Tag Archives: Content Marketing

This is a guest post by Leslie Bailey, a freelance writer in Indianapolis.

As a blogger and freelance writer, I receive dozens and dozens of press releases a week. About 98% of those are deleted…and that’s on a good day.

Despite what old-school public relations professionals might say, press releases are no longer the only way to get the attention of the media. Social media and modern marketing are far too strong of a driving force in this sector to ignore.

That’s not to say however, that press releases are a lost cause – if you handle them correctly.

Here are a few tips from my personal experience that will help you get the most out of your press release. Note: these tips may not apply in every situation; consider each case on an individual basis.

The easiest way to do this is by checking of the ‘Five Ws’ – Who, What, Where, When, W…and I don’t mean within the copy of your press release.

WHO

If you’re targeting a specific audience – what’s that? You’re just sending out mass emails? Let’s start over.

To get the most value out of a press release, consider reaching out to your subject in a personalized manner. No one wants to feel like they’re part of a cattle call. Unless a publicity email addresses me by name, I don’t read it.

Blogger, Madam, “Hi there” or my favorite yesterday, “Hi lovey!,” don’t count. Find out the person’s name and address them by such (be sure to spell it correctly!)

WHAT

What does the person who you’re contacting cover? If you are trying to pitch the latest and greatest diaper, you should probably note that I don’t have children and have never written anything related to babies. Look at media contact’s previous or recent work to see what topics they usually write about.

WHERE

Where are you sending this press release? Make sure it’s the subjects preferred method of communication. I’ve had people contact me through Facebook, Twitter, and other various platforms to ask for my email address. If they’d take a few minutes, they’d see it’s listed very clearly in several places.

WHEN

Timing is everything. If your media blast is concerning something Christmas related, it’s as effective to send it in July, as it would be to send it on Christmas Eve. As a blogger, I like a six-week lead but when it comes to print publications, the time varies. For a newspaper story, I need about four-weeks notice while something pointed for magazine, two and a half months. Each publication is different though so be sure to consider the timing of your release.

WHY

This is key not only within your content but also when considering your recipient. Why does this person care what you have to say? Referring back to the matter of ‘what’, a food writer isn’t going to care about the latest in fall fashions just as a fashion writer doesn’t care about the best place to create a Fantasy Sports Team.

IN CONCLUSION…

You’ll notice that all of these suggestions take TIME. Sure, you’re a busy person and you’re trying to get a message out to the greatest number of people possible but if you can’t take a moment to find out someone’s name, why do they want to spend hours covering your news? They won’t.

Do your research, make a friendly and personalized introduction and see how much further it takes you.

You can follow Leslie @Lesalina.

In April of 2009, Steve Blank and Eric Ries gave a presentation on Customer Development at a Startup2Startup Conference in Palo Alto, California. They called it The Customer Development Model, which stated that, “More startups fail from a lack of customers than from a failure of product development”.

But it’s not just startups, more companies fail from a lack of customers than from a lack of a great product, yet most of the time a company forms around a product and then tries to go out and find customers for that product. What if there was a way you could find the customers first, build a product for those customers, and then create a company? There is and it’s called Customer Development.

Customer Development is a rigorous methodology developed by Steve Blank to bring the scientific method to the typically chaotic, seemingly disorganized startup process. Blank’s first book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, detailed the Customer Development process and his second book, The Startup Owner’s Manual, is a step-by-step guide to building a successful startup, offering practical advice for any startup founder, entrepreneur, investor or educator.

According to Steve Blank, Customer Development involves four steps:

1. Customer Discovery – Create a hypotheses about who your customer might be and then ask those customers what they want, how they work, what they hate, and what they want more of.
2. Customer Validation - Develop a repeatable and scalable sales process. Only “earlyvangelists” are crazy enough to buy.
3. Customer Creation - After proof of sales, creation is where you “cross the chasm”. It is a strategy, not a tactic.
4. Company Building - (Re)build your company’s organization and management. Re-look at your mission.

But what if you’ve already started your company and you already have products? You can still use these same methods to find out who your target customer is, what they want, and how they talk in order to create custom marketing directly to them.

Steve Blank says, that “Customer Development is about testing the founder’s hypothesis about what constitutes product/market fit with the minimum feature set.” What is product/market fit? I would define product/market fit as the moment when the iterations of your product match the desires and needs of a market in a way that the customer would actually be mad at you if you didn’t let them have the product. Once you’ve achieved this state, it’s time to “fuel the engine” as Eric Ries says, and build it fast. This is the moment you’ll want to attract funding and start adding as many customers as possible (Customer Creation) in order to build a company. In this way, the entire company is built around the customer, not the [by]product.

Customer Discovery

Customer Discovery involves “getting out of the building” and doing Customer and Solution Interviews. Part of the Lean Startup methodology, which combines Customer Development and Agile Development to create a business model that values learning, these interviews are the best way to find out your customers wants and needs – so that you can solve them. Like Agile methodology, Lean methodology uses iterative processes and the Scientific Method to hypothesize, test, and learn in order to create a product that customers actually want before building it. Once they have this “product/market fit” they built it as fast as possible.

What are your customer’s pain points? What are they complaining about? Where do they hang out? What words do they use? It’s only when you know the answers to these questions that you can then determine if they are both able and willing to pay for the solution. The first part of that question is called a Customer Interview.

Here’s an example of a customer interview:

You “get out of the building” and meet with a potential customer in your market and ask them what sort of problems they run into on a daily basis. The business owner tells you about having too much spam in their email.

Now that you know the customer has a problem with too much spam, you create a hypothesis about what product might solve this problem for the customer and set up a second meeting called a Solution Interview to determine what the customer thinks of the solution, if they are willing to pay, and if they are able to pay for it.

Here’s an example of a solution interview:

You meet with the customer, present the solution to them, and ask if they would be willing to pay to have their spam reduced.

Write down any feedback you get because the point is not to sell the product at this point, the point is to learn as much as you can so you can go back and refine the product to create product/market fit. Even if you can’t change the product, you can still iterate your approach or how you you’re using the product to solve that problem. It could be that your product is a better answer to another problem or that a new product is needed.

Applying Customer Development and Lean Methodologies to Content Marketing

Joseph Dager, Lean Marketing consultant and author of Lean Marketing House, says that “Lean Sales and Marketing is about applying Customer Value to the Demand side of your business.”

If you’re solving clients problems you won’t have to do much marketing at all – the customers will seek you out. If they aren’t seeking you out, you might not be solving their problems. But how do you identify what your customers pain points are? The simplest answer is to ask your target client or existing client base what things are bothering them most and when you start to see a trend, you can start to ask if they’d be willing to pay for it to get fixed.

Content/Market Fit

We believe that content marketing is the best way to attract customers when marketing online.

We’ve adapted the customer development process for content marketing and developed a way to create content that achieves a product/market fit that we call content/market fit. We spend more time on content development so that our client’s customers find them. Why? Because the content we develop content that solves a problem for our client’s customers. Whenever they search for the problem they’re having, our client’s solutions are displayed as the answer. In this way, you’re working more in sync with Google’s goals of wanting to deliver the most relevant content to users seeking out answers to their problems.

We help business bloggers write content that answers their customer’s problems.

By spending more time finding out what problems your customers are having, you’ll spend less time in the customer creation process and more time making money in the company building process. How can Watershawl help you build your company? Contact us for one hour of free consultation. Just mention this code: CMF.

We did a small test to see what were some of the biggest problems business owners had and what we found was the biggest problem was “How to Get More Customers“

We know that in order to get more customers you must first figure out what your customers pain points are – find out what are the things they are complaining about that you can fix – and then determine if they are both able and willing to pay for them. The first part of that question is called a customer interview.

Here’s an example: a business owner complains of having too much spam in their email. You respond by creating or finding a product that helps the client reduce their spam and then asking the customer if they would be willing to pay to have their spam reduced. This is called a solution interview.

Customer and Solution Interviews are part of the Lean Startup methodology, which combines Customer Development and Agile Development to create a more sound Business Model that values learning. Agile and Lean both use iterative processes and the Scientific Method to hypothesize, test, and learn in order to create a product that customers actually want before building it. Once they have this “product/market fit” they built it as fast as possible. Erich Stauffer talks more about this cycle here.

If you’re solving clients problems you won’t have to do much marketing at all – the customers will seek you out. If they aren’t seeking you out, you might not be solving their problems.

How do you identify what your customers pain points are?

The simplest answer is to ask your target client or existing client base what things are bothering them most and when you start to see a trend, you can start to ask if they’d be willing to pay for it to get fixed.

A less effective, but quicker route is to find out where your customers are complaining or seeking out solutions online. A good way to do this is by using Google Discussion Search to search for problems people are sharing on forums and other discussion groups.

We did a test search with the term “my business” and this is what we found:

• My business keeps disappearing from Google Places
• I need a slogan for my business
• I need a logo for my Business and possibly a website
• I need help getting payments to my business
• What is the best CRM software for my business?
• Anyone using Dropbox for business file storage?
• I need a really good name for my business
• I need help with my business card
• A client owes my business money… what to do?
• Can I request to remove my business from Yelp / Qype?
• I need help getting my business off the ground
• How to promote a new site?
• How many of you have tried Offline Marketing ?
• What’s your most effective marketing method?
• What is the most important points of business?
• How to get more customers?

Once we started noticing a trend, we started recording things we could blog about, solutions for problems like which CRM is best, how to use Dropbox for your business, and how to promote a new website. Our first post is this post, which addresses the last question

How to Get More Customers?

1. Identify a need by asking or searching.
2. Find a solution for that need.
3. Ask potential clients if they would pay for that solution.
4. If so, write about it. If not, find a different problem or solution.
5. Once you’ve written about it, promote it using SEO.

Essentially you start out with Lean methodologies, then do content marketing, then finish with SEO. So the key to getting more customers is not SEO, it’s knowing you have a product that solves a problem AND people are willing and able to pay for and then writing up content about it on your “home base” and only then doing search engine optimization.