.

Go ahead and power pose. Feel good. Feel confident. Amp yourself up.

☑ Walk the walk

You’ve got to when it comes to some of these things and to just feel comfortable in that space.

☑ Good > perfect

Know that good is better than perfect. A lot of us are perfectionists, and we just have to execute good. Trying to be perfect will kill us all.

☑ Screw imposter syndrome

Many of the speakers that I go on different conference circuits with all struggle with this. It’s totally normal, but it’s good to acknowledge that it’s so silly. So to try to take that silly voice out of your head and start to feel good about the things that you are able to offer.

Take inspiration where you can find it

I highly suggest you check out Brian Tracy’s old-school negotiation podcasts. He has some old videos. They’re so good. But he talks about leverage all the time and has two really great examples that I love so much. One being jade merchants. So these jade merchants that would take out pieces of jade and they would watch people’s reactions piece by piece that they brought out.

So they knew what piece interested this person the most, and that would be the higher price. It was brilliant. Then the time constraints is he has an example of people doing business deals in China. When they landed, the Chinese would greet them and say, “Oh, can I see your return flight ticket? I just want to know when you’re leaving.”

They would not make a deal until that last second. The more you know about some of these leverage tactics, the more you can be aware of them if they were to be used against you or if you were to leverage something like that. Super interesting stuff.

Take the time to get to know their business

☑ Tie in ROI

Lastly, just really take the time to get to know someone’s business. It just shows that you care, and you’re able to prioritize what it is that you can deliver based on where they make the most money off of the products or services that they offer. That helps you tie in the ROI of the things that you can accomplish.

☑ Know the order of products/services that make them the most money

One real quick example was my previous company. We worked with plastic surgeons, and we really worked hard to understand that funnel of how people decide to get any sort of elective procedure. It came down to two things.

It was before and after photos and price. So we knew that we could optimize for those two things and do very well in their space. So showing that you care, going the extra mile, sort of tying all of these things together, I really hope this helps. I look forward to the feedback down below. I know this was a little bit different Whiteboard Friday, but I thought it would be a fun topic to cover.

So thank you so much for joining me on this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I will see you all soon. Bye.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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