Paul is launching a media advertising agency and wants to stand out. Evan shows how he turned a single blog post for TELUS into ongoing work by delivering 1,500 words instead of 300, adding videos and promotion. Over-deliver on every project and clients become partners, not one-time gigs.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer a question from one of my readers, Paul, who wrote in on the TelesTalks Business blog that I write for. And he's starting a media advertising agency and is worried about how to start it up and differentiate himself. There's a lot of competition, and he's wondering how he can kind of stand out from his competition. So Paul, since you wrote in on the TELUS blog, I'll tell you a little bit about what I do with TELUS Talks Business and how that might help your story. Since you're providing a service-based business, your key differentiating factor, I think, should be your service. So you're providing a lot of value through whatever service you're offering, but you want to go out of your way to provide exceptional customer service and think of other ways to be able to help your potential clients. That way you can turn small projects into big projects into big repeat projects into referrals. And that's an awesome way to grow your business. So here's a little story about what I did with TELUS Talks Business, and hopefully, hopefully the guys at TELUS don't mind me telling the story. We'll see, I guess, after this video. So they first hired me to create a blog post, and they hired a whole bunch of bloggers, and they said 300 to 500 words, create a blog post, and it was on a famous entrepreneur topic, and I did. But instead of writing 300 to 500 words, I wrote 1,500 words, and I created videos that went along with it. And then I marketed and promoted it to my audience and got people involved and people started commenting and I responded to the comments and we had a whole bunch of activity around all the posts that I was creating. And as a result, they wanted to make it a series and hire me back to do more of these posts. And then that became an ongoing, ongoing series and creating more videos and more content. And now what I'll try to do with them is I'll create quarterly reports to say, here's what entrepreneurs are thinking about. And there's no value in that for me except I'm helping my client and they wanna work with me on an ongoing basis. So I don't get paid to create extra stuff for them like these reports. So I'll create a quarterly report saying the kind of state of entrepreneurship. I'll try to meet with them once a quarter to talk about ideas to help them grow their business. Even if there's no benefit for me, we'll kind of brainstorm ideas on what they can do to help kind of grow their practice online. And all that kind of extra service leads to a great working relationship. They want to hire me back. I love working with them. They're fantastic people. So it's kind of working out from both sides and able to go out and get other business as well that's kind of similar. So it's through that exceptional service you turn that one kind of one-off potentially small job into an ongoing repeat project that then grows in size and you can get referrals out of it. Especially when you're dealing with a business type of customer. If you can prove that you are an indispensable part of their business, you're almost a part of their business instead of just being a service provider. Think of yourself as an extension of their marketing advertising arm. So you're thinking about other ways to grow their business besides just what you can offer. Uh, it's a fantastic way to be able to kinda get yourself in, establish yourself, and build a nice big business for yourself. So I hope that helps. I'd love to hear what you have to think about it. Everybody else watching the video, if you want to leave a comment on the video, I always appreciate those. And I love seeing the thumbs up, just keeps me motivated to want to do more of these videos. So please leave a thumbs up below and stay tuned for the next episode.
