How to Become the Voice of Trust for Your Industry w/ Marcus Sheridan

0:00Marketing is a battle for trust. What do we need to do to become the most trusted voice in the world? Marcus Sheridan, They Ask, You Answer is the book. The cool thing about this They Ask, You Answer type of mindset and addressing their questions, worries, fears, issues, concerns, that is a beautiful SEO strategy in and of itself. He's listed as one of the 20 speakers you don't want to miss. Somebody once said to me, you know, Marcus, it's dumb not to dumb it down. I had the ability to explain complex things in a simple way so that they were easily understood. What is success to Marcus Sheridan?

0:32Success is being to say yes when you want to say yes and no when you want to say no. And you don't have to hesitate on either one of the two. Let's go to your formula for success and your methodology. How does success happen? It's interesting to me that I find society, Brad, teaches us to not embrace our genius, which is a huge mistake. Say things like be humble. We're almost like we're afraid at this point to say, I'm really gifted here. This is my genius. This is the thing that I'm supposed to do with my life. And if you look at the great ones, they identify that thing. They own it. They make it part of their identity.

1:13And then they continue to pursue that. They're not embarrassed about the thing. And so the earlier you can identify what that is, and of course, for me, what I realized early on is I had the ability to explain complex things in a simple way so that they were easily understood. Early on, I could tell that was my gift right around 19, 20 years old. My entire career has been built around understanding that simple genius that I have been given. And because I know that, I also recognize that I'm not a bunch of other things. Marcus, how do we succeed in this day and age with marketing? Well, I think we have to understand that ultimately marketing is a battle for trust.

1:58And so you've got to have like this center point of your marketing philosophy, strategy, framework, trust, and ask yourself, okay, what do we need to do to become the most trusted voice in the world? If you start there, it doesn't really matter what happens next. It doesn't matter what new platform pops up because you have a guiding strategy that will not change. Many companies don't have that compass set. Because of that, they're constantly changing the brand and who they are and just what they're trying to do. It's not clear. So I try to help companies say, okay, with your marketing, let's become the most trusted voice in our space.

2:41Now, in order to do that, I would argue there's three fundamental things that we have to do. Number one, you got to be willing to talk about. Tell what others in your space aren't willing to tell. Show what others aren't willing to show. and sell what others aren't willing to sell in a way that they're not willing to sell. Now, if you do that quickly, you're going to become the voice of trust in your space. And generally speaking, when I ask any audience, Brad, so how many of you in this audience right now could honestly say that we show, tell, and sell in a way that the majority of our competition does not, no one can raise their hand.

3:14So we've got this incredible sea of sameness in most industries. and then people wonder, why am I not standing out? How do we succeed at creating great blogs out there that help us make sales, not just put up content? When it comes to your blog strategy, your content strategy, you want to focus with what we teach and they ask you answer the framework. Very simply is the big five is where you start. The big five are the five subjects that drive the needle in pretty much every buyer's journey. The things that they want to know, that they want to understand, that they want to research before they reach out to you.

3:50So what are those five subjects? Well, buyers are obsessed with understanding cost. They have all these cost, budget, pricing questions. So you got to be willing to talk about in a way that at least gives them enough to say, I feel like I have a sense for things. They don't need to know exact, but they've got to have a strong sense for things. Otherwise they won't trust you. Number two, buyers want to know the problems or the negatives or the issues. How could this go wrong? How could this blow up in my face? Number three, comparisons. We love to compare stuff online. Think about how many times you compared something online.

4:19We're constantly comparing. People are asking you, okay, if you're me, which would you choose? Constant comparison-based questions. Number four, reviews. People are obsessed with reviews. They want to know the good, the bad, and the ugly though, not just the good. And then finally, number five, best. Best, most, top. Think about how many times you've gone online and searched best such and such. Should be driving certainly any type of business blogging strategy in 2023. This is what buyers want to know. This is what they're researching. And unfortunately, this is what most companies are not willing to talk about.

4:50So if you do, you're going to become that voice of trust. What else do we need to do then to succeed at creating great traffic to our site? The cool thing about this, they ask you answer type of mindset and addressing their questions, worries, fears, issues, concerns. That is a beautiful SEO strategy in and of itself, because that is Google's obsession. They're trying to give you the best, most specific, relevant answer to your question as quickly as possible. And so when you do this, it forces you to think like your buyer, their questions, their worries, their fears, their concerns, their issues, and address those questions through text, through video on your website.

5:24So that is, from a traffic perspective, that's one of the best ways you can do it. What's one of the things that's easily working the best? It's short form vertical style video. Now, if you're going to do that, though, three quick suggestions for you. This is the keys to vertical style video, short style videos. Number Number one, you have to take what you do within your business, within your world, which you think is normal. And you got to be willing to show it to everybody else and understand that it's not necessarily normal to them. Now, number two, you want people to stay. And one of the best ways to make them stay is to follow what we call the three second rule.

5:56And the three second rule means you want to have a cut every three seconds in terms of the scene. And then number three, you want to create what's called a curiosity gap. Communications obviously shifted over the time. How do we succeed in communication in this day and age? Somebody once said to me, you know, Marcus, it's dumb not to dumb it down. And I thought about that for a minute. I'm like, but this is the reason why there's many people that you and I have watched before on a video or we've even read or seen on a stage where immediately they turned us off. If you said to them, well, why'd they turn you off?

6:31If you're forced to answer, oftentimes the answer is because that person thinks that he or she is smarter than me. When you release the need to appear smarter than your audience, and you're literally just looking for communion with the audience, the audience feels that very, very quickly. And so they lose that initial guard in that competition of this person elevates themselves above me. If you can eliminate that from the fray, you've disarmed the situation, and now you can speak from the same place and you can achieve that community. How do we succeed in sales today? Number one, you have to accept that buyers don't want to talk to a salesperson until they feel like they are ready, they're informed, and they're not going to make a mistake.

7:18Now, once you have that one-to-one, a couple things have to happen. You better be a stinking expert. And then you better understand how to ask deeper, better discovery questions than your peers. And that's the Big Success Podcast for today. Hopefully you took a lot of notes, learned a whole bunch. And if you need to go re-listen to it, we dropped a lot of information right there today. Big success is what it's all about. And by the way, if you haven't subscribed, hit that subscribe button so you're here with us every single week on the Big Success Podcast. I'm Brad Sugars. That's BS. Big success is what we're shooting for.

7:51Check the show notes for all the links. Make sure you follow through. Keep learning. Keep coming back. Oh, and by the way, share this with any of your friends who you know are up for success. I'll see you next week on The Big Success Podcast. You've been listening to The Big Success Podcast with the number one business coach in the world, Brad Sugars. To learn more about how to achieve business and personal success, as well as how to level up or listen to past episodes, visit www.bradsugars.com. We'll see you next time.