today I want to talk about balancing content Creation with doing actual client work and this is a struggle that many of you have and you feel like it's this burden to do content creation you just feel like G and for some of you it's like fingernails on a chalkboard it just kills you to do this here's the problem let's just take the label of content creation away from this we'll just call it client acquisition do you have a client acquisition strategy like how do you plan on getting new clients let me tell you a story
as a cautionary tale for many of you when time are good you're busy feasting and you're not planting any seeds in the field so that eventually your food stores your Warehouse will run out of food and you'll go hungry and this is a problem that many of us have is we're working in our business and we're not working on our business I have friends and I've seen this happen to them time and time again they get fat not literally figuratively and they get a little bit lazy because clients are coming in they think they're the
shiznit at this moment in time because they're just falling over bids and like oh I don't know what to do with all the bids in my life and they take their foot off the gas pedal and they stop working on client acquisition strategy and what happens and this always happens it always happens I can guarantee you your clients eventually change they become tired of you and then they go elsewhere and this has happened to agencies who built up their entire agency around one big automotive company and they think they'll never go away cuz we built
them the 10 20 30 years later at some point your clients will decide we need fresh ideas fresh energy or some young upand cominging competitor will have figured out something that you haven't because you've taken it for granted and they pretty much pull the account from the agency or they take half of it or more and give it to another agency which is devastating for ad agencies and we see this happening on a base scale we see it happening on a small scale and you've not made any preparations so if you know this is going
to happen this is an inevitability then you need to prepare for this and what do you need to do well while you're doing the client work you need to be focused on client acquisition this can happen in many different ways you could do networking like in-person networking go to functions go to dinner parties become part of masterminds you could be doing old school sales calls like knocking on doors and just putting your foot in the door and saying hey just want to show you what we're doing all of those things take time and energy but
those kinds of efforts are not scalable there's only so many view that can go around there are only so many meanings that you can have before you run out of opportunities but there's one thing that you can do which has infinite scale infinite reach potentially which is to do content marketing which is to create content to broadcast to your audience tell a story figure out a need put your finger on the pain and use the language that they use so that you can attract new clients because all of us would be much more confident if
we had more customers to serve than we had capacity to do this is an important concept if we have more customers more opportunities then we'll become more confident and who would not like more customers and what would that mean for you it would mean that you could be choosier you could turn away work that doesn't fit your schedule doesn't fit the creative brief that you had in mind or doesn't pay you the kind of amount of money that you want and I know from my own personal experience when we're hot and there's a moment in
time when you're hot you're able to find who you are you can develop systems you can hire the best people and you can continue to raise your rate until you find whatever theoretical ceiling you're going to find you can only do that because you got to say no to everybody and the best way to say that no is to raise your price so only the ones who can afford you will say yes you put the decision in their court if we look at the now as client acquisition strategy maybe it's a little bit more important
than you think and maybe you don't have to feel like it's such a burden for you to work on like my God because when you dread something it influences your state and if your state is like oh I hate this I don't want to do homework I don't want to read this book I don't want to write a report I don't have to give an oral presentation you're going to be dragging your feet through the sand and we all do this and what is the result of this and you know this if you're grumpy if
you're not excited you're going to give it some partial effort and you self-sabotage and then the outcome is exactly predictable at that point well the content I wrote didn't get anybody excited it didn't lead to any customers Chris well yeah because you didn't care you didn't put your love into it you look tired and uninspired yeah that's going to win over clients so we need to reframe this we are so lucky to be living in this age in time in which the media the advertising is free all we have to do is create the content
back in my day there was no social media the media was expensive to buy and the ability to reach people was questionable and your ability to track the results the metrics was impossible we took out ads old school ads in magazines and in books and directories we sponsored shows and events I'm not sure if any of them ever resulted in one new client so we should be grateful that we live in this time and space where you can quite literally communicate to the world at the amazing price of free Chris I'm all in man I've
been doing content I've been riding that hamster wheel this whole time and I'm spending 78% of my time making content but I'm not getting any results well that's a problem too when we do something repeatedly and we put all our energies in into it and we're not getting any results what's that called that's called Insanity I believe to expect a different result so if you're creating content it's not that the content doesn't work it's your content doesn't work it's not that the platform was broken it's that your content on that platform isn't working for the
audience that you're trying to attract so I hate to say this CU it sounds self- serving but you got to learn a thing or two about storytelling you got to learn how to write you you have to understand the the wants and the needs of your customer your ideal client Avatar and you have to do the thing that's the most difficult thing that any business can do which is to say I'm going to be committed to this specific client I'm going to Niche down because I understand this client really well most of us can't make
that commitment so we broadcast generic messages to generic people and when when has that ever worked so don't do that save your money or give it to me everybody Chris here we're trying something a little bit different than what we normally do for the podcast we're doing solo episodes these are shorter more contained buils around certain themes and questions I think are very relevant for us to be talking about so wherever you're listening to this however you're seeing this let us know in the comments and the feedback what you think and we'll make some adjustments
as we go
