POWER OF FREE! #4: Feel Your Market in Intelligent Content Marketing: It’s The Experience, Stupid

I’m going to talk about how you sense what your marketplace is really all about how you can really put yourself in the shoes of your prospect audience. And as a result of that, be able to create a business proposition that is tantamount to a market alignment.

 

Because what you’ve done is you’ve removed all the points of friction in the relationship that you want to have with your tribe member, if you will, and go on to achieve something remarkable as part of your overall purple cow. Well, to sort of go through our journey so far, I started off by explaining to you how everything is changing, because we’re now living in a connection economy, we’re leaving the industrial era behind. And as a result of this, we’re producing this huge machine called the internet. That’s the summation of all human knowledge and endeavor. And it acts as an opportunity for all humans to interconnect with everybody else. And in this process, wonderful things can happen. If you go about forging relationships in the right way.

Then I thought about how you could position yourself on that machine, by going about the process of creating an expert niche for yourself where you are effectively, very, very good at one thing, and you publish to that niche. And before too long, you become that knowledge expert and the the go to resource anywhere on the internet for the kind of information that you are an expert in. And that way you develop and you build your tribe. And once you’ve built and developed your tribe, you can then go out to monetize that relationship with them by selling them the things that they really need, and selling them the things that they need when they need them and selling them the things that they need at a price that they’re ready to pay, and giving them control of the relationship. And in doing that, you really need to have a purple cow, which was the topic of the last time that I was here. And I took you through the importance of being remarkable in the internet age that if you’re going to be on the internet in a profound way. While you’re there, you may as well create an opportunity for people to talk about you. And that by definition means that you must be remarkable. And that remark ability is reflected in a number of different concepts that that I’ve discussed in some considerable detail and in other parts of the presentation.

But today, I want to tell you about one of the most important things that ever happened to me in business. And that was about seven or eight years ago, just before my life started to hell in a handbasket. I went off to North America with my wife and young children and we went to Florida and we went on a Disney Cruise. Has anybody ever been on a Disney Cruise? Okay, well, you hear all about the Disney magic, right? That error of error of wonder and Miss mystery and surprise and the you know fulfillment of your imagination. And you go into an environment where they take over you and they give you a wonderful experience. Now, if you go to the to the parks to a large degree they achieve that. But can you imagine what it’s like being locked away on a boat for five days with this all around you. You see what Disney did was so remarkable that it made me understand that that’s essentially the highest possible level of customer touch stone that you could ever wish to achieve.

Because the Disney experience on a cruise boat is like this. You go down and have your breakfast in the morning you finish your breakfast and you come back to your cabin. And in your cabin is somebody dressed as Cinderella and she’s whistling while she works. That when you have a quite a query about an item on a bill for example, that complete exchange is totally stage managed. Disney have reduced To an act, but they understand what the dynamics of that scenario is. And they’ve positioned everything that they do to fit the exact dynamics of this scenario to deliver the experience. So I can tell you after five days of being on a Disney Cruise, where I saw my children an hour during daylight hours, but I always knew where they were. And I always knew what they were doing. And I always, always knew that they were safe. And that every single facet of my stay was stage managed, to the degree that it was completely frictionless. So when I got off that boat, I swear to God, it was like walking on air. So this really stuck with me. And I thought one day, this is what I should aspire to. So then I had an opportunity, when, in 2011, I made the decision with my business partner myton, to develop a completely new internet facing.

So an internet based immigration practice in Hong Kong. And we were going to use publishing techniques that we originally understood would work for us back in 1996. And we knew that with the modern internet, if we took those same, that same publishing mindset to our material, and produced interesting content that helped people answer their questions and solve their problems, but we would be, in a sense, creating an opportunity for people to relate their experience with us as being the author of that material. And so because we knew that we could publish this material, we knew thereafter, but also that we had to make it really easy and accessible for people to get real value out of it. So in mapping out our initial content proposition, we sat down and said, Okay, in this particular circumstance, when I go to the Internet, and I’ve got a particular problem, a Hong Kong immigration problem, what would I like to see to solve that problem. And because we have such domain expertise, we can clearly put ourselves in the shoes of our customers. And we know how to bundle and package all of that those content solutions so that we can deliver them to people in a way that is attuned with how they are best positioned to receive it. So we’ve given away a do it yourself, these are kit.

There are several types of these as you come into the site, immediately, you can select the visa type that applies to you. And then by email, you’re going to get everything that you need all located in one place, so that you can then work on your visa application. During the currency of working with any of our content, or using any of our kits, if you have an equation, if you have a question, you can ask that question on our website. And within 48 hours, you’ll get a podcast answer for me with the facts changed to protect your anonymity. But it is the next level of service, where an act of generosity actually helps somebody, singularly solve a problem, but also adds to the overall value of the content mix, because it will assist other people in the future, solve similar problems. Everybody that has a residence visa in Hong Kong, some stage during those seven years here before permanent residency needs to extend it. There are 30 to 40,000 people in this town every year that go through that experience. So we recommend that we should produce a kit that gives them everything that they need to go about going through the experience completely free of charge.

And of course, there’s the the the grand library of all our content, the visa handbook itself, which has got a in the region of about 8000 pieces of content now and constantly constantly growing. But we understood that if you’re coming to Hong Kong with a visa problem, you’re going to want to access that content in a particular way. And so we develop this site here, if you are a and then it’s a singular, easy way to access all the content, because when you get in there, everything that you need is all available for you. And it helps you solve your problems as we saw in the presentation last week. And people come on our websites, they’re able to find what they need, with less than three clicks across the site, on the text and three pages to get the answer to the question that they need. And they’re spending up to four minutes each time on our website. So we know that this works and it’s remarkable and it’s configured towards the dynamics of hands. We know our marketplace will be experiencing a relationship with us. So once I had my business partner Martin had determined that we should configure our content proposition in that fashion. Then it was a case of asking, Well, what is the emotional? What are the emotional dynamics of being in this scenario, if you are wanting to have people to help you solve your problems, where you’re paying money, to have those problems solved.

Now, even though I’ve been practicing Hong Kong immigration for 21 years, it’s a very, very, very long time ago, since I had any kind of emotional response to an immigration problem in Hong Kong. Personally, I’ve been living here for 27 years. But I think I was quite fortunate because at the end of 2000, I relocated my young family from Hong Kong to Western Australia, because Hong Kong is a great place to do business, but Western Australia is a very attractive place to raise a young family. So I made the decision that I was going to commute and what that meant was that over the course of what was eventually 12 years before I ultimately became an Australian citizen, I went through an immigration experience on a regular basis, so that I know even today, what it feels like to be with a visa problem or situation that needs to be managed. And because I can do that, it means that I can truly sense what this relationship should look like at every step of the way, because I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of immigration experience.

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