I built a $17 million Shopify store from essentially one pre-sell article.
One piece of written content that started a conversation about a problem my brand was passionate about, and then educated readers on how our product solved it.
And I advertised the heck out of it, because it resonated strongly with our audience and created a community of passionate customers.
But that article was only part of the conversation…
Other parts included blog videos, product demos, customer testimonials, case studies and, of course, promotional content and holiday sales.
No matter what you sell, your brand’s message is only half of an effective content strategy — and how you present that message is the other half.
From coloring books to $1,500 training courses, watch how 7 expert marketers are investing in creative content to reach more people and grow their businesses.
Video Highlights:
0:01 Invest in content
0:15 Give the customer value in email content
0:27 Provide free content videos then pitch a product
0:48 Mail a minimum of once a week, mostly with free content
1:07 Facebook groups cultivate community and culture in business
1:29 The number one quick win you can do is to invest in video
2:40 Focus on creative
3:15 Always having more than one piece of content, something a video, an article, something that provides value
3:25 Creating a community and culture around what it is that you do, will set you apart from your competition.
Click Here For Video Transcript
Buck: We invest in content. So we invest in videos, short videos, educational videos, snippets. And we invest in blog content, that gets indexed by the search engines, so to get posted on YouTube and places like that.
Matt: All of our email content, we try and give them as much value as we can, even outside the physical products, but also just with curated content.
Molly Pittman: A Jeff Walker product launch formula style sales funnel. So basically, this is providing three free content videos that work together in a sequence to then pitch a higher dollar product that allows you to give a ton of value first, which we know is important in building the relationship with the end user, and then you’re able to sell a pretty expensive product on the back end.
Michael: Once they’re on our list, we try to email them at a minimum of once a week, but typically several times per week, and give them free content or some type of value rather than trying to always jam a sale down their throat. And those are typically the types of things that people will unsubscribe from, but if they’re getting content on a regular basis in between those types of emails, they typically tend to open those emails much more.
Molly Keyser: Facebook groups are a huge part of my business because it cultivates community and culture within my business. It’s cool because then you can title your group what it is that you help with. So now, when they type it into Facebook, they’re finding me and I’m getting free traffic. And then everyone gets in that group, we’re up to about 20,000 people now. I can now remarket them. I can talk to them. We can have fun together.
Ben: I think the number one quick win you could do is to invest in video. So, create some really strong video assets, both for your brand and your product. Things that tell your brand story but also tell the benefits of your product and create different types of assets for different mediums. So everything from very casual assets that you might be able to use in an Instagram story, to things that might be longer format that could go on YouTube, or be permanent assets for your brand.
Matt: That one down on video, and yeah, building out different formats of video, that’s probably the two areas we’re spending a lot of time on.
Patrick: Yeah, content. I mean, it’s just as much content as we can get out. As much as we communicate to those audiences once we’re doing those lead campaigns, getting them in and nurturing that funnel and nurturing each channel.
Michael: We put a lot of effort into our social media calendar every month. We actually sit down at the beginning of the month, and kinda map out our roadmap for what we’re going to be doing. And we’re really delicate about trying to balance good content for our customers, sale content and promotional stuff about our products, and also community based stuff. We get a lot of user-generated content from the types of products that we sell. So we try to balance that stuff out throughout the month.
Ben: So we’re most focused on our creative. Constantly doing new photo shoots and video shoots that are engaging our customers in a real and personal way, and testing the way those were embedding video into email, or using that same video on an Instagram story, and trying to create content that we can use between a lot of different mediums to create campaigns that can be successful across the board.
Molly Pittman: And I shot three videos that they got an exchange for an email address that we dripped out over a week. Then we were able to sell a $1,500 course because these people are really educated.
Buck: Always having more than one piece of content, something a video, an article, something that provides value.
Molly Keyser: And really it’s not just about selling products, right? It’s creating a community and culture around what it is that you do, and that’s really what’s gonna set you apart from your competition
