Don’t Tell Your Market About Your Best Stuff … Show It!

In order to leverage your authentic best self and attract more clients, you’ll have to make potential clients aware of how you can help them.

And to do this, don’t just tell them … show them.

Keeping in mind that actions speak louder than words, design your marketing communications to showcase your best stuff, your true authentic self.

Here are three ways in which your marketing communications can showcase your best stuff.

The Best Content Is Educational

Many people believe the business that educated the most gains the most.

True in all marketing communications, this belief is especially helpful in showcasing your best stuff.

When individuals become aware of a problem or issue to be addressed there is a sense that something is not quite right.?Things are not the way they should be.

Typically our clients recognize they need help but lacked the know-how to go about attracting new clients.

Regardless of specific needs, people at the level of problem recognition need information that will help them recognize that the problem that exists.

Once there is a glimmer of awareness of the problem, most people will search the Internet for help.

The most useful content helps viewers better understand their problems and start to learn about how you can help them.

Using a blog as your preferred story format, demonstrate professional expertise and how you have helped clients with similar problems.?Other useful formats could include published stories and articles and infographics.

A relationship coach for example, would address some common family issues, including examples of how clients may have benefited from her services.

Building on the information that they have gathered, potential clients will start to narrow their choices, hopefully including you on their short lists.

Storytelling Helps Your Audience Learn

Storytelling — once the stuff of childhood nighttime rituals — has grown up and is quickly becoming a go-to tool in the very adult world of business.

MBA programs, workshops, and coaches all offer strategies and support to help today’s leaders craft a better story. And it makes sense.

A well-told story appeals to a wider variety of learning, listening, and information-processing styles. You have a better chance of getting your point across to more people when it’s framed in terms of a story.

Stories have a way of tapping emotions and creating a visceral impact (that even the most well-crafted PowerPoint slides leave on the table).

They tend to be delivered through “human” means versus e-mail, texting, etc. This alone helps to cut through the noise of the thousands of disembodied messages we’re bombarded with daily.

Stories are efficient as they pre-digest and pack a potentially overwhelming volume of information for grateful inhabitants of a time-starved world.

When told live, stories create not just a shared experience but a shared space for dialogue as well — something craved by workers who are increasingly feeling disconnected in today’s virtual world.

?“Stories are how we think. They are how we make meaning of life. …

Stories are how we explain how things work, how we make decisions, how we justify our decisions, how we persuade others, how we understand our place in the world, create our identities, and define and teach social values.”

(Source: “The Psychological Power of Storytelling,”)

Storytelling is a natural and obvious element of showcasing your best stuff.

Free Feels Good

You wouldn’t dream of buying a car without a test drive.

In effect, a test drive is a free sample of what it would be like to drive the vehicle once you have purchased or leased it.?That’s kind of like the free samples of food offered in grocery stores and other food sellers.

This ‘try-before-you-buy’ approach can also be very effective technique to get more clients.

As a service professional, you can offer free samples in a variety of formats: live on-on-one or in groups, print or digital products and through online content.

Live and In-Person

Many professionals offer free 30-miunute in-person consultation.?

Typically offered through scheduled in-office appointments, live consultations can also take the form of spontaneous conversations and planned group events.

How many times, while going about your normal non-work activities have you had a casual conversation that led to a new client engagement?

Similarly, how many live training events or presentations have you delivered that not only helped your audience clarify a niggling issue, but led to one or more attendees hiring you?

Some words of caution.

Although there is no shortage of opportunities to offer free service, live and in person, the major challenge is drawing the line between free and paid.

That’s where your professionalism comes into play.?

From experience you will…or should…know when your best comment is something like: I think that’s something that is best discussed in private.

Use your free to share the joys of farm life … not give away the farm.

Information Products

Information products are products where the most important part of what you sell is knowledge.

Think eBooks and content-rich audio and video recordings.

In digital format, these products can be distributed through your website.

Regardless of your experience as a service professional, you probably have a ton of potential information products tucked away in your archives.

Maybe it was from your personal research or professional development.?

Or perhaps it was something that you wrote for publication in one form or another in print, electronic or digital media.

Communications with colleagues, prospects and clients often contain chunks of education-worthy content that can be repurposed into information products.

Information products represent an ideal opportunity to deliver free service…but without the time required for live, in-person delivery.

Your Turn

Although there are many more ways in which marketing communications can showcase your best stuff, the three suggestions above will suffice for introducing the concept.

Of all the above three approaches, which one most resonates with you and your way of doing things?

What is one thing that you can do to enhance this approach by incorporating your personal brand into it?

If you have not yet developed your personal brand or think it might need refreshing, maybe it’s time to develop or upgrade your personal brand.