Dorie Clark:
How do you break through the noise on social media? We all know from our personal experience, that everyone is spending more time on screens these days. That’s certainly more of an opportunity to reach your clients, your customers, your potential customers, that’s fantastic, but everyone else is doing the same thing too. So we want to get the advice of a true expert, Shama Hyder.
Dorie Clark:
So what can people do to actually stand out and do something different now that everybody is kind of inured to this?
Shama Hyder:
You really nailed it, Dorie. The bar is higher, and I think that’s the thing you have to keep in mind as you approach all of this is what might’ve been good enough before, just isn’t now. You have to really aim for that excellence, which is good. I think it forces all of us as business people, entrepreneurs, creatives to say, “Hey, this is my chance. I better raise that bar. I better get more creative.” I will tell you, here’s what’s fascinating. When things started, obviously clients were deeply affected, trade shows canceled, usual way of doing business or perhaps the way they were expecting to get visibility or leads or whatever that is went kaput, wasn’t going to happen. So one of the things that I found interesting is as we’ve helped them even shift to remote, so as we say, “Hey, remote’s getting inundated.” I just want to be clear, that’s not to say you don’t want to do it or avoid because no, the audience is still there.
Shama Hyder:
Yes, the bar is higher, but it’s never been a better time. And I’ll tell you, with our clients, we were just doing the numbers, just in 2020, they’ve seen an average of 71% increase in leads compared to the year prior with trade shows canceled and everything. So I do want to put that out there saying the things that we’re doing, the digital, it’s working. The pipelines are getting filled. People are getting visibility, so still great opportunities to be had. Now we look at okay, but how then? How do you take advantage of it? And I’ll give you my three Cs. All right? Because I’m a big … I like making…
Dorie Clark:
Oh my God. We want the three Cs. Give it to us.
Shama Hyder:
Okay, I’ll give you the three Cs. 1- Compact. Micro is winning right now, more than before. And I know that we say, “Oh, but people will binge Game of Thrones,” yada, yada, yada. Yes, this is true. But unless you are creating Game of Thrones, compact is your friend. This is important. The other part of it is consistency (2). So compact is great. We want to be consistent with that compactness. There’s a great marketing expert out there, his name is Robert Middleton. I followed his work for years. Robert is one of the originals in the field. He teaches, he works a lot with solopreneurs, but I think his content is great. He was one of the first newsletters on the internet in marketing. You’re talking back in the day, and recently for example, he made a switch and he said rather than one longer newsletter a week, I’m going to start sending something every day.
Shama Hyder:
And that might seem like, whoa, but it works for his audience and it’s consistent. It’s compact. It’s a much quicker message all ready to take in versus something longer. Even when we’re doing … I’ve done so many, like you Dorie, all my keynotes and everything has gone digital. So doing tons of remote events, I’m also finding shortening that a little bit like 30, 45 minutes versus you might have 60 minutes on stage. But even just chopping off that little bit makes a difference. So compact, consistency, and the third one, I know you will love, Dorie is creativity. You’ve got to get creative. This is where it counts. The thing about creativity is it’s messy. It’s not always straightforward, and it’s scary. There’s times I put something out there that I’m like, “Woo, best work ever, Hyder. Great job.” And crickets. Well, you know, more or less, right? I’m just like, “Wow. I thought that was so good.” And then you’re like, “Okay, all right, next thing.” And then you start doing something else, and what you find is people love it and you’re like, “I didn’t even like that one.”
Shama Hyder:
So I think that’s always funny is creativity is different and that means testing things out, being open to experimentation, not being stuck. We had, I did, for SharpSpring actually just yesterday, they have this acceleration series right now for agency owners and they have these great lineup of speakers and that’s really fascinating because they’re working with influencers in the space, they’re engaging, I don’t know if they would have done this before, pre-COVID, but it’s working really well. So I think part of this is you’ve got to learn to experiment if you’re B2B and you might’ve never considered influencer marketing, well, now’s your chance. If you’re B2C and you’ve never considered doing PR or really getting your name out there, now’s your chance. We think that creativity is really key.
