Figuring out what content you’ll use versus lose when preparing a speech, a blog, or other business communication can be a tricky business.

It can be a challenge to sift through myriad information and ideas you could share with your target audiences and only choose stuff that’ll likely bring them to the edges of their seats, wanting to know more.

And here’s a certainty, if you hit any audience with too much information, messages that aren’t clear, or content that’s off point…

…You’ll have an uphill struggle to win their attention and inspire them with your ideas.

In today’s interview with B2B communications expert and Marketing Manager of Phorest Salon Software, Connor Keppel you’ll find a plethora of ideas you can use to consistently create messages and content that are valued offline and online.

What does it take to create truly engaging content for the podium and beyond?

Listen in as we talk about what it really takes to create, choose, and hone content that’s more likely to win attention, to be heeded, and to be shared, including:

• Where to start when choosing content that will interest and engage your target audiences
• Ingredients worth favouring in all your business communications
• The art of mentioning, and even waxing lyrical about, technical stuff without boring your audience into submission.
• Awesome sources of content you may not have considered
• The power of acid tests and why you should care
• Costly content selection mistakes you should avoid
• Why it pays to ignore the apparent lure of a convenient, cookie cutter approach to sharing great content across many communication platforms
• 2 Reasons you should listen to your gut when choosing content you’ll use
• How courting the possibility of failure can end up being a good plan
• And more

Your Turn

Please share your thoughts, ideas, and observations about choosing winning content.

To learn how I can help you to inspire other through your talks, click here.

Interview Transcript

Eamonn: Hello and you’re very welcome. It’s Eamonn O’Brien and this is the The Reluctant Speakers Club Expert Series. I am delighted today to be joined by a pal. It is Conor Keppel, all the way from Phorest Salon Software.

Conor: Great to be here.

Eamonn: Delighted to have you.

We’re talking today about one of the great challenges people have as marketers or promoters of businesses and ideas. And that is, what does it take to create more compelling and interesting content? Whether you’re a speaker or indeed you need content for other forms of communication, how do you get at the good stuff? Conor you’re somebody who has loads and loads of experiences in that realm. In fact, you and I share something in common. We’re dyed in the wool marketers, business to business, bloggers, and so much more. Tell me about your approach to creating content. You can talk about what you do now and maybe things that you’ve done in the past.

Conor: Sure. For my approach to creating content it all comes back to my philosophy on marketing. I think if you ask maybe 10 different marketers what marketing is, they’ll probably give you a different definition. For me, it’s about embedding differentiation in the mind of your target public to generate demand. That’s the way I would say it. For me, when it comes to content creation it’s about getting the message of the company and so on. But the most important thing is to try and strike a bit of emotion. Particularly, one important emotion with our target audience, which is salon owners, but it’s an important emotion to anyone, is one of aspiration or it’s the whole aspirational thing.

Eamonn: What you’d like to do.

Conor: What you’d like to do, where you’d like to be. We recognize the challenges that you have faced, for example. I think a lot of content creators, unfortunately, look at the product and they’re like, “It will do this and it will do that and so on.” That content, while it might work to a certain level, it can be a bit stale. And I think when we’re creating content I love to look at success stories. Not to look internally and say we’re the best salon software company in the world. While I firmly believe that I like to look at some of the salons and what they’ve achieved and tell stories for instance about Mary in Beauty Essence in London who worked on the floor of the salon and now has three salons or stories about people like that.

Eamonn: And tell me, success stories and what have you, do you find they’re a great source for the types of content that you produce and do people react well to it?

Conor: They do. For us I suppose our audience are not techies and we’re a techie company. The last thing we want to do is go out to tell them this wonderful machinery we have all the bytes and megabits and cloud and all this kind of thing. Yeah, it really does work because there’s a human interaction to it. They see somebody who they can just be like too and they see this person has done it. So, if you go out and say, for instance this person has created a wonderful salon and increased turnover and here’s how they’ve done it. And that person will feel like, “I can do that too. It’s not impossible. It’s not just something you read about.”

Eamonn: And tell me, do you include the technical stuff in what you’re talking about or do you give that a lesser position because maybe it doesn’t require the same lead?

Conor: Yeah, we give it a lesser position. I mean, the only time we ever talk about technology is what it can do for your business. Never talk about technology in the context of just technology.

Eamonn: That’s a splendid idea.

Conor: Yes. We’ll talk about things like, “You can market your salon through social media with our software.” “Why?” “Because it will help you get a younger clients. It will help you generate referrals or what we call, word of mouths.”

Eamonn: [laughs]

Conor: So we never talk about technology in the context of just technology.

Eamonn: How much research do you find you have to do to find good ideas?

Conor: A great place to start if you’re looking to do research is with your sales team. They’re out talking face to face…

Eamonn: Why is that?

Conor: Well, they’re out there everyday talking to them. And I know in the company for instance we have a great sales team and they all come from industry. They’ve all either previously been a salon owner or therapist and they have great contacts and they’re out there talking about the software peer-to-peer. So, I would take a lot of stories, a lot of messages back from them because I’d would have these wonderful ideas, I think, and they just might not float. The message might not strike any particular kind of want or need or desire. So that’s a great place to start.

Eamonn: So the sales folks would be one source. Where else would you look now for ideas? What works?

Conor: Interestingly enough, in the context of research, I think it’s changed drastically in the last 5 to 10 years and there’s so many tools out there now where you can do the research yourself. Previously, rather than going around and maybe do focus groups – I’m not personally a huge fan of focus groups – and I very much come from, you know the whole Henry Ford story. Where he said if you ask people what they want he would have built a faster horse. So, it’s a little bit like that. What we very often do in the marketing team, is we sit down, we come up with stories about existing salon owners. Some interesting stuff about customer complaints. And what we’ll do is take a small section of an email list and we’ll send them two or three different titles – to a blog post for instance and we just measure which one got the most clicks.

Eamonn: So, you’re testing.

Conor: We’re testing. Research is great but very often when you’re face to face with research sometimes you’re only going to get something your competition can get. You’re only going to get something that’s not truly differentiation and whereas I think if you can sit down with really creative people, really understand your brand, really understand your target audience, come up with a great story and then test it. Don’t sit there thinking, “I think, or I feel…” Test it.

Eamonn: And I like that because I think that’s exactly right. You can have any number of ideas and research will help show you what won’t work. When people say I wouldn’t do that. But you ultimately still have to have the test of getting it out to real, live people. and getting their reactions because they will tell you. They will vote with their feed, their attention span and everything else in terms of what they gravitate towards. And tell me in terms of advice that you might give to people who are maybe starting out and trying to create content, you know, for example when you are creating your content for your talks and you do quite a few talks on behalf of Phorest. What advice would you give to people about really making sure the content they create is more interesting, more engaging?

Conor: In the context of a talk I think the simple biggest mistake people make is they don’t tell a story. They do a presentation. I don’t do presentations. I try to tell a story. We do something called retention marketing in Phorest. Its terribly boring, but its basically the fastest way to go at your salon is not by chasing new clients, but by focusing on your existing ones and generating referrals.

Eamonn: We call that dancing with the girl you brought.

Conor: Exactly. Yes. In the context of a presentation we’ll go on and talk about techniques and methods. Which I do, but I tell the story of two salon owners. So I get up and talk about Lisa and Mary. I’ll say, “Both are trained therapists. Both worked in the same salon and they went on to start two salons in the same city.” I say, “There’s one difference. Lisa thinks that if new clients are coming through the door, her salon must be growing. Whereas Mary focuses on her existing clients.” And then I ask, “Which salon do you think grew faster, is now more successful?” And everyone’s like,” The one chasing the new clients of course because she’s getting new clients through the door.” And then I turn around and say “No.” And I tell the story of Lisa and Mary. And then we talk about retention marketing vicariously almost through the two people. So that’s the difference. Whereas a lot of people I think get at the start I always opened with these amazing features and here’s what we’ll do and we’ll grow your business by 100%, we’ll do all this but you have to tell a story.

Eamonn: Yes and let’s stop there because there’s an example of a story which can work very well when you’re in front of an audience. But here ‘s the question because I’m not really asking you so much about speaking. It’s more about how and where that story can be extended now into other forms of communication. Do you find you have to do something different or can you use similar materials. What’s the balance?

Conor: Online, or?

Eamonn: Yes.

Conor: Yeah, online you can use similar materials. I think the premise of your message in terms of Phorest… okay, its a story, it’s maybe about retention marketing. Say if that’s the campaign, yes you can use similar stuff but a big mistake a lot of people make is, “Oh, if this works on twitter, it’ll work on Facebook. It’ll work as a blog post. It’ll work as this.” The famous Gary Vaynerchuck always talks about, “It’s like learning Finnish and then expecting to go into Sweden and for people to understand you.”

Eamonn: That’s a good analogy. I’ll remember that one.

Conor: Every platform it’s different. For instance, Twitter is instant and it’s interactive. So it’s just like recap your statement with a link to your blog post or more importantly its about listening, using search.twitter.coms meanwhile conversations are going on around it. Interacting with those people, but also seeing how they’re speaking about it. And then using that language.

Eamonn: I love it. It’s adapting, basing what you’re doing on conversations that people are having.

Conor: Exactly, that they’re already having. So it might be a conversation around, “Oh it’s impossible to get people back into my salon because of this…” So then what you do is you start a blog post going, “How to Break the Barrier of… or “It’s not impossible, here’s how to…” So something like that that addresses the questions. So when you get on Facebook, it’s more visual. And one of the biggest mistakes is people just come on and think the same thing will work on every platform and every platform is different.

Eamonn: You’re absolutely right. And it doesn’t. I knew we were going to have a great chat today Conor and maybe we’ll close out with kind if an interesting one and I hope you find it interesting. If you were to take you today and you were to think about all the things that you’ve learned over the years. If there’s one thing you know now that you wish you’d known when you were younger, what would it be when it comes to great content?

Conor: I’d probably say don’t get into content marketing. Become an accountant or software developer.

Eamonn: That’s your mother speaking.

Conor: Yeah, I think I’ve learned many things. It’s hard to sum it up into into one. I think one mistake that I’ve probably made as a marketer is a lot of people talk about research and we were talking about research earlier. Sometimes you just have to trust your gut. You have to go with something completely unique and different. And the biggest mistake I made for the first few years was, “Oh, here’s how our competitors are doing it.” And even though you don’t consciously end up saying the same thing as them, if you absorb too much information, if you become too tied up into what they’re doing, you actually end up basically turning your message into the same. It might be slightly different. The second thing I learned is to resist the temptation to be too sales-y from day one. People don’t… they don’t want to interact with that. The greatest thing, learning, I’d say to someone starting out is, “Trust your gut. Try to do something completely different. Don’t be afraid of failure. And in this day and age, test it. There’s no excuse for failure this day and age. Just take a small segment of your list. Do a presentation, whatever it is and see the reaction and then rule it out based on that.

Eamonn: That’s especially true when it comes to things online.

Conor: Yes, very much.

Eamonn: We’ll I knew it would be great chat. Thanks for coming in Conor. So delighted to have it. You have been listening to Eamonn O’Brien and this is The Reluctant Speakers Club Expert Series and until the next time, thank you for listening