The right to take up someone’s time

Grant Leboff: So Bryony one of the things you talk about in the book which resonated with me is this idea of having the right to take up someone’s time, that you can’t just bombard people, you have to have a right to earn their time. Can you talk a little bit more about how that works?

Bryony Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. I think all of us can empathize with the fact that there are some people who have the right to interrupt you. There are some people who – your phone rings – and you make time for them because they’ve earned a right to it. Maybe it’s your partner, your children, some of your key team at work, some people have the right to interrupt you and take up your time, other people don’t. There are some people where your phone rings and it’s straight to the divert button. I think if you were to think about that in your marketing, if you’re thinking your email is usually interruption, your direct mail is usually an interruption, do you have the right to interrupt and how might you earn that through the marketing that you put in place for people?

One of the key things that we walk people through with Watertight Marketing is to find ways in the marketing of steadily putting things in front of them that incrementally allows somebody to actively choose to give you more of their time. So rather than going from tweet to half an hour’s webinar you would do tweet to blog post to paper to webinar because it’s a more natural way of getting to know somebody, isn’t it?

Grant Leboff: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Bryony Thomas: Hi, nice to meet you, let’s spend the weekend together doesn’t really fly. Whereas nice to meet you let’s have a good chat, let’s stay in touch is much more natural.

Grant Leboff: If you’ve got a prospect list, like a cold list, they don’t know who you are so you haven’t got the right at the moment as it were to interrupt them. Where do you start on that journey to start to earn that right?

Bryony Thomas: Well, I wouldn’t start with a cold list. I have a number of clients for whom I have put the list in the bin because if you’ve bought data then it’s not truly yours because they haven’t made an active choice to be involved with you.

My first thing with a cold list would be to try another way. Really what I would do is to map out marketing that allows somebody to choose to spend time with you, go back through where they are in their buying decision, have a think about the questions, the thoughts, the emotions that are going through their mind, create some content that talks to that and have it put in front of them a bit like a lighthouse. Whether that is social media, whether that is advertising, something that pops up in a group their part of or at an event that their part of, so that they can then make a choice to interact with you further.

Once they’ve made a choice to interact with you further you then map out the next steps through the buying decision and you create materials that incrementally increase in the amount of time that that person would give you. If you were going from a tweet, the invitation would be the link. From the link you would land them on something that wouldn’t take them any longer than two minutes to consume, so as satisfying as a biscuit, about as long as a cup of tea, and then at the end of that present them something that might take a bit longer, like a download. From a download you now have their email address, invite them along to a web seminar or an event which would take half an hour to an hour. So you’re mapping your marketing materials in incremental and increasing time chunks so that they can actively choose to spend more time with you.

Grant Leboff: At the beginning of that journey how do you evaluate the effectiveness of that initial taster, if you like, that initial bit of content whatever it is, because obviously, I mean I’ve worked with customers where I think they kind of delude themselves into what their prospects might find interesting. Obviously if you put it out and no one clicks that’s a good idea, but how do you sanity check before, perhaps, you send it out?

Bryony Thomas: That’s a really good question. I would say that the first click isn’t the true measure, it’s the second click. Anyone can get a response, you know “Free five pounds. Click here.” It’s whether or not that then leads people to want to spend time with you. So lots of marketers are very concerned with showing up at the right time. It’s fairly easy these days, it’s called scheduling. Whereas actually making people want to spend time with you is a much harder task so I wouldn’t ever measure an awareness piece of content on first interaction. I would measure the effectiveness based on the second or third interaction as they choose to continue to spend time with you because getting a reaction, you know click bait, doesn’t mean sales and it doesn’t mean conversations, so yeah.

Then your second question was how do you test it? I would test it through some existing customers initially. I always do marketing the other way up so I’ll take my content and I’ll put it out to some existing customers and some groups of people who have bought from me in the past, see if gets a reaction there, then I’ll put it out to a slightly cooler, but still warm audience, and then I might put it out into the general public.

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