Get a leg up by perusing your top three competitors across all the platforms on which they play! Here’s a systematic way to collect priceless data from competitors in your space.

Pick three brands already successful in the market you want to reach. Pick companies that are where you aspire for your brand to be within a year.

Not 10 years. Not 5 years. 1 year from now. Do NOT choose the BIGGEST player in your industry unless you can honestly catch up to them within a year.

As cooperative capitalists, we understand that making a list of your competitors may feel adversarial, so let’s dismantle that before we begin by stating that this process is designed to help you WIN with your audience, NOT win over the audience of your competitors.

Collect the answers to these 11 questions for each of the three brands in a spreadsheet or document. Your choice.

Here’s an example we performed for a past client who said ‘Storybrand’ was one of their top 3 competitors:

Finally, Assimilate the data you collected to form a plan to alter your path for the better.

With all the data you just collected organized and in front of you and your top executives or advisors, look for what I call ‘patterns in the matrix‘.

Look for where you can outshine the competition and make sure those strengths are accentuated in your marketing and offers.

Look for where the competition outshines you and glean insight into what you might want to consider modeling or improving for your content, products, and offers so you can continue to delight and deliver on the value you deliver.

Here’s a list of just some of what I consider when performing this process for our clients.

• Where do you have a competitive advantage? What’s better about your offer? Is that accentuated in your marketing?
• Where can you play a bigger game? Is there a wide open field on a particular social media platform?
• What is revealed when examining fee structures? Is there an opportunity to make an offer at a particular price point?
• How high or low touch is the delivery of their process? Is there a concierge version to offer or something more DIY?
• Are you catering to a different personality style or sector of the market? Is that clear and are you on the appropriate platforms for the audience you want to reach?

There you have it! That’s how you perform Competition Telepathy.

If you’d like the insight without all the work, you can schedule a time to talk with Travis about the Foundational Marketing Package which includes our team doing Customer Telepathy, Content Telepathy and Competition Telepathy and assimilating it all into a suggested plan of action for your brand.

You Are Not Alone! We’ve been there too.

Don’t get us wrong, we are a stand for having an awareness of trends in marketing so that you can grow, but beware of causing Operational Whiplash.

One of the biggest complaints we hear from passionate teams is that brand leaders come back from conferences and masterminds with new ideas to implement just before the last big idea has gone live, or has yet to be optimized.

Has that ever happened to you?

Imagine the frustration of completing all the painstaking details to get a marketing initiative up, running and gaining traction only for an executive or brand leader to come back from an event that caused marketing envy.

All of a sudden directives change radically and the team is thrown into the chaotic state of Operational Whiplash!

Your team may feel like your money and their efforts are wasted.

One team member of a client of ours was in tears when the evergreen quiz funnel that was declared essential got pushed aside without being completed so that the whole team could focus on a documentary launch that some guru promised would be a money-making slam dunk.

“Here we go again.” was becoming the team mantra and that’s NOT how we want your team members to feel!

Bouncing from one marketing initiative to another. UUUGGHHH. We feel your pain.

How can your team have clarity on which funnels work to which traffic source when there’s no system to track progress and assess the ROI after ad spend, COGS, and team time?

Worse still, marketing efforts become random and incongruent which fails to create the cohesive, layered experience an audience needs to develop a relationship that leads to sales and brand loyalty.

It is possible (and we’d argue easier, more efficient and less expensive) to create layers of measurable funnels that tie together, endearing your brand to your audience while qualifying buyers and clearing out those who are clearly not your target market.

Please stop implementing the disjointed, perpetual-promotional roller-coaster approach to running your business. Why? Because you’ll fail to get the learnings you need from optimizing one funnel before you’re, as Jay-Z puts it, “on to the next one”.

When you architect a funnel using the statistical learnings from the previous funnel, you grow a self-assessing Superfunnel that morphs to meet your audience’s needs.

As passionate marketers ourselves, we are saddened by the industry’s lack of commitment to provide support in building measurable funnels that interconnect and are easy to optimize.

But it doesn’t have to be this way…

Launchr supports brands in growing from six-figure to seven-figure businesses by prioritizing marketing initiatives, the right way. We get all “Art Of War” on creating and delivering efficient systems for sifting through ideas to sort out which one’s have the highest potential based on the 5 most important business areas.

The Quarterly Scorecard clearly identifies which opportunities are worth exploring and which should be put in the ‘parking lot’ for execution in the future.

Stop guessing. No more chasing fruitless failures. Focus on the initiatives you’ve vetted through a proven process!

Here’s the closest thing we’ve found to a crystal ball that can reveal the best next moves in your business to elevate profits while tailoring your marketing to meet your audience’s needs. It’s called the Quarterly Scorecard and it goes a little something like this.

1. Start by scheduling an all-hands-on-deck meeting.
Notify your team that they’ll be asked to share their ideas. Don’t surprise them. Get their brains brewing up ideas beforehand. Cooperative competition breeds out-of-the-box ideas, so consider a bonus or incentive for the originator of winning ideas.

2. Prepare a spreadsheet to organize, evaluate and prioritize ideas.
Or, make it easy on yourself and use the Quarterly Scorecard that we’ve used to move our clients from six to seven figure businesses for the last decade. It comes pre-loaded with the tabs you’ll need for the process.

3. Ask the entire team for any and all profit-generating ideas (no matter how random or off-the-wall).
List them on the Quarterly Scorecard, taking the time to collect all of the following:

4. Release all team members from the meeting except the brand leader(s) and the executive team.
Assign 5 votes to each person remaining. We use Post-It notes as vote indicators. Each person posts their votes to the ideas they believe in most.

IMPORTANT: People can cast their votes on 5 different ideas, put all 5 toward one idea, or any combination that reflects how they would prioritize the expenditure of money and team time on the ideas generated. The five ideas scoring the most votes are then transferred to the Big Ideas tab in the Quarterly Scorecard.

5. Rate each Big Idea based on its potential to cause growth in 5 areas: acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue.
(Shout out to Dave McClure for distinguishing these crucial areas!) Assessing based on all five factors gives you initiatives across the board rather than only in the top of funnel sections of your marketing. Most brands screw this part up, focusing only on acquisition and failing to build connection for ongoing sales!

6. Finally, evaluate each Big Idea using three crucial questions.

A combined score is generated for each opportunity that makes your next moves crystal clear.

7. Create and Assign Action Items.
All that’s left to do is to task out the to-do list for the winning projects and you’re ready to work the best of your Big Ideas. Here at Launchr.co we use Asana (our fave task management software).

Brands don’t fail from having too few ideas, they die from exhausting their resources on too many!

You can END ENTREPRENEURIAL ADHD and get laser focused on what works!

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could confirm that the content you invest time in creating is valuable and wanted by the audience that needs you? You can!

Here’s the Launchr Insider trick for confirming the content you create is wanted, needed and even shared so that you reach more people organically. (You’re invited to join the private Facebook Group for more pro tips and live Q&A sessions here.

We call this process Content Telepathy and it has two phases. Phase one applies to brands that have a fair amount of content out in the world. If that’s not your brand yet (you’ll get there soon), then skip straight to Phase Two.

Phase One of Content Telepathy is to take a long, hard look at your brand’s content, specifically how audiences are or are not responding to it.

An example of how this can be useful comes from the work we did for the world’s leading autoimmune specialist, Dr. Amy Myers. In her posts about autoimmunity on her blog and on Facebook, by overwhelming majority the comments and questions were centered around one particular autoimmune disease called Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis.

Can you see how the Content Telepathy process revealed the need for content centered specifically around that particular subset of autoimmunity? All we had to do was look for patterns in what seems like a chaotic pool of comments.

Direction from the audience is there if you take the time to look for it!

Phase Two Content Telepathy is to look at other brands in your same niche to see what themes or patterns emerge in the comments and feedback they get on public platforms.

Here’s the deal. If your competitors get repeated questions on a particular aspect of a topic, chances are you can create content that fills the gap, thereby showing up as a hero to that audience.

Connecting through content starts a far higher quality relationship than direct-to-offer marketing. Content marketing not only boosts conversion rates, but also increases both lifetime value and the quantity of referrals your receive from happy customers.

If you’re not currently measuring the impact content marketing can have on your brand, read on to learn the minimum content needed to create a web of influence using the 1-3-15 Process.

Since we’ve already revealed the three primary research tools for developing your Foundational Marketing, we’ll get straight to creating a sticky web of influence using the 1-3-15 Process. You’ll definitely want to read the posts on Customer Telepathy, Content Telepathy, and Competition Telepathy before you begin because that’s the foundation you’ll need to form an intelligent hypothesis about what content to include.

Assuming you’ve completed the three preparation processes above and found the content topics your audience is hungry for, here’s a visual of what to do with that clarity.

Here’s the step-by-step on how we build these sticky webs using the 1-3-15 Process. Watch the free training video below for more details.

STEP ONE:
Get crystal clear on your offer ladder.

STEP TWO:
Select or create three lures that logically lead to the offer. Within these lures, include invitations to the offer.

STEP THREE:
Build five content pieces that intelligently connect to each lure. One content piece to address each of the four personality types and one that works well for a general audience. Again, look for logical opportunities to link to other articles in this content web. At the bottom of each post, list other content in the web under the heading “You might also like…”.

STEP FOUR:
Create a mini-nurture campaign for each of the three lures. The point of these emails is to support the new lead in using the lure and to progress towards an invitation to the offer. In these communications, link to other content pieces in the web wherever it makes sense. (See the Ninja Note below.)

STEP FIVE:
Create at least three promotions for each content piece to use in your top three marketing channels.

“Content Marketing is all the Marketing that’s left.”

Seth Godin

Once you’ve done all five steps, test all three lure processes before unleashing the promotions out in the world organically. If you have experience with paid traffic, you might feel confident investing in the dollar-a-day strategy to gain traction faster.

We’re big fans of the high returns we’ve seen from such a minimal investment. Plus, we like to ‘swap a flop’ (replace non-engaging content with fresh material) as soon as possible. Driving paid traffic speeds up that process.

While even this simple content launch process is admittedly a lot of work, we find that getting set up on the organized 1-3-15 system and tracking it all on a Weekly Marketing Spreadsheet has a positive lasting effects for brands. It takes the guesswork out of the equation and makes all of your marketing measurable.

In doing so, it replaces the discouraging feeling that you’re investing time, money and effort on stuff that doesn’t move the needle with clarity on exactly what works.

We’re here if you need us! We offer coaching on the execution of the 1-3-15 Launch process as well as done-for-you packages. Schedule a time to talk with Joy to figure out what’s most cost effective for you.

NINJA NOTE: To remove buyer friction for those that are bouncing around this 1-3-15 content web, duplicate all 15 content pieces. Do not include these duplicates in the public posts viewable on your blog or channel because you’ll will edit them to skip the email collection process (since you’ll have already captured it from the first lure they take). CTA buttons will instead send the prospect directly to content delivery pages for the other lures or possibly offer pages. Be sure to set up tagging so you can track which prospects have consumed which content. We feel it’s safer and less aggressive to make invitations directly to the offer from those duplicate posts since we know they’re already on the sticky web. (If this Ninja Note created a WTF moment, just skip it! You can layer this process on later.)

Even in the simplest of funnels, you’re going to need a collection of content that engages and endears people to your brand.

With all your many talents and your depth of knowledge, how do you decide what content is worth creating?

Most brands assume, guess or simply create so much content that they’re bound to get lucky with some of it.

Let me spare you the guesswork by sharing what’s worked, even though I’ll be revealing the secret that has me looking like a superhero for my clients.

Clients are happy with the content pieces, lures and communications I write for them because they convert significantly better than what they were putting out before I came along. While it’s sweet that they think I’ve got some magical power to intuit what will work, the truth is much simpler!

My secret to showing up as a badass copywriter is to limit my client list to brands willing to invest in the Avatar And Empathy Map Interview Process (Pick a time to talk if you want this done for your brand.) But, my friend, since you’re here I’m going to reveal the key part of the process that empowers me to “predict” (tee hee) what content and overall tone will give brands the widest reach and highest conversion.

The trick to figuring out which lures, content pieces and promotions will attract an audience at any given stage in the funnel is to conduct interviews with about twenty people. Ideally, the majority of those have experienced the exact offer which you will be writing about, but even if they’ve had a similar experience, you can get what you need.

SIDE NOTE:
I also suggest interviewing a few people who have the challenge your brand solves, but are unfamiliar with its offers. This exposes the hurdles and objections total newbies to the brand may have. You’ll need that intel for when you’re ready to run cold traffic (the term for buying ads that target people with no previous exposure to your brand).

Start with questions that get the interviewees talking about themselves BEFORE they start talking about their experience with the brand.

This is where artful communication is required. You want to get the story of the particular challenge they were facing and the emotions it brought on WITHOUT getting their whole life story. (That’s a useless time suck!)

Start by harvesting the juicy stuff about their issue and what it felt like to be dealing with it.

Find out how their experience impacted their day-to-day life, their relationships, etc. This line of questioning gives you the seeds for the top of funnel (a.k.a. TOFU) copy crop. This is a BIG portion of the overall copy, so dig deep. The best way I’ve found to expose the emotions of their journey is to PROVIDE MASSIVE EMPATHY!

Next, inquire about discovery.

How did they first encounter the brand? What differentiated the brand such that they decided to engage and what was the first way they engaged? What triggered them to make the initial purchase? What did they FEEL while they were making their buying decision?

Move on to inquire about their experience of the purchase, implementation, and usage.

Ask if and when they got results and how those results compared to their expectations. Did they get support, directions? Get their views on the level of engagement with the brand after the initial sale and what could have been done better.

Ask how their daily life changed because of their purchase and what emotional responses they had due to this change.

Depending on what’s in development with the brand, questioning can continue quite a bit more. But no matter what’s going on, I always inquire about who else they follow OUTSIDE THE NICHE OF THE BRAND. This can reveal powerful intel for buying similar audience traffic.

Just one example of this is when I found a common theme among women with autoimmune conditions following GOOP (Gwyneth Paltrow’s online magazine brand). This might not be an obvious audience for competitors in that space, but upon investigation I found that the brand provides emotionally compelling shares from MD.s, ND.s and specialists. For an audience of women who’s nervous systems are overloaded, it makes sense that they respond better to heart-centered delivery of content on GOOP than on more clinical options that directly address their condition. Cheaper ads. Bigger wins. YAY!

By now, you’re probably wondering what all the answers you collect will do to help you create content and copy. Would it be worth all the effort? HELL YES! Here’s how.

I guarantee that you’ll see patterns emerge from what initially looks like chaos!

Certain words, phrases or, at the very least, sentiments will stand out in each category. Word combinations will be repeated verbatim or said in slightly varying ways.

The language, concepts and struggles that show up prior to finding the brand – that’s the stuff new audience members will need to hear first. You’d be wise to use the language and address the concepts they need help with in ads that lead to beneficial, introductory content like posts and videos.

Use what’s different about your approach or product to guide them to your list or social media community by incentivizing them with the next level of content.

Support them with initial communications that address the challenges your interviews revealed. Acknowledge what will be difficult and show up as a trusted advisor for the journey. Again, use the same words, phrases and sentiments your interviewees used at this stage.

Based on engagement (or lack thereof) with those communications, tailor the offers you make to them so you’re putting the product or service most likely to solve their problem in front of them. Use the FEELINGS they’ll have when they get the results they want to get them to the offer page.

Once on the sales page, it’s time to take them through the emotional journey of being seen and understood where they are now, show them what’s different about your offer, and invite them to cross a very solid bridge enforced with social proof, sound sense and logic to experience what life is like when they take your offer.

Can you see how the interviews would help you create content that attracts new audience members by resonating with where they’re at now? How you can welcome them in by providing them with a sense of understanding? Do you see how addressing their fears and revealing what’s unique about your offer or approach engages them, and based on their responses (click thrus, likes, direct inquiries, etc.) you can sort them to make customized offers best suited to their needs? The only thing left to do to complete this and turn it into a well-optimized funnel is to measure the efficacy and evaluate to make improvements.

That’s the A.W.E.S.O.M.E. marketing we stand for around here! And it all starts with ASKING.

In summary, use interviews to decide what content is worth creating instead of guessing.

Ask about life before, life while deciding, life during usage or implementation, and the happily ever after. Use that info to refine what you offer the world, making the ride from brand discovery to raving fan a more efficient and rewarding journey for you and those who need you.

Want more confirmation on the content your audience wants? Avatar Interviews are our number one tool for guiding content creation. AND… we confirm that we’re on track by using what we call Content Telepathy. It’s a decent ‘cheat’ for brands unwilling or unable to perform the interviews as described above.