Build a Content Marketing Fortress

Ian Paget: Martin, you got in touch with me a few days back. I know we've known each other for a while and I was really excited to hear that you've released a new book called Content Fortress, which is exciting. This is about content marketing. And I know that some people in the audience might not know what this is, but I can guarantee that they will be interested in this and will want to know more. So I think as an opening question to this conversation, can you talk through what content marketing is?

Martin Huntbach: Yeah, I mean, it's such an overused term I find. And often when there's a buzzword out there, I know I did when I first heard it, I kind of just blanked it out really. It was only from reading books myself that I really started to understand how businesses were using content marketing to improve their businesses. So the way I like to see it is how can you provide as much value as possible before someone becomes a customer? So that might be different for all businesses. It might be I decided to use a YouTube channel. That's my content avenue or for you, it might be the podcast. For me it was blog articles.

We just found that all of the things that we tried for our particular business and for our particular audience, we found that articles and creating long form articles was going to be the best way for us to reach our business goals. So content marketing, people think podcast, YouTube, TikTok now, but there's just so many different avenues and sometimes it's just about trial and error. So that's kind of what content means for me. It's how you can build as much trust and value before someone becomes a customer. And obviously there are just so many benefits of that as well.

Ian Paget: Okay. Do you want to talk through what some of those benefits are? And that was beautifully explained by the way.

Martin Huntbach: Oh, thank you. You'd think that I sort of preplanned that, but actually I'm just like... It's a really interesting question.

Ian Paget: Oh, yeah, but you've clearly wrote a book on the topic.

Martin Huntbach: Well, yeah, I think the benefits are, the initial benefits and the reason people reach out to us as an agency and want to work with us are generally because of a few surface level things. So you would imagine that people want more traffic. They want more people to know who they are and what they do. Maybe one level deeper might be leads.

And that's kind of a lot of the people who reach out to us are just, they want to build more awareness and they want to get more leads and potentially sales. But the sort of the first question people ask is, how can we just get more exposure using content? You hear the term viral and I want to go viral on TikTok and I want to go viral on Instagram and I want to be Instagram famous.

And you know and I know that you can be pretty successful with your business without going viral and without actually taking over the internet. So the benefits really are on the surface level, are things like more traffic to your website, more traffic to your social media and more leads, people that might want to work with you or people that just subscribe to your newsletter, that kind of thing.

But actually we found, and this is why when we wrote the book, and I know we're not specifically talking about that, we didn't really want to write a book that spoke about the surface level stuff. What we found interesting is that when we started to really focus on creating content, we focused on creating content that led to sales. So yes, you're going to get traffic.

Yes, you're going to get rankings and search engine rankings and lots of keywords, depending on what platform you're trying to create content for. But we just found that ultimately businesses are only successful if they make sales, and that's what we found. So we were creating content and we were... Some of the benefits that we specifically, so I'm not saying everybody's going to see these results is when we were doing it, we were mainly building websites.

Now trying to rank online for website related keywords and SEO and things like that is obviously extremely competitive. So we didn't pick the best niche really, but we still saw success from creating content on a consistent basis. So in terms of what we saw, we saw an increase in traffic from a few hundred to a few thousand within the space of 12 months. We'd increased our traffic by 10 times.

And that's in a very competitive niche. We found that we were attracting better clients in general. They were more educated because when they spoke to us, they wouldn't ask so many basic questions. So that actually made the sales process slightly easier as well. And over that time, we increased our prices multiple times because it got to a point, and this is where kind of the underlying benefits are, which is when you get to a point where, and I say benefits, but also this is a bad thing.

And this caused me personally quite a lot of stress, is that we were generating so much traffic and we were generating quite a lot of leads, but at that point, it was just kind of me running the business. And my wife was still working, which we both now work together. And I was finding that I was kind of getting lots of leads, but the leads weren't always great leads.

I was just being inundated and I didn't have time to actually do certain things within my job and I just felt the pressure, and we call it email anxiety. So I'm sure you've been there before. I'm sure a lot of listeners are. When you get an email from someone because they've consumed some content and they think, oh, great, this person's going to help me, what are the chances that that is your ideal client?

It's not going to be a 100, it's not going to be 80%. It might be 50/50 if you're lucky, but ultimately we just found that out of all of the leads and inquiries that we were getting because of our content, there were maybe only 20, 30% potentially that were really, really great clients and great prospects.

The problem is when you get an email and you know that you're getting vibes that they might not be the right client, maybe they're asking what the price is before they're asking about the value and what you can do. And we just found that I was losing sleep because I'm like, I really got to reply to that email. And I don't know what to say because they're probably not of the budget.

They're in a wrong niche and I don't think it's going to work out because we had a certain price point. And obviously you've got to deal with that. So even if you're getting leads through and traffic, it's not always sunshine and rainbows. You've got to have a strategy and you've got to be able to deal with that.

So we actually transitioned our content from being more traffic focused and lead focused into more filter focused. So we were able to filter it through and that's where the term content fortress came in.

Ian Paget: Oh, wow. Now that makes a lot more sense. I really love this idea of using content as a filter rather than simply focusing on purely creating content for the sake of it. So we definitely need to talk about how you are using it as a filter, but I think before we do, I think we need to talk about actual content creation itself. So how do you go about creating content? Where do you start? How do you know what to write or talk about?

Martin Huntbach: So one of the... Obviously, I can tell you we've got a shed loads of free resources on our website, but actually giving you tangible information. The best-

Ian Paget: Just to pause you, what is your website? And then I can get people to go there and I'll link to it in the show notes as well.

Martin Huntbach: It's jammydigital.com.

Ian Paget: Fantastic. So people can go and check that out and I'll link to it in the show notes as well.

Martin Huntbach: Yeah, we've got a learning center on there, so there's lots of free content and little quizzes you can take and stuff like that. So yeah, we try to make it as helpful as possible.

Ian Paget: Brilliant. Because I know in terms of the time that we have, so this would be an hour long conversation. There's only so much that we can go into really. And with my background, I used to work for a web design agency and as part of that team, there was an SEO team. So I do have a background sort of in SEO because I worked alongside the team.

And in terms of training people, you need at least a day or two or three to really understand content marketing and being able to optimize content. So really I know in this conversation, we are probably only going to go surface level and so it's great that you've got those extra resources and information that people can go to after this.

And like I said, if people didn't write that down then, check out the show notes for this episode and I'll make sure to pop links in there as well.

Martin Huntbach: Fantastic. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if we were to go through everything we know, yeah, it would take a couple-

Ian Paget: Yeah, we'd be here all day.

Martin Huntbach: Absolutely. But in terms of when we first got started, the content we created was quite broad about questions that we used to get asked on a regular basis. Quite often the questions that if you sat down you said I'm going to create some content, one of the mistakes that we made when we first started content is we made it too technical and out of reach for our ideal customers.

And I mean, I know I said that really quick, but I can't stress the importance of that. So there are agencies and you spoke about agencies and we saw this too. A lot of people think, oh, you're going up against these other people and they've got big websites and things. The worst kind of content we see are generally from agencies. They write content that's quite thin.

They write content that's there to elevate their authority without actually giving some content away. So you might see stuff like, oh, we've recently released a blog post about an award that we've won or they may start writing super technical stuff because they've got someone on their team to write it and they only know C++ or whatever, some technical jargon term that nobody actually really cares about.

So the really fine kind of sort of the area in which you want to create content is what questions do your customers ask you on a regular basis? What are the basic questions that you would think that's really obvious to me, but to them, I can't believe someone's just asking that question?

So when you actually really, really bring the content down so that it's super simple, super ideal for your customers and forget about your competitors, that's the best way to get started. If you can imagine the top 10 questions that you get asked on a regular basis.

One of the things that we found is when we started producing that kind of basic content, we found that people didn't ask those questions anymore, because they were on our website and they were checking us out before they actually booked a sales call with us or a discovery call. So they were self-educating before taking the part-time. So that's a really, really good benefit.

Obviously that doesn't necessarily stop people from getting in touch if they're not the right fit, but that's the best place to start. Think about the really straightforward questions that you can ask or that you can answer, should I say, on your website? And that's kind of, we didn't create content every single week. We may be in our first 12 months created maybe 20, 22 pieces of content, which is a little less than one every other week.

So that kind of content we were realising that if we just focused on really answering those questions that we get asked on a regular basis, then that would get us, at least it would make for easier conversations. At least it would allow people to learn a little bit more about what we are talking about and increase their trust within us because we're just answering basic questions that we know that they're asking.

That's how sometimes the best content can get created no matter what tools you've got online that can calculate the best keywords and what you should write content for or how to look at the metrics and the data. Sometimes the best thing that you've got is your email when people ask you questions that you might find annoying or phone calls, when they ask you questions about just how you build a website from start to finish.

That's a question that we used to get asked quite a lot. That's definitely something that we decided to answer on our website. And those questions sometimes get missed because they seem so trivial and basic, but those are the questions that your customers actually want you to know. So that kind of content will get you started and that kind of content will make your life a lot easier.

Ian Paget: Yeah, I think this is a really good point and an important one, because I did an interview, I can't remember how long ago it was, a few months back with someone I think you might know. A graphic designer called Col Gray in Scotland. I I think we go to mutual events so you probably met him.

Martin Huntbach: Yeah, he's a good friend.

Ian Paget: He told this story about the time he started working with a client and he wanted the client to send him over a file. I can't remember the exact story, but he did talk about it in that podcast. And he basically asked her, oh, can you send me a JPEG of that file? Something really trivial. As a graphic designer we know what a JPEG is.

We just assume that everybody else knows what that is. But the problem is in that particular case, that lady didn't know what a JPEG was. And she felt so embarrassed that she didn't get back in touch with Cole because she didn't know what it was and just felt humiliated that she felt like she was supposed to know what that thing was. And she just had no idea.

And you need to think about these type of things because as a logo designer or whatever you do, there are terms and things that you do on a day to day basis that they just don't know about and that can be content. So something as trivial as what is a JPEG, that's not even something that you would normally even think of having to write as a piece of content, but actually your client needs to know what those things are.

So if you was to think of your process, you could probably break it down into hundreds of pieces of content that will actually genuinely help people. And I really like what you've... You've kind of implied that you need to, I guess almost treat it like you are teaching a child.

It's like this stuff is completely new or potentially completely new to somebody. How can you go about helping that person really understand what it is you do so that you don't keep getting question after question after question?

Martin Huntbach: Yeah, exactly. And the best example I've got is what we did. So before we actually really focused on this, the piece of content that I published before I changed my approach was what is a 301 redirect, and why do you need to know? So that's a technical term that most people, most designers might not even understand.

I have to teach people that. But for some reason in my head, I was like I want to rank for that keyword. So that's what I'm going to go for knowing fully well that none of my customers, I literally say zero, of my customers could tell me what a 301 redirect was, or even identify that as a term that they needed to think about.

So it was completely pointless me writing that article other than if someone was technical and they just needed a reminder. So when you compare that to the first piece of content I created when I changed my approach and it was how much does it cost for a website? So the difference is vast between here's a technical term that you've never even knew existed, or what is it a guaranteed question that you are going to ask me?

It's 100% guaranteed that someone's going to ask you that question when they want to work with you or when they're browsing online. So that's the difference, really. The difference is making it so obvious, making it so achievable for someone to get an answer that you know that they're asking a question about.

And I think that's probably the simplest way to be effective and it sounds so straightforward and it sounds so simple and it's like well, if it's that easy, why aren't other people doing it? And it's because they're not taking this approach. They're not treating their customers like royalty, I suppose and just answering every single question that they've got.

And this concept really was brought to light from the book They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. He's also a good friend with me and with Col Gray as well. But that's where I kind of it really hit the nail on the head for me. That was how I was able to start getting more traffic, more rankings and more leads and more sales.

It just so happened that when we were writing that content that was really helpful and easily accessible and great, we were still attracting some people that we really didn't want to attract and weren't the right fit for us. And that's why we had to kind of change things up slightly.

Ian Paget: Sure. I'd like to go into the actual filter more, but I think in terms of creating content. So at this point, I think within a fairly short space of time, you perfectly described how you can figure out what the question should be that you want to answer.

But I guess when we talk about content, at the beginning of the podcast, you broke down what the different types of content are, but I think it's worth going into this. So we got a question, we know that we need to answer that, and now we want to create some content. What are the different forms of content that we could potentially create in order to help our target customer?

Martin Huntbach: So it really depends on who your audience are. Do the audience know that your product and service is something that exists that will benefit them? For instance, logo, design. Is that something somebody's going to be searching for? Logo designer in Manchester or London or even cheap logo design or whatever.

There are people out there who understand what logo design is. So those people will be searching online. Maybe they'll search YouTube, maybe they'll search the Apple Podcast, but more chances are, if they're searching for someone to help with a logo, they might just go to Google, which is still the number one website in the world.

And until something better comes along, it probably still will be. So that's probably the best place that you can start, which is to think about where your customers are based on what they know, their knowledge level. I think most people understand what a logo designer is the same that they do a web designer or someone who bakes cakes. So for those people, are they searching for your product and service already?

In which case, where are they probably going to go first? There are obviously new platforms like TikTok and obviously Instagram and things like that that are fantastic for attracting people who don't know what it is that you offer, or maybe I see people all the time talking about how they renovate broken down houses and things like that. Now there are people out there who search on Google for that.

There's always going be people that want detailed articles and maybe some videos on that book. Some people haven't thought about that before. So in that case, popping up in the newsfeed on how you doubled your money on this house that you bought for 20 grand, then that's the kind of entertainment content that might beneficial for that platform.

The other part of this question is how can you take content like a question, one question and make the most out of it? Now we always start with a blog article because the blog article is usually the longest form of content. So you can flesh out all of the individual ideas.

And what we do is when we spend that time creating that content, we find that we give ourselves so many other pieces of content from that one article that we can distribute across other platforms as well. Things LinkedIn, at the very least we can take our article and break it up into five to 10 individual LinkedIn posts. That would also work for Instagram.

So it's about thinking about where your customers are before writing the content or producing the content and then distributing it, not just copy and pasting it. Sometimes you will have to play around with it a little bit more, especially with LinkedIn. So it's about where your content starts, the platform that it starts and where it can go once it's been produced. We just found that most of our traffic comes from Google.

So we're going to stick with that first. We've got people searching for what we do, but we've also got people searching for answers to questions and problems that they're facing like how to rank a website on the first page of Google, how to write a headline for a blog post.

Those are the kind of ideas that mean that we focus more on Google traffic and rankings, and we start with the article and then we can actually just carve that up and use it on other platforms as well. You have to be realistic and ideally you would have a social media person that can create new content every single day for those platforms.

But if you're trying to keep things lean and there's only one or two people in the business, that's the best way that we approach this, which is publish content on your preferred platform first that makes the most sense for your target customers and then make time in the diary to take pieces of that and distribute it across other platforms as well.

Ian Paget: I can't stress enough the concept of repurposing content. That's something I know I need to do more of because I'm frequently creating new content on a weekly basis, in particular through this podcast. And I know that there's a lot of opportunities there to take that content that's being prepared and distribute it in many different ways like you said.

I think in the graphic design space, people that might be familiar with Michael Janda, he has a fantastic Instagram feed. And I am very aware that most of his posts... So he does a lot of these really great carousel with you slide through them, it's got helpful tips and advice. What that content actually is, is his next book.

So what he does, I don't know if he releases it as blog posts in the same way that you do, but he treats... He is continuously creating a book, but then using that content on social media, and I'm sure he's probably able to use any questions that people might be asking to actually make his book better. So it's a good way to be thinking about it.

So when you do create content, maybe you could be working on a bigger thing rather than just creating a carousel instead. Because there's a lot of designers out there. I've seen young designers do this. They will focus on the carousel because they're trying to be Michael Janda or Chris Do. And obviously they see those people creating the carousels and they want to do the same thing and that's totally understandable.

But what they don't often realise is the bigger picture like you described where they have this main piece of content. In your case it's blog post, in my case, it could be a podcast, with Chris Do, maybe it's part of a training course and it's a training course that he wants to sell. He's just taking content from that and issuing that out in different ways.

So don't just focus on the minute Instagram feed that's just going to be there for a short period of time. Think of the bigger picture and how you can potentially distribute that in many different ways. I think that's really good advice, Martin.

Martin Huntbach: Yeah. And I think, I mean you mentioned Chris there. So one of the things that in terms of turning content from a course into bite sized content, a lot of people have this preconceived notion that if it's good enough that it's paid, then you might not really want to share that publicly or freely on Instagram if you're trying to get people to buy it from you.

But actually one of the successful methods that we've taken is imagine that the content that you are creating right now has a price tag attached. Imagine the content, the article you're going to write or the video you're going to record, could that be premium? I'm not saying you should charge for this. I'm saying, if you added £50 to that or $297 or whatever, wherever you're in the world, would it still be valuable?

Would somebody still get value from that? Now, I ask myself that question before I hit publish on every single piece of free content. The reason that I do that is because if you are thinking, oh, this is valuable. I probably shouldn't share too much. Then your competitors are probably thinking that as well, or nine out of 10 of them probably will.

So that's a really, really good sign that the content is good enough. If you are sharing a logo design tip on how to fix this thing, you might think this is really good. And if I give this information away, nobody's going to want to hire me. The reality is is that most people don't take action. Most people don't implement what it is you're out there teaching.

So you are free to just share everything regardless of the value within your content. You want to be the most helpful. You want to be the most trustworthy because as a side effect of that, you're going... Most people are not going to work with you. That's a reality. There's not enough hours in the day for you to work with everyone if they wanted to.

So if you only attract1% or 2% of your total audience, the bigger the audience, the more money you're going to make. So if you can have that price tag mentality when it comes to content and I think to myself, would I be happy to charge for this content?

If I would be happy to charge for it and I wouldn't feel guilty for charging for it, then I publish that piece of content. It's just a really, really simple filter on whether or not it's good enough. Would somebody pay me for this?

Ian Paget: Yeah, you're actually making me think of Pat Flynn. So I'm sure you are aware of Pat Flynn.

Martin Huntbach: Yes.

Ian Paget: Some of the audience might not be but I've been a fan of Pat's for a long time. I consumed a lot of his content and his podcast and blog posts and everything like that are such high value that it's incredible content. And in my opinion, it's the best in terms of passive income and information.

And what's interesting is obviously he's giving that away for free, but when he did create a book or a course or anything like that, what I found really interesting is the information in that training course, he'd actually freely shared already. So if you listened to all of his content, followed everything he did, you would know everything that was in that training course already.

And now these training courses, I can't remember the price tag but say hypothetically a few hundred pounds. But the main difference with that is that training course, you can sit down and go through that within a few hours and learn everything. But if he needed to go through all of his content, that would take you days, weeks or so on to go through everything.

So even though he'd taken content that he'd given away for free, which is obviously of value, he hasn't lost any customers. If anything, he's become the authority. And people like me, I love Pat. I want to watch his training course. I want to support him because I know that I've got so much value from this free stuff. What's the paid stuff going to be like?

And I've never been disappointed. Like I said, it's not that I felt like I've learned something new from the training course, but it's a nice way of refreshing that information. And when he releases a book again, I want to buy the book because I'm a fan of his content. I'm saying this just to stress what you' said about giving away your best content for free.

It doesn't stop you from generating an income from that, whether that be through consulting or a product or service or anything like that. That's how people are succeeding now is sharing everything they know

Martin Huntbach: And I just wanted to point out as well that Pat Flynn's a great example. A lot of the big successful podcasts, they live and breathe this. But like you said nobody's disappointed if they pay for a course with Pat Flynn because it's packaged better. They don't have to serf through so many different articles and links.

It's just packaged better. It's neater, it's easier. It's presented better. You feel obligated to do the thing because you paid for it. So nobody ever minds. If you get a return of an investment after going through 10% of that course, then it's paid for itself and you're happy. So people to buy for many different reasons.

And I also wanted to stress that Pat's got hundreds, maybe even a thousand episodes now. I don't know how it's been going since 2013.

Ian Paget: It's got a lot definitely. And it's got more than one podcast

Martin Huntbach: Yes, absolutely. So I don't want anybody to think that they have to dedicate their lives to this like Pat has done. We found that we were getting great results from writing one article that answered one question. So for instance, as an example, off the top of my head, we found that we were getting a question quite a lot, which is I've built my own website or somebody's built my website and it's not ranking in Google and I don't know how to fix that.

And that's a question that if you were to use a tool or search online with a keyword research, not many people search for that, but we found that every single person who spoke to us or read our articles were like well, we are not ranking in Google. What can I do? We know you're writing lots of helpful content. So we actually wrote one article, which is why you're not ranking in Google and how to fix it.

Now that one article obviously attracted a lot of traffic. It attracted leads. We've taken on customers from that article, but that was only one article and we found that we were getting some success. So when Pat Flynn creates all of these article or these podcast episodes and dedicates his entire life to free content, you can do that on a much smaller scale.

Pat Flynn's a very, very rich man because he produces very, very rich content. You don't have to have as much money or as much success as Pat Flynn to get the same results. It's just you doing what you do on a small scale. So be ultra specific about the content you produce. Do it the right way. You never want to produce content that you think I need to produce a piece of content.

So I'm just going to put this out there and hope for the best. It's much better for you to produce fewer articles or fewer videos and actually get the content right rather than just sharing content for content's sake. Because you can achieve exactly what it is that you just explained Pat achieves, which is people buy his course anyway.

People find that it delivers a decent return on that investment. People love it and they're thankful for it, even though the content's similar. And that's something else to be aware of is that if you are not prepared to produce this content for free, your competitors might start clocking onto this as the best way to grow their business and they might get there before you.

So I definitely think logo design and design in general is a big opportunity. In websites and SEO and with online income, there's a lot of competitors out there, but in the design space, there are obviously some big names. You've mentioned a few of them on this podcast, but it's very... When I stumble across design websites, they're very design heavy. They look very beautiful. They're very clean and clear.

The problem sometimes is like photographer websites is the imagery sometimes makes for great experience, but without content on the website, without articles, without some helpful guidance, the images by themselves won't do a lot of the selling, won't do a lot of the educating. They won't answer things like, what is a JPEG? So I do think that there's room for that. And I know it's something Col Gray from Pixels Inc has done quite a lot of.

He's really, really tried to focus on content these past few years. His big thing obviously is his amazing YouTube channel, but he really has focused on content as well. And it does help throughout the buying cycle when you are able to send articles to people and you say, I've produce this content, this answers that question. And it just makes things a lot easier.

Ian Paget: Yeah, I think Col's actually a very good example of this because he has his YouTube channel and obviously graphic designers are interested in this and they are following him. But he's not targeting graphic designers in the same way that I am like this podcast is a podcast for graphic designers.

But in terms of what Col's doing, almost all of his content is for clients. They are answering questions that clients are searching for. So in terms of that video, that content marketing that he's doing is specifically for potential clients, not for graphic designers. It just happens to interest graphic designers anyway.

Martin Huntbach: Absolutely.

Ian Paget: Cool. So I want to talk a little bit more about this whole idea of filtering things down. So we spoke about what content should we create? And we've spoken a little bit about actually creating that content. We could possibly go into that in more detail if we have time, but I think this filter thing is an important thing that we should go into first.

So how do you go about going from simply creating content to get traffic, to creating content that is filtering out the people you don't want and attracting the people that you do want?

Martin Huntbach: Yeah, it's a really interesting one. And often people don't think that they have this choice. They don't have this option. You just attract who you attract, and there's some magical unicorn customers that will just be perfect and they'll get in touch with you, and they're just going to pay you 10 times more.

But in reality, you have quite a lot of responsibility in order to attract and repel your customers and the ones you want to work with versus the ones you don't. So how it came about is, like I mentioned, we were attracting lots of leads, traffic leads and opportunities for sales. But we were finding that some of the people that wanted to work with us, maybe they didn't have the budget.

And if they don't have a budget, you're going to have to... Quite often a normal, typical sales process is you don't know what their budget is. You don't know what... They don't know what your prices are. So they book a call with you. They spend an hour on the phone and at the end, you might be brave enough to say, what's your budget? Or if not, you tell them the price that you charge.

And then they say, oh, wow, I really can't afford that. I was expecting it to be a few hundred and you just quoted me over a thousand or whatever it might be. And then you've given up all your time because you're so polite, you didn't bring it up earlier. And every sales call's different. So it really depends.

The point is that we were just finding that when we were speaking to these people, we were getting frustrated, not with them, but with the fact that we'd spent time doing that and booking the call and you know what it's like trying to get things in diaries. Sometimes it's a nightmare. So we just found that we needed to stop that from happening.

And the very first thing that we did is we started to create content to stop mistakes like that from happening. So one of the things that we found is one of the first piece of content I'm trying to think off the top of my head was, why you shouldn't spend thousands on a brand new website when you first launch your business.

So there's this idea that everyone's your customer as long as they've got money. But in reality, we found that the customers that would take longer to deal with maybe they don't have the budget, are brand new business owners, maybe they've just left their job, or they just want to start a new business. And for us to take over £1000 off them, it didn't feel right because they hadn't fully established a customer base.

They didn't have ongoing sales. They were just starting out. But when we were on sales calls with people, you might get sort of 20, 30 minutes into a call. And they say, I haven't got much of a budget, but really even if they did have the budget, it wouldn't be the right thing for them to do. So we actually created a piece of content that said, why you shouldn't invest if you're brand new.

And what that meant is that we could establish whether or not they were new business owners when they sent us an email, because they'd say things like I'm just starting my business. I'm looking for a web designer. Can you help? Can I book a call? Can I book a meeting? So we created that content to stop us from speaking to those people.

We'd send them a really helpful email. And we'd say, if you're brand new to business, it might not be the right time for you to work with us. Maybe you want to find a cheaper web designer. Maybe you want to do it yourself using some software. But rather than saying, no, we can't help, we actually wrote that article and sent it to them and they were extremely thankful for that.

So that's one way that we really, really started to flesh this idea out to say, you might not be in the position yet where you're going to benefit from our services. And it obviously takes you a while to understand who is your customer and who isn't your customer, but that was just something that we got a little bit frustrated with. So it was what was happening within our business that dictated the content that we produced.

So I can't think of any other examples, but every single time that we had a problem within our business, we were like, have we created a piece of content to stop that from happening again? Have we created an article that says, why you shouldn't work with us? So new business is one thing, but there's so many other different people out there aren't the right fit for us.

We found out early on that people that were like, I need a website done fast. I need it done cheap. Even if they've got lots of money, but they just wanted to treat us a little bit of an employee rather than an agency. So we actually created one article that said seven reasons you shouldn't work with us. And we listed those reasons so that people could self-educate.

Now, understandably not everybody is going to read your articles and they're not going to read all of them and they're not going to get down to those articles, but they still might get in touch with you. And that's where we decided to set up a couple of email templates. You can pretty much establish, get a good idea of what someone's like from the initial email that they send. Some emails might be like, hi, Ian, I love your website. I love all your amazing content. It's fantastic. I'm looking to work with a logo designer and we wanted to work with you last year, but we decided we're going to wait until we've got more money in the bank and now's the time to work with you. That's one inquiry that you would get that you'd be really excited about.

And another inquiry is like, hi, I saw your name in Google. Someone referred me to you. They said you designed their logo. What's the cheapest and quickest way that we can get this done right now? The anxiety that you might feel in terms of replying to that, the latter, is so much more different from the first one.

So when you have content, it makes it... And you publish content on your website or you publish content on YouTube, you can then use that to make that transition easier. So if you say, I don't think we're the right fit for you, go away, then it's not really going to sit well with them.

But if you send them an article and saying, actually it seems as though what you're asking for we might not be able to help with, for more information, read this article about the seven key reasons that you might not see success when working with us really, because they are a particular kind of person. Sometimes they'll read the article and they'll be like, oh wow, you've really... I really misinterpreted what a logo designer does and they transition themselves.

That's happened multiple times for us, when they think it's one thing and then your content has helped move them from a particular type of customer to someone that really, really values your opinion because you've used content to take ownership of that situation, take control of that situation. And content is a nice, easy cushion for them. It's not, yes, we can work with you. No, we can't work with you.

There's a middle area and a gray area that you can really, really help build your brand and change people's way of thinking. if they do have a budget in the future, then who are they going to work with? They're going to work with someone that's helped them understand that it's not the right time for them because nine out of 10 times, they'll speak to nine other people and they'll all take their money.

And they'll be like, yap, let's get you signed up. And then they'll have a terrible experience. And we didn't want that. We just didn't want to sign up customers for the sake of money. We wanted to sign up for the sake of the experience and the fact that we wanted to help people get a great result.

And we just found that when you have certain content and when you have a certain library of email templates that you can send to these people, you're just able to save yourself quite a lot of time and it helps stop that email anxiety.

Ian Paget: This is absolutely genius. And I don't know about listeners, but I'm feeling really excited about this because I am faced with that challenge a lot. I think everyone listening that does sales a lot will have clients that want it now, or don't know how much it costs or they come with you saying I don't have much of a budget or whatever.

That's fairly common. And I really, really love the idea of creating content specifically that you can use to share in emails. I never even thought of that, and it's a really good idea. Because as you described, that particular client that sent the email that wanted it now, they wanted it quick, they wanted it cheap, you would be inclined to reply like, I don't think we're going to be a good fit, blah, blah, blah, if you was going to get back to them.

Some might even just ignore that inquiry because it's pretty clear that that's not going to work out, but I really like the idea that you can prepare template emails for those scenarios and help them. Because I mean, something I've always liked to do with telephone calls. So when I started working for myself full time, I always felt fairly uncomfortable with sales scores. It was new to me. It was daunting.

It was something I haven't done a lot of previously. So it was a new thing. So something that I did was I spoke to anyone. So if a lead came in, even if they said that they don't have much of a budget, I would still speak to them on the phone. And there was one time, and this comes to mind now, where I don't know why, I must have been having a quiet day or I got on well with the person that I was speaking to, but this person basically had no budget.

They had what, like £50, far from enough to even make it worse talking with them. But what I decided to do was just spend time with them, help them understand the process, how things work, why it costs a certain amount, what her options are, what she could potentially go for now to get going. And I just spoke through everything.

I spent about half an hour on a call that I know wouldn't necessarily convert, but what I was really surprised about and why I think the approach that you said is fantastic is she actually eventually came back to me within a week and said, Ian, your advice was so fantastic. What I've decided to do is pull together some money from different things and I'd like to go ahead with your usual project.

Martin Huntbach: Amazing.

Ian Paget: So I originally started with her only having a £50 budget to having a lot more than that to actually go ahead with the project. And it was simply because I helped her and I will openly admit that I don't always have that time for clients, especially when I know that they're not going to go ahead. I'd love to, but I'd never make an income.

But I think the approach that you've described here in terms of preparing good content, that could be blogs, videos, audio, it could be anything, physically creating that content so that you can get back to those people. But if you prepare template emails, it is just genius because it's literally copy, paste, send, forget.

But that to that customer could be like, oh, this is really helpful. I didn't know that it was like this. I'm going to get in touch. And you could convert somebody that you would previously have ignored and actually turn them into a customer by simply copying and pasting an email.

I mean, it's kind of obvious but having you describe it to me anyway, I find it exciting and I've got some work to do. And I'd imagine that there would be people listening that have that same feeling inside, and now they just want to stop and start working on content now.

Martin Huntbach: It's an interesting one because the email templates are something that you figure out. Within our business, we were like, this will save us time. But actually when you marry it up with content, it works wonderfully well. We always say that, I mean, when you publish content, people treat it differently than if you were to say on the phone.

We say this all the time, people care what you... They don't care what you say. They care what you publish. If you're on a phone call with someone and you say, usually most of my customers pay £1000 and that person has a choice. They either believe you, or they don't.

And they go somewhere else or they laugh and they say... Because that's what happened to us earlier on. When we were trying to charge a certain amount for a website, people were like, nobody would pay that. That's like-

Ian Paget: Yeah, I've heard that.

Martin Huntbach: Even if it's like a normal price, isn't it? It's not particularly expensive. Some people just have a different idea. And I just found that people will care and believe more about what you publish. So if you put your name to something and you write an article to say the average amount of money that people pay us is between five and 10,000, then people will believe that.

People want to believe what they read on... They believe the news, and sometimes that's not correct. So why wouldn't they believe an honest logo designer that's talking about how you can grow your business with logos and what impact it has? And you produce an article to say, this is what people typically pay, and here's why, and here's what's involved.

And you mentioned it before, the process. One of our best performing articles was our 31 step process to building a website. And throughout that article, we would send that to any new inquiries, regardless of if they were good or bad or whatever. We could send that to people to say, here's exactly why we charge a certain amount, because this is the process that we follow.

You may have thought that it was as simple as add a few images to our website. It's not the case, and here's exactly why. So when you actually are more honest and transparent about your processes and the way you do things, the price often doesn't seem like such a huge issue, but you have to be prepared to be honest and upfront about the real questions and the real concerns that people have.

You probably see now why writing about why a 301 redirect is important for your website, probably doesn't perform as well as the kind of content that we're discussing now. And I think when you do get over that hurdle and you get started, you'll naturally start to pick up where you need to create content and what problems you need to solve.

You can transform your business completely just using content that you sit down on a Sunday evening and just decide to solve a problem a week. Even if it's relatively short, but you can use it with a new sales process, maybe you want to go into more detail, like the 31 ways to build your website. That's potentially going to rank well, and it's potentially going to drive some traffic, but it's also going to improve that customer.

And when you loop it into your emails, you can't really go wrong. And we're just finding now we spoke about the benefits at the start of general content and the content that we were producing before, but the benefits now are completely different and we never would've realised the benefits even after seeing the results initially.

So some of the benefits is we never have people on a call who don't know our prices, who aren't aware of the sort of price range that we charge. So it makes for a more interesting conversation. The sales calls are 20 minutes versus an hour and a half like they were before, which saves us a lot of time. And we're also converting 90% of the proposals that we send out.

So we're not wasting any time on people who can't afford to work with us, or maybe they're not the right fit, but we're also not sending them emails that says we don't want to work with you if you can't afford to pay us. It's a really, really interesting automated, sort of semi-automated way to save time, treat people with respect and attract higher paying clients. It's kind of the perfect trifactor, really.

Ian Paget: Yeah, definitely. Well, we've been speaking now for about just over 50 minutes, and we've only really scraped the surface of this, but I think we've done enough to inspire people and to direct people how to approach this. But obviously, there is more that people might want to learn about. Earlier you mentioned about your website with lots of resources and so on.

We've briefly mentioned the book. I think we should talk about this a little bit more in the last few minutes that we have here. Can you tell us more about your book? So it's called Content Fortress. I haven't yet read it myself, so do you want to tell us a little bit more about that book and then we'll wrap things up?

Martin Huntbach: Cool. Sure, absolutely. So it was my wife and I that wrote the book. I was saying before we hit record that we wrote it during COVID. We sort of announced that we were writing a book and then COVID and lockdown happened. So yeah, we wrote that during lockdown, so that was fun. We'll never forget that.

So yeah, the idea of Content Fortress is everything that we've spoken about on this call about being able to attract better customers and repel the ones that you don't want to work with. That's what the book's about. So if you want more details and sort of some email templates and things, that's all in the book as well.

Essentially, we break up content that you can create into eight individual pillars. One of the pillars is repelling content, like the content that we've been speaking about. Some of it is how you can actually sell your products and services as well. So we have like eight pillars and we have one of them at sales content. So we've kind of got eight pillars.

You really kind of want to just spend time creating content across the eight pillars. If you're ever struggling, you've got a book or resource. It's kind of like a handbook on how to do that. We've got some great examples as well from completely different niches, B2C, B2B, about how people are using content in order to demand their perfect customers.

And I think that's what it's about. If you're there and you're publishing content and you're actually producing it and sharing it with people, you just will naturally attract better customers. It's probably the biggest benefit, I think, to the book, to reading the book to get the entire concept. So it really just depends on what your goals are.

If you want to produce content just for traffic and rankings, that's great. But at some point you're going to have to filter through who you want to work with, and that's where the book comes in handy. So it's kind of like one level deeper from just traffic generating content. We don't talk a lot about SEO in the book. We've got courses and blog posts for that.

This was a slightly different angle and how you can really take your business, especially for a service based business like logo design. How you can demand better customers and make sure that they pay what you want to be paid. So yeah, that's really-

Ian Paget: And also I noticed on your website there, is it 10% sales go to Mind, go to the charity Mind?

Martin Huntbach: Absolutely, yeah. So I told you briefly that I struggled when I was dealing with all these people. I struggled that I was having to respond to multiple emails a day. I just didn't have time to do my job and it caused me quite a lot of stress and anxiety. So I struggled with my mental health when I was in that kind of period.

It was only after implementing this strategy that things got better. So we decided when we launched the book to donate 10% of all sales, not profits, all sales to to Mind. So yeah, they're an amazing charity and they do some amazing work.

Ian Paget: Yeah, that's very generous. And I know through this podcast, I'm very much an advocate of mental health. If anyone is struggling, speak to somebody, get professional help, if you need to. It is totally normal. I fully support it.

I admire people that do look after their mental health as much as their physical health. It's important. And if you don't look after that, then you are going to struggle. So thank you for supporting Mind and for being open about those struggles.

Martin Huntbach: Yeah.

Ian Paget: Cool, fantastic. Well, this has been a brilliant episode. I think there's been a lot of really solid takeaways. So Martin, thank you so much for your time. And yeah, maybe we need to do another episode again in the future about-

Martin Huntbach: Love to.

Ian Paget: ... Some other area of content marketing. But yeah, thank you so much for your time. It's been great to speak to you.

Martin Huntbach: No, absolutely loved it. And yeah, whatever anybody else needs, I'm sure I can help.

Ian Paget: Brilliant. I'll link to your website, book and everything in the show notes so that people can find your content, book and reach out if they have any questions. So, brilliant. Thanks, Martin.

Martin Huntbach: Wonderful. You're very welcome. Thanks for having me on.