Sales & Marketing Authority, Bestselling Author & Business Motivational Speaker

As I write about constantly on this blog, the key to winning over new customers is providing them with something of value. If you write an informative blog post, your readers will be more likely to reshare it via social media. If you include a free guide with an email, it will be much more likely to be read. This begs the question – how can you ensure that you always have new content to work with? Read on to find out some surefire ways to keep your creative engine running.

Work Backwards

Don’t start by just trying to create content – you’ll quickly run out of ideas and find that you’re just rehashing the same information over and over again. Your readers definitely will not appreciate this. Instead, begin by defining your goals. Look at what you want to accomplish, then look at how much material you’ll need to meet those goals. So if one of your goals is to update your blog twice per week, then you know that you’ll need 104 blog updates to cover you for the next year.

Plan Ahead

The real key to making sure that you always have enough content is by creating a calendar, and planning out what types of content you’ll need. So think about how often you’ll need to write sales letters, blog postings, twitter updates, and the like, and determine what you’ll need to keep your marketing machine running for the duration of the calendar.

This also allows you to refurbish some old content. If you’re looking at your marketing calendar, and you notice that you have a four-month gap on your marketing blog where you don’t mention much about SEO, then its acceptable to take an old article about SEO and re-work to fit into the gap. This is substantially less work, in terms of creating new content, than writing a totally original posting.

Find Hooks

Some of these are easier than others. First make note of calendar events – Christmas, New Years, Summer Holiday, which you can use as hooks for subjects. Blog posts are meant to be timely and to-the-moment, so holidays are a great hook for a blog post. Additionally, note events coming up that are personal to you, and which can be used as article hooks. If you’ll be attending an industry conference in March, you’ll definitely want to write a couple of articles about what you learned while you were there. This is easy for you, and interesting for your readers.

The other key to finding hooks is making an intelligent plan to capture inspiration when you see it. Keep a pen and paper, or a smartphone, with you at all times, and jot down a quick note when you see something interesting that you might want to write about later on.

The idea behind any marketing campaign is building relationships. You’re building relationships with your existing customers, and building bridges to reach out to new customers. Now, anyone with even a bit of experience in marketing already knows this. The key is understanding how to build these relationships most effectively, and how to use those relationships to spread ideas and information – namely, the information about how your product can improve the lives of your potential customers.

Word of Mouth

The oldest tool in the bag of marketing tricks, word of mouth is still the most powerful marketing device out there. Always start any marketing campaign with the people who you already know – friends, acquaintances, and previous or existing customers.

By winning these groups over to your side with a powerful campaign, you essentially give your ideas the ability to go viral in the oldest sense of the word. Think about the last new restaurant that you tried. Was it because they had a great sign on the front door, or was it because a friend told you that they had a great lunch special? Probably the latter. When you really make an impact on someone, you essentially create a door through which you can win over their social and professional circle.

Make it Stick

The key to this is making your marketing messages stick, so that your targeted groups can share them with other potential customers. Accomplish this by making them relevant to your potential customers, and by making your information add some value to your customers’ lives. The classic example is a hotel that provides a free map of the area in which it’s located, and advertises for itself and for affiliates on the map.

Leverage Technology

Of course, the internet has made this all possible on a scale never before imaginable. The groups with which people now interact regularly number in the hundreds or thousands. This makes it possible for an intelligently-designed message to spread worldwide in a number of days. Use this technology to your advantage.

When you’re making a new marketing push, ensure that everything can be shared by your targeted customers. So send them an email that they would be interested in forwarding to their friends and associates, or write a blog post that they can easily re-share or recommend on a social networking site.

By combining the old marketing tools of word of mouth and message relevance with the latest internet and social networking technology, you can make keep the best of your years of experience, while making your marketing messages relevant and successful in the modern day.

Happy marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Marketing Consultant – Sales Expert - Motivational Speaker

Like most of you, I receive hundreds of emails every day, and even after I’ve deleted all the spam from my Inbox there’s still loads of emails hanging around day after day, week after week. Suddenly you realise that your email account is full to bursting and you’re struggling to find the important information in all of the backdated emails you’re hanging on to.

There are some real benefits to purging your vast sums of emails every now and again, mostly for your own sense of organisation and control. Not only can your important emails end up being lost in the vast sea of contact you’re holding on to, but you may also end up becoming backdated when trying to respond to all of the contact you receive every day. Starting afresh can help refocus your efforts and ensure that your email account doesn’t simply become a filing cabinet for every last email you have ever sent or received.

There are two ways you can declare email bankruptcy. One is to close the account in question entirely and open a new one, whilst the other way is to simply delete everything up until a certain date. Closing your account entirely and starting again takes far less time and hassle, but this may not be possible for some – so clearing the account up to a certain point is a great way of spring cleaning your emails and regaining some structure and organisation.

If you think you have reached a point where you need to purge all your emails and start again, then here are a few issues to consider before you press the almighty “Delete All” button and dismiss them all for good. 

It may be worth considering going through your account and moving any important emails into a safe folder – although this is completely dependent on the amount of emails you have been hording and how much time you have to dedicate to this. Usually this will be something you do as you go along, but it’s possible you may have missed something so double check if you can. 

A great way to look for important information is to search by name. You should be aware of who your most important conversations are held with in general and this should help you find any vital emails quickly without having to wade through them all.

It’s also worthwhile sending out an email to all of your contacts, explaining that their emails have been deleted and asking them to contact you again if they are still waiting for a response. Hopefully, you’ll have managed to respond to the majority, but in case you have missed anything important this should help you catch it the second time around.

When you feel like you’ve done all you can to ensure that you haven’t lost any important communications, it’s time to press “Delete All” and wipe the slate clean. Now, doesn’t that feel better?

Once you’ve cleared your account of all unnecessary items, you need to start to reorganise your email system so that this doesn’t have to be a monthly occurrence. A great tip for gaining more control over your email account is to immediately set up separate folders alongside you inbox, such as Colleagues, Clients, Leads, Important Info etc.

Then, when you start receiving emails again you can begin to file the important ones away into relevant categories – leaving all the irrelevant correspondence in you inbox to be deleted at the end of every week. Make it a ritual on a Friday afternoon, before you power down and leave the office, to file the important emails and cleanse the rest. These five minutes a week will save you having to shut down and start again several times a year.         

Remember, the “Delete All” button is a last resort to help you reorganise your workload, so in future make it easier on yourself to keep on top of things and prevent the necessity for declaring email bankruptcy at all.

Happy marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

(Image by Nokhoog Buchachon)

Marketing Consultant – Sales Expert - Motivational Speaker

It’s Sean’s Marketing Manager Louise here today. I thought I’d pop by today as I have some interesting news about Sean McPheat.

Sean has been named as one of the Top 25 Sales Influencers For 2012, which he is obviously thrilled about. The list has been produced by OpenView Labs, who have named their list of top influential sales leaders of today – and Sean has been put forward as an authority on lead generation and modern day selling.

Sean shares the limelight with the likes of The Sales Blog’s author Anthony Iannarino, thought leader Sharon Drew Morgan and best-selling author Jill Konrath. Sean has been tipped as an expert in his field and named as being one to look out for in 2012, so make sure you keep up to date with Sean’s blog this year to get your  fix of expert sales and marketing knowledge from the man in the know.  

Happy marketing!

Louise

Louise Denny

Marketing Manager