IAM2294 – Gresh Emphasizes on Value-Driven Outreach for Business Success

In this special episode, Gresham Harkless emphasizes the importance of providing value in cold outreach, similar to a social media strategy.

Gresham discusses the need to understand the target audience deeply: “What keeps them up at night?” This understanding helps ensure that outreach is relevant and helpful, which leads to a win-win situation.

He highlights that businesses often resist change, sticking to what’s familiar, even when it’s clear that new methods can bring more success.

He also points out that many businesses fail because they focus too much on the “how” and not enough on the strategy behind their marketing.

Gresham emphasizes that it requires consistent strategy, quality content, and proper integration of branding and marketing tactics to be successful.

Gresham Harkless explains that SEO isn’t just about keywords and backlinks; it’s about user experience.

Furthermore, he highlights that businesses need to create a seamless, positive experience for users, as this is a fundamental part of SEO.

Podcast Link: The Lead Machine Growth Show

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Transcription:

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Gresham Harkless Teaser 00:00

You have to increase the value that you're providing. You're basically interrupting somebody in their day on what they're doing.

And you have to increase that value that you're trying to provide for them. As much as possible, of course, you want to, again, go back to that question, who am I targeting? Why am I targeting?

What's keeping them up at night and make sure that when you do provide value, it's value for them, not necessarily value for you.

Intro 00:26 

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast. And I wanted to share with you one of the episodes that I was a guest on for someone else's podcast.

I always talk about how important it is to build a media company. One of the next best things you can do is be on somebody else's media company.

So I had the pleasure of being a guest on this podcast and I want to share a little snippet with you because it would help support the 8 business pillars we've really been trying to focus on with a lot more of our content, a lot more of the solo episodes that I'm doing.

So make sure of course that you subscribe to our podcast, but of course you take some time out, check out the show notes to subscribe to the podcast that I've been featured on as well too.

And get to learn about some of those 8 business pillars and how you can continue to kind of leverage and build that up so you can go from builder to architect to a course at Rockstar and Luminary. So this is Gresh signing out. I hope you enjoyed this I AM CEO special episode.

Paul Guyon 01:19

How can this media company help with with outreach? So we're doing cold outreach to people to bring them into the falls to try to get them into to get more customers.

There's a there's that need for outreach. I mean, obviously we've got the inbound methodology of creating content and things like that.

But there's also the need for, especially in certain kinds of businesses, there needs to be outreach.

Gresham Harkless 01:45

Yeah. I think a lot of times with code outreach and reaching out to people, we kind of have to approach it in very much the same way that you can approach a social media strategy.

The reason I say that is because a lot of times on social media, you're not necessarily searching for whatever it is you might be trying to provide to people.

So the way I see that is you have to increase the value that you're providing. You're basically interrupting somebody, in their day, what they're doing.

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And you have to increase that value that you're trying to provide for them. As much as possible of course you want to again go back to that question who am I targeting why am I targeting what's keeping them up at night and make sure that when you do provide value it's value for them not necessarily value for you.

As much as possible, you want to try to create a win-win, but you really want to know the hearts and minds and the souls even to some degree of the people that you're trying to target.

Because when you do that, when you do pop up, when you do try to provide them an opportunity to sign up for your email or join your email list or set up a consultation, whatever it is, you want to make sure that you're providing value.

But keep in mind that, just like you understand all the pros and cons and ingredients, those strategies also may require you to do a lot more than you would if it was somebody coming through your door that was a little bit more of an inbound opportunity.

So know that the volume might have to be there versus the inbound, but you again, you understand that.

You understand what you're doing and that's so huge, but just don't forget like value, value, value and know that value could be many things. It could be saving somebody's time. It could be making somebody laugh.

It could be giving them a specific solution to help them increase their relationship with somebody or monopolize or maximize their time, whatever it might be, just don't forget about that human part because at the end of the day, people are trying to improve their lives in some form, shape or fashion.

And you want to send them, if you're coming to them completely cold, some type of transformation, how is this going to improve their lives?

And I think if you start to look at it from that perspective, it doesn't mean that everybody's going to say yes, everybody's going to become a client or customer.

But at the end of the day, I think at the heart of what we all try to do from an entrepreneurial perspective is provide change in value.

So I feel like even if you don't get the result that you want necessarily, from that specific outreach, you still can be in alignment with who you are and what you ultimately stand for.

Paul Guyon 04:14 

Yeah. And when we think about content or rather content creation and outreach on top of delivering service and the day-to-day operations of a company, how can entrepreneurs, what kind of tools or what kinds of strategies can they do to make that maybe part of what they're already doing or how do they make time to do it?

There's gotta be some tips that we can have or tools that we can use to make things a little more effortless.

Gresham Harkless 04:45

Absolutely. For people that are creating content and information. Yeah. I mean, there's so many tools out there. And again, everything is like, it depends. There's a pros and cons for each.

Gresham Harkless 04:56

Of course, these social media platforms want you to spend as much time as possible on those platforms, posting everything natively, doing everything natively and realize that that has a higher organic reach.

But in reality, you're looking at your resources, you realize that you don't have all the time in the world.

So maybe you do start to use platforms like Hootsuite, for example, and that allows you to schedule out social media platforms.

Now, Meta has its own way to schedule out social media. You can definitely do that. But understand that there's pros and cons of each.

You can probably get a lot more things done, I should say, when you're using Hootsuite versus,  posting natively on the site every single time.

But no, you'll probably get a better organic reach and better engagement potentially by posting natively.

So look at that, related to all platforms. But one of the big things that's happening, especially with AI, is there a smorgasbord of kind of tools that you can use to repurpose content.

So one of the big things that I think people sometimes don't realize when you create one piece of content, usually that piece of content is not one piece of content. Usually it could be 789, sometimes 10 pieces of content.

So taking a 30 minute long video or maybe it's a webinar that you did, or maybe it's a topic that you did to just your dog and your wife and your kids or something like that.

If you can record that, you can make that into a blog post. You can make that into a potentially a podcast or you can send it out on X and tweet it on X or X on tweet or whatever you call it.

You can do all of these things to get your information out there, but you really want to think about how do I take this pillar piece of content that's maybe a little bit more long form and be able to kind of repurpose it so it can reach more people.

So there's, there's platforms like Vizard.ai that you can use for that. Minova is another one as well too, that'll you, all you have to do is take a video and it will splice it up for you.

But there's so many different platforms that are out there, and there's an influx of these AI, I think, powered softwares that allow you to be able to take that pillar piece of content and repurpose it very efficiently.

Paul Guyon 07:10

Yeah, and I think you just kind of hit the nail on the head with content creation. We were talking about Hollywood with one of my previous guests, and they have trailers for their movies, and they have promotion plans that start way out, way in advance before their launches.

So you need to be thinking like a media company. And I think that I work with a client who's 15 million or so, and they were very, very hesitant to get into inbound marketing.

And right now they're working with print and they really need to branch out into using video and they aren't doing podcasts and interviews or anything like that.

And I think a pitfall of every company or every entrepreneur is like, it won't work for my company.

And that's just not true. And so what are some of the challenges and pitfalls that you've run into with your clients that you've had to maybe convince them or train them up and bring them up because this is not gonna go away. This is just getting faster and faster.

Gresham Harkless 08:16

Yeah, I think that I hear very similar things with clients that, we work with as well too. I always say, you don't want to get as attached to the how versus the why.

And the why is ultimately what's leading you to do the impactful things that you're doing. I think many times people get really attached to the how.

I can't say the number of times that I hear from clients that I need to do this because I heard that I need to do this.

And whatever this is, it could be TikTok, it could be print, it could be SEO, whatever it is, they're kind of stuck on that.

And I think if you start to drill down a little bit more, you start to realize that there are other opportunities there, but people get really attached to like the how versus the why.

Like the why is you ultimately want to make an impact. You want to reach more people so that you can have more impact and change more lives, have that transformation.

But if you get attached to that how, what it's going to do is it may not necessarily affect you negatively in the beginning, but if you get stuck to that how, it could leave your business behind because as you said, so well, things are changing and they're changing rapidly.

So that's one of the big things that I find. The other big thing is that I talk a lot again, around the ingredients is that people don't really have a true understanding of the pros and cons of different ingredients and what they look like.

They think that just because they post something and just because that they're going to be able to drive home those opportunities.

They don't realize it doesn't happen overnight. It does take a time, it does take strategy for those things to happen.

So I think so many times we see those commercials and it makes it look like it's so simple. But in reality, there is a strategy behind it.

There is the integration of who you are and who you're serving with being able to communicate on these platforms.

So I think there's just a lot of misinformation and not a great kind of understanding of what marketing and branding and all those aspects look like.

But I think as much as possible, we try to just set those expectations because at the end of the day, we want to make sure our clients are as successful as possible and have an understanding of what that looks like.

Paul Guyon 10:26

Yeah. And speaking of successful clients, what are some of the, can you share an example of one of your clients who maybe said, oh, I'm not a media company. But hey, Gresh, tell me how it's done because I need to be better.

Gresham Harkless 10:40

Yeah. I think a core of what we try to do is around SEO. And I feel like SEO, as much of it, it can be seen as an ingredient, I actually think it's a way to approach, it's kind of even a marketing philosophy to some degree.

Because the idea is that you're trying to be where people are. I always say, Wayne Gretzky says, don't skate to where the puck is, skate to where the puck's going to be.

And that's a lot of what SEO is all about. So for one of our clients, we had a plumbing company that was based out of Ohio that didn't really have a lot of success with SEO in the past.

And another big thing that happens is a lot of times people say that I tried that, it didn't work, so it doesn't work. Right.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that the agency, the company, the people that you work with necessarily did it the right way, or maybe there's a lot of factors around why that could be the case.

Specifically for her and their company, they had a person that wasn't doing quality SEO services.

So basically what they would do is they would take pages on the site, and they would just copy those pages over and over again and just change the city and state on the site.

So, there's not necessarily duplicate content per se, but it is duplicate content because you're copying the same content on your website.

And what you're starting to see is that even with AI, the influx of AI content and information, Google is prioritizing value content. It's no different than what I talked about.

Like how are you providing value for people's lives? So when you start to think about that media company working with them, the first thing we looked at was the content.

The first thing we looked at it was like, it's not just putting out things just for the sake of doing it to say, check, I have a page for this. I have a page for that. How are you providing value?

So a lot of what we were able to do is to kind of undo a lot of that bad SEO that wasn't going, that wasn't happening.

And being able to kind of take more of a value-based mindset asking, who are you trying to target? What are those ideal clients and customers looking like?

And what are they what's keeping them up at night? Or is it an emergency? Is it connections that you want to build?

So we started to build a lot of those things within that content and information. And you start to see that success with, traffic on the website of rankings, of course, which is of course important for SEO.

But you start to do that because you don't necessarily say all the time that, hey, I want you to be a media company, but you say that, hey, this is what's stopping you from getting you to where you are.

And 9 out of 10 times the media, the way you're approaching that, it could be the way that you're doing that. So that's just 1 of the clients that we kind of work with.

Paul Guyon 13:18

Right. So yeah, SEO, that surprised me. You really need to have that owned asset so that, like we were talking about earlier, like your email database and your website.

Those are 2 very, very critical things to have. I don't know where I was going with that, but the sandwiches that we got were great. I think you would have loved them, Gresh. It was a Italian zapper, it was an Italian sub that I got that was really, really good. So, anyway. That's one of my favorite sandwiches.

Gresham Harkless 13:46

So, wherever you're going is the right place. But I do want to say one thing and I love that you brought that up because at the heart of SEO, people forget about, it's about user experience.

When your wife clicked that link, she had a bad experience because she clicked and it didn't go to that own platform. It went to Facebook. It could have went to any other place that, that's a user experience.

And like people forget like before someone patronizes your business or your product or services, you're creating that experience before that happens.

And that's a lot of what SEO is about. It's not about just keywords and doing backlinks. It's about experience.

So when you don't have a good experience, people remember that and they won't patronize you.

And they may even say that this wasn't a great experience, so don't necessarily go and visit them.

So you want to make sure that you are looking holistically at what that experience looks like.

Paul Guyon 14:39

Yeah. And we did end up going to that restaurant because one of my clients, it's his brother who owns it.

So we know that we know that they have good food there. So we just disappointed that he didn't have a website. And I just I said, see, honey, this is exactly what I've been teaching people.

Gresham Harkless 14:55

Yeah, there's your opportunity.

Paul Guyon 14:57 

Yeah, exactly. So I think we're about at the top of our time together as we wrap up with your final words, Gresh. What are 3 things that our listeners and our audience can do today to put these ideas into action?

Gresham Harkless 15:12

Yeah. I think one of the first things that you can do is definitely make sure that you're having a conversation with your ideal clients and customers. Really know exactly as much as possible what helps that user experience.

That sandwich shop should be having a conversation with Paul and his wife and understanding exactly what is part of that experience because you start to uncover those things that can create a better experience for people.

So make sure that you are painting that picture so you know who exactly, you are that you're, that you're targeting

Gresham Harkless 15:40

Depending on where you are in the journey, I say one of the best things that you can do to kind of learn as much as possible is to roll up your sleeves and just get started.

So whether that is spending time on one of the unowned platforms, make sure that you do that, but make sure you understand that you don't own that platform.

So whether it's LinkedIn or it's Facebook group or something along those lines, make sure that you're doing that.

And then the third thing I would say is once you have an idea of who you're targeting, once you have an idea of what platform you want to kind of play on, for lack of a better term, find out if there is potential groups.

Like I'm a big, huge proponent of building your media company, whether that's a blog, podcast, blog, whatever that might be. But I say the next best thing is being on somebody else's media company.

Outro 16:22

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh again, and I hope you enjoyed that special episode of the I AM CEO Podcast. Just like I mentioned in the beginning, we're really trying to laser focus on these 8 pillars and show you as a builder, how you can leverage these 8 pillars and really level up there so it helps to level up your business and organization

So hope you enjoyed this episode and definitely please check out the show notes so you can learn more about the pillar, learn more about the person that I guested on, their episode, and of course learn more, a little bit more about us as well too. This is Gresh signing out. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

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