How to kiss a stranger, and other marketing advice

There is a myth in marketing that you need to start from a place where ‘nobody cares about you or your business’. Toby Moore, author of Trust at Scale and curator of TEDxBrighton, disagrees and explains why.

People are looking around the room all the time, looking for stuff that will excite then, amuse them, educate them and inspire them. 

Sometimes this even transcends into making and/or saving them money. Can you believe it? 

But just like being a good-looking, single 20-something at a house party, you’re probably thinking, ‘sure, but how do I get them to look at ME?’. 

How do you get them to want to kiss a stranger?

Content is trust, at scale

I work in marketing (kind of). Or at least people come to me for help because they think I work in marketing. However, the honest truth is that I really rather dislike marketing. And I would even go as far to say that I’m not actually very good at it. But what I do love is content.

The reason I love content is because everything is content. We often get told that content is something highly defined and tactical, such as blogs for SEO, or podcast for building an audience, or webinars for generating leads. But this is a very narrowminded and ultimately ineffective perception of what content is. 

I say content is everything – because content is everything. The ideas you have across a coffee table, this is content. The comments you leave on a friend’s social post, this is content. The question you ask at the end of a talk at a conference, this is content.

Content is anything that enables you to pass on your thinking, ideas, processes, messages, questions, answers, knowledge, expertise or curiosities.

How you capture that and share it with the world outside of just that moment, that thought, idea, or answer appeared. That then defines your ability to turn content into customers.

I have subscribed to this concept of content for almost 10 years of my career now. I’ve taken it across as many industries as I can think of. And I’ve worked with businesses all shapes and sizes, from FTSE 100 brands all the way across to freelances, charities and founder brands. 

We have to stop saying content is something that we use to earn clicks likes and leads, and transcend our thinking into believing that the purpose of content – whatever shape it takes – is to build trust. Then more importantly than this, the purpose of content is to build trust at scale. To take a moment in time, where our work has the power to inspire one other person. Then figuring out a system to allow that moment to reach an unlimited number of people through the power of the internet and digital.

Trust is the ultimate goal, because trust is what allows us to show up in our work as exactly who we are, and for the person sitting across the other side of the table to believe everything that we say, to understand exactly what we have to offer, and to feel happy, comfortable and confident in taking action to follow our lead as a provider of compelling services and products.

Without trust, there is no ability to believe, there is no reason to understand, and there is ultimately no compelling opportunity to say yes to.

Therefore, to fail to put trust at the very heart of your content, is to fundamentally fail to take advantage of the most human element that you have available to you uncapped, 24/7, for free, within your business.

How to build trust

I’m going to tell you about the three components of building trust through content. And then I’m going to give you the most powerful, easy to do and low-cost approach you can use to changing gears with the way that you create content immediately, in order to place building trust at the heart of your work.

Let’s start with the three components of building trust. These are education, empathy and entertainment. Or if you like, the three E’s.

Education

Valuing the way that you educate the people around you – both customers and community alike – will get you noticed, develop authority in your industry and ultimately demonstrate to anyone and everyone exactly what you’re capable of doing. 

People are often afraid of over educating online, on the basis thier clients might run away with their secrets and do it themselves. I say, let them try… If one blog post can provide someone with the answers the 5, 10, 15 years’ worth of experience has taught you, in order to do it just as well as you can… well that would be a rare thing. Instead, educating your audience simply places you as a person in your industry that values educating generously which intern builds trust, and offers people the opportunity to see what you know and what you can do. Which also builds trust.

Empathy

Empathy might sound like a soft and squishy thing, but frankly the world of work needs more squishy things. If you want to build trusting relationships with potential customers and you need to be less afraid of getting down in the fluffy stuff and figuring out how to come back out of that develop it into a method that attracts customers systematically. In this context, empathy is about understanding the problems challenges and ambitions of your customers. 

You can figure this stuff out by simply imagining the conversations that you have with your best and favourite customers. Consider the questions that they ask you, the questions that you ask them, goals ambitions and dreams to share with you and the different ways that you like to respond in order to make them feel like you get it. Spend 15 minutes writing stuff down on a piece of paper and start building it into your content strategy, and you’re onto a winner.

Entertainment

Now I don’t mean entertainment in terms of jazz hands, showtunes or telling a bunch of crappy dad jokes. What I do mean is taking a conscious and purposeful approach to building your personality and your characteristics into your content. 

Much like empathy, this comes down to understanding exactly what it takes to build excellent and trusting relationships in real life, capturing that as knowledge, and then translating it into ideas, stories and language within your content. To do this, spend 10 minutes doodling down things on paper that help you understand how you behave in front of your best customers. Then take every opportunity you can to work those behaviours into the tone of voice and characteristics of your content.

Putting it down on paper

Those are the three E’s. Now before I go, I did promise you a super-killer technique for developing fantastic ideas for content. It will immediately improve your ability to build trust online. And it goes a little bit like this.

Write down the name of the customer, they can be imaginary or real. The important thing is it has to represent the type of customer they would love to do business with again and again and again.

Now write down next to their name three questions that you know that they would want to ask you. Try to focus these questions around tapping into the knowledge and expertise that you have – that they would normally have to pay in order to access and understand. 

Example: if you were an HR consultant these questions might look something like: 

‘What percentage of my staff should be on the payroll?’ Or ‘How should I approach diversity and equality in my organisation?’

Now I want you to write down two more questions that you would like to ask them. And these questions should represent things that you would want to know about this person, in order to figure out whether they have a problem that you would like to solve.

Again, if you’re a HR consultant these questions might be something like: ‘Have you ever used an HR consultant before?’ Or ‘What are the biggest staffing challenges in your organisation right now?’

Now grab a fresh piece of paper and create five columns across it. At the top of each column write each these five questions. Next up, set a timer for 20 minutes. Try to write down five ideas or headlines for content and each heading. 

These headings can be as simple as ‘Five ways to find and choose an HR consultant’, or ‘How to tackle the biggest staffing challenges facing businesses right now’.

If you’re ruthless with this and don’t waste any time. Within 20 minutes you’re staring at 25 new ideas for pieces of content that are borne out of actual questions, challenges and qualifiers that are relevant, helpful and educational to new and potential customers

Did we get lucky?

Who knows. Henry Ford once said: “Fifty per cent of the money I spend on advertising works, the problem is I don’t know which 50 percent.” 

This mentality translated into decades of marketers’ thinking that they had to throw mud at the wall wait to see what sticks.

You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to put it down to luck.

Instead, place building trust to scale the heart of everything that you do, whether that be online, off-line or in-person. Everything is content, and every piece of content has the potential to surprise both you and a potential customer. 

But the more strategic, intentional and consistent you become at creating content that is designed to build trust, the more likely it becomes that you will successfully build awareness, connection and conversation with relevant like-minded customers in a way that is easier to do more enjoyable to me than any SEO, growth hacking or algorithm gaming technique that the marketing cowboys never seem to get tired of selling you.

Good luck. Go be you. Go build trust at scale.

Toby Moore
Author of Trust at Scale and curator of TEDxBrighton