Launch a course as an authority marketing strategy.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and I'm your host. This is a podcast for anybody out there who has value locked up in their organizations or even in themselves and is just looking for ways to share that through cost-effective communications. I've been running public relations agencies for over 25 years, and I've also been an entrepreneur on 3 continents. So I'm here to share what I know will work for you. Today, I'm going to look at the merits of creating a course around your knowledge. Because if we can share our way of thinking and it becomes an industry-leading way of thinking, this is great publicity because it becomes the standard way. We think about how Jack Welch made the Six Sigma the GE way. It became synonymous with quality and shareholder value. So today we're going to look at building courses for our companies as a way of communicating our value. Now I'm looking at creating a course for Speak PR. This is the 5-stage methodology that I've established for East West Public Relations' approach to getting companies noticed. Now I've started this podcast to share the 5-stage methodology which is Storify, Personalise, Engage, Amplify, and Know. And I've also just today got news that the trademark has been filed, which is really exciting. So I'm really going down this path of using my intellectual property for the value in the business. Normally we have ways of doing business, and those certainly as an agency are kind of repeatable. And the value in the business is always considered to be, if you like, the client list and the turnover and the revenue. And in fact, if we are a company, for example, like a restaurant, we often think of the delivery of the food as being the value. But I was having a conversation with a chef recently, and she's in exactly the same position where she keeps making food and selling it, delivering it, but then she has nothing left. So we're talking about how We as business owners can create value from what we know how to do rather than just what we deliver. So courses are one of the ways that we can do that. So I'm looking at creating the Speak PR course, and this is going to be a mastermind. It's an 8-week program, and I'm working with an old friend called Maury Morgan, who was on this show a few episodes ago talking about how he'd managed to get his comedy training business in Australia. Now, why would we do this from a public relations point of view? We're all trying to find ways to differentiate our business, no matter how big or small it is. And when I look at the agencies in the world, there are tens of thousands of agencies, but as we know, enterprises employing less than 250 people represent 99% of all enterprises. Certainly, that's the case in the EU. Globally, that's about the same. In other words, there are thousands of agencies and freelancers all pursuing less than 1% of the companies because by and large, companies have to have a certain scale before they employ a third party or an agency to help them with their marketing. So I'm looking at creating this course because I think that there are lots and lots of people possibly 99% of all companies in Europe and around the world that would like to learn how to do their own public relations without necessarily the costs and the complications of hiring an agency. So my business strategy is to start to teach people who can't afford an agency or don't want an agency how to learn the tools and the technologies that we as agencies possess. And in the process, to create a value within my company, which is attached to the way that I know how to get clients noticed, rather than just see the results of getting clients noticed as being the value in the business. So I can share my knowledge, but I need to do that in a structured way. I'm creating articles, I'm creating this podcast, And indeed, this podcast generates articles that are going out across various platforms, but that's not enough in itself. This podcast, Speak PR, now is heard in over 55 countries, which is, you know, really heartwarming to think that people are listening all over the world, but I need to also give everybody that's listening an opportunity to have a more structured way of addressing and incorporating the Speak PR methodology into their own businesses or in their own lives. I've been looking at a platform called Udemy. Now, udemy.com has over 130,000 courses already online, but the issue with the Udemy course is that most of them, or a lot of them, are in the sort of $19 to $20 low price range. And with the Speak PR product, I've been hoping really and planning to raise this as a masterclass where it's not a hands-off course. It's an 8-week program where we run through with just 6 people per cohort the methodology whereby then those companies can work on their own company with me in the session. That's quite different to kind of a hands-off, take the course through remote learning. But let's not be snobbish about that. If we look at, for example, the Complete 2020 Web Development Bootcamp created and hosted by Dr. Angela Yu, it has some 262,843 students as of today. Now, it used to be £19.99. It's just recently gone down to £14.99. But this program is packed with some 53 hours of on-demand video, 110 articles, 20 downloadable resources, and according to my calculations, will have grossed some £5,254,000. So online courses are not only a great way of developing public relations because it establishes one as an authority, but plainly can be a source of great revenue. There's another organization called Coursera which has got courses for corporations as well, and there they have professors. For example, there's one called Eric Rendeflesch who is a professor of marketing at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. And his course on marketing in the digital world has had 1.433 million views recently. So online courses are a brilliant way to start to share our knowledge, but potentially in a commercial way also. And so that's really what I'm looking at now as East West PR with my SPEAK methodology because I think that I can help unlock the value in companies and organizations for people who can't afford an agency, may not be ready for an agency, but could use the tools. So I'm working with Maury in Australia, and this is his STEP methodology. That's S-T-E-P-E. And I wanted to share that because there are many of us out there who have got value that we could share through the processes. That we know how to leverage and what we do day to day for our clients. But it's a way of demonstrating an expertise which can be used in public relations and marketing. So I've reached out to Mori, and in fact, he, he mentioned this at the end of our, our podcast conversation just the other week, and we followed up, which is great. So He has this great methodology, and I just want to share with you because one of the key learnings I've got from his methodology is this need to create the structure within the course time itself. I thought about the 5-stage methodology. What he's now doing is helping me to break it down into component parts within each method. So, Morriss Step Program. The S stands for skill, and by the end of each module, we're going to be able to identify, for example, gaps within the 5 stages. And then we have the theory, which is the T. So in the theory, we're going to talk about the elements within the different stages. So he's going to take us through the theory. The third element is going to be the example. There's going to be an example of a company that follows the 5-stage methodology, and that becomes, if you like, the key point that validates the Speak PR methodology. Next comes the practice, and this is where the participants in the course will be able to use the templates that we've created, which will enable them to start to identify which parts of the course they already understand. Which parts of the 5-stage methodology do they currently already implement within their own organisations? And then the next part is the evaluation. So this is where we're going to get individual participants to share what they're currently doing and to evaluate the performance of their current work so that we can start to identify the gaps between what they currently know and where we want them to get to. So STEP stands for Skill, Theory, Example, Practice, and Evaluation. I like this approach because it's very structured and what What Maury and I are doing is working on the timing. So for example, we'll have some background pre-reading, which we'll send to people in advance. We'll have a 2.5-minute section on the skill you're going to learn. Not too long. We don't want to lecture people. 7.5 minutes on the theory of the story. Personalise, engage, amplify, know. 5 stages. 10 minutes on an example. How does this work for somebody else? 30 minutes on the practice, getting people to try the tools, because it's only through practice that actually people start to learn. By and large, people don't learn by being spoken to, especially when we're all virtual. And then 10 minutes on the evaluation, where people get to reflect. And as we're working in a Mastermind, practice group where we've got 6 people all together, we're going to get people to share with one another. So, how we structure the course will enable us to then generate consistent results for all those people coming in, but will also then help us to communicate to each of the people within the course our own methodology. So, the reason that a course could be potentially a great public relations tool is we will be communicating the values that we have within our own organization. Whatever service we're providing, we'll be able to articulate that, and people will become more and more knowledgeable. And one of the parts that we talk about under the engagement and the amplification is about getting people to go from being ignorant to becoming aware, to becoming engaged, to becoming evangelists. And evangelists are people who understand and believe and then start to share more information about the organization or the good or the product or the service. By having a course, what I'm hoping is that I can share genuinely what I know and have people to improve their own public relations abilities through using these tools that I've developed. But also we have people that will understand what we do and help other people to understand. Public relations, as I have mentioned on more than one occasion, is not just press releases. It's about all the different touch points between a company and the 3 different audience groups. That's the internal, as in the staff, the partners, those people that we rely on but are not necessarily giving us money, and our customers. Lots of different people in lots of different roles are required to create an effective company. Courses can help us to train not only external, but if you think about, if we create a course and I create a 5-stage methodology of Speak PR, if I have more freelancers come and work with me or more staff, I can take them through the course. And this is codifying the knowledge of the business. If I want to share with potential customers how we work, I can give them free access to the course as well. Now, the hard part, of course, is, of course, is sitting down in a focused way and making this content consistent, make it engaging, make it compelling, and then delivering it in a way that resonates for those people. We have to choose people that are at the right stage in, for example, running their own business and needing the 5-stage methodology. We have to deliver it to them in a way that is accessible, that fits their timescales, for example, because if it goes wrong, the downside is that the course, of course, could be a liability. So think about if you've got knowledge in your company, which is how you do something, a certain practice a certain approach that actually is a core part of the value of the business, but it's what you don't charge for currently. Is it something that could be made into a course that could then become a book, could become training notes, could become the articles that go into industry publications, for example? As we say in public relations, it all starts with content. And this is really what we're trying to develop now by creating a course. Last year, I was working with a group at Mondelez, which is the large food company. They have products like Oreo, for example, and I was the Asia-Pacific digital expert teaching using the SimplyLearn platform. And the SimplyLearn platform embeds video and audio and live polling and documentation and has progress, for example, across a course. And when people log in, it's marked. So it's like a corporate platform, much like Coursera. They were using this to establish common best practice across the teams, and the same course was being delivered across America, Europe, and Asia. With each individual market having its own special sub-programs. So training is a core part of any communications program, certainly internally, but also externally. It could be another way to build our public relations activities. So over the coming weeks and months, as I build out the Speak PR training, I'll share this because there are some learnings, obviously, of how to put this content together and how to deliver it. But I think also, above all, it's a way of encoding the knowledge that we have within an organisation, and multimedia platforms now really enable this in a way that's never been possible before. So, very excited that today I can share that we've trademarked the SpeakPR brand, and we have embarked on the training course. And my real mission is to share with more people the ways to get noticed without necessarily having the cost of engaging an agency at this stage. So in the meantime, if you'd like to find out more about the tools, we've got them at eastwestpr.com. You can see them under the Mastermind and Speak PR Thank you for listening to this episode of the Speak PR Podcast. If you would like to subscribe and ideally leave a comment or rating, share this with someone else that you know might find it useful. We have a weekly newsletter. I'd invite you to subscribe to that. It's free and it's a compendium of useful thoughts and tips and tools that help companies to unlock the value in their organization with free and effective public relations communications. So until we're together again, I wish you the best of health, that you are running a successful organization, and that you keep on sharing your knowledge and maybe thinking about putting that knowledge into a course for other people to learn.