Lessons - How to Create and Distribute Great Content | Hayden Cashion, CEO of Cashion Marketing

Hi, it's Scott here. On these lessons, episodes of my podcast, I'll be selecting my favorite lessons from various guests and episodes of Success Story. Today my guest is Hayden Cashin. He is the chief executive officer of Cashin Marketing. Hayden is a career marketer. He's worked as head of digital marketing for Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group. He's been a digital marketing advisor for Poudre Noir. He has the social media advisor for CPAC. He's been an instructor and co-founder for the Modern Marketing Certificate Program and currently he serves as chief executive officer at Cashin Marketing, working with some of the largest brands in the world. Today he's going to teach you all about content marketing. Some of the most core principles in creating content that resonates with your audience and then distributing it to make sure you can get that piece of content in front of the most eyeballs possible. My name is Hayden Cossum. I'm the CEO of Cashin Marketing and today I'm going to be talking about content and distribution. The way I look at content is three pillars. Number one, what is the goal of your content? Are you trying to sell products? Are you trying to generate leads? Are you trying to foster engagement? Are you trying to build a brand depth? What is the goal of the content? Number two, who is the audience you're trying to communicate to? Is it mothers? Is it contractors? Is it athletes? Is it teenagers? Who is the audience? The content is essentially the birth child of step one, the goal and step two, the audience you're trying to communicate to. But the third pillar is how are you going to differentiate yourself from the competitors? So I would call the third pillar the value propositions. What are the things about your service offering or your product that makes you different aka better than the competitors? How can you position that to make you better than the competitors? The way I like to think about this is I like to study the competitors in the landscape, put a list of all their value propositions, the things they are great at, and then have another list beside it of the things my business is great at. Cross reference the two lists to find the things that my business is great at, that the competitors aren't great at. Those are the core value propositions that you now want to communicate within the content. So just to summarize, the content is birthed out of what is the goal, who are you trying to communicate to, and what are the value propositions? This concoction is what's going to make your content stand out and actually resonate with the audience and give them a compelling argument of why they should do business with you. When you have that concoction, the way I like to structure it is a hook, body, and called action. That's a standard way to structure it. So the hook is within the first two seconds, how are you going to stop the end consumer from scrolling typically in a digital landscape, it'll be from scrolling, how are you going to stop them from scrolling? So you have to say something compelling, that's contextual to them. So back to pillar two, the audience, if you're talking to mothers, you could simply say, are you a mother? That would be a great way to stop a mother. Or another way you can stop a mother is your baby crying right now, that would be a compelling way to stop a mother. If you want to stop an athlete, you could say something like, has your sport got you tired out, it's football draining you. Do you need a boost in your football performance if you're targeting a football player specifically? So the hook is how you're actually going to stop them, that's all you care about. A lot of the times people try to just go right into the body, and by virtue of that, they don't stop enough people, and enough people don't consume the content. So the hook is very important, all you're trying to do is stop the person. And within the body, this is where you want to communicate the value propositions, once again, in a contextual way to the audience, right? So you want to say those unique value propositions from the list we cross referenced, that is going to make the end person actually compelled to do business with you based off of the contextual way you present it. So once again, if we're speaking to mothers, we may want to have the content be in an environment that mothers would resonate with. So maybe a daycare, or maybe the living room with a book in a candle and a baby stroller beside them, or something of that nature, we very much want to contextualize the environment and contextualize the language, but make sure we're communicating the value propositions of the product. And then finally, we want to have a call to action on the back end, so something that's very clear, very concise, go here to XYZ, or call this number to XYZ, very clear, very concise. So to recap the two things we just talked about, how to create content is three pillars really. What's your goal? Who's your audience? And what are the unique value propositions that are going to allow you to stand out? That's the concoction, then you take it, and you structure it in a way that is the hook, the body, and the call to action. Now the second part of this whole talk is distribution, so that's the content side of things. If you go into the distribution side of things, the way I really see the digital landscape right now, and today is September 29th, 2021, the way I see it is TikTok and Instagram reels are designed for growth. They're designed for people to see your content that don't necessarily follow you. So if you can actually create content that's going to compel people to consume it, to share it, to engage with it, the algorithm is going to reward you by showing it to more people. So you have the opportunity for scale, you have the opportunity for virality on TikTok and Instagram reels. Therefore, the content you produce, so this is an additional layer to what we just talked about. The content you produce on these channels have to be designed for virality for scale because that's what these channels are good at. That's what the opportunity is within these channels. So TikTok and Reels for scale, what you want to do from there is bring them in my opinion to Instagram or potentially to Facebook. In my opinion, some people will say YouTube too, it really depends how your business is set up. For simple argument, most businesses out there, let's go to Instagram and that's where it's more of a closed community, Instagram outside of Reels, so I separate regular Instagram from Reels. Instagram outside of Reels is more of a closed gated community. You don't necessarily post something and 50% of your views are new people from the discovery page. It's mostly like say 95% of your followers that are going to see it. So it's a closed gate. So once you get people to your Instagram, you can communicate to them more frequently because a follow is very valuable. A follow basically means now you have their attention over a long period of time until they unfollow you in theory. So what do you want to do there? On Instagram, you want to build depth. So the content, once again going back to the content argument we're talking about, you don't want to put a layer here for virality or scale. You want to put a layer here for depth. So when people come from Reels or they come from TikTok and they landed on your Instagram page, what's going to make them feel closer to you? So examples of this is potentially testimonials, potentially behind the scenes, potentially the origin store of your business, potentially showcasing the staff or things you're doing in the community. Things that are going to make people feel more warm and compelled to do business with that brand. Not necessarily going to go viral on TikTok, your testimonial will probably not go viral on TikTok, but when they come back to your Instagram page, it'll build depth with them. They're going to see somebody out to third party endorsing you that's going to make them feel warmer towards your brand. And finally, what you want to do from Instagram where you build depth in there is push them to your final objective in my opinion. You want to either push them to your website if that's where your final objective takes place or potentially the YouTube, if your content creator, that might be the long form where your final objective is to build a super family sound YouTube that's willing to consume a 20 minute piece of content or to your website where you can sell to them or generate a lead from them. And that in essence is how I see content and distribution. To recap content is the three pillars, the goal, the audience, the value proposition, that's the concoction and the structure is the hook, then to the body where you communicate the value proposition, then to the call the action. And then once you have that as kind of your content framework, you want to look at the distribution channels, TikTok and Reel should be designed for growth, scale, and eventually be designed for depth, building depth and nurturing people, really getting close to them. And then that should eventually push to your final objective on your website or on YouTube or in another place, depending on your business, that is how I see content and distribution. Thank you so much for listening. Once again, my name is Hayden Cashin, that's H-A-Y-D-E-N, C-A-S-H-I-O-N, I'm the CEO of Cashin Marketing, which basically focuses on pay digital advertising for clients in all different industries, have a wonderful day.