A short YouTube talk (speaker: Peter Vander Wall) that argues for using the psychology principle called the law of reciprocity in business: give prospects more free value (e.g., educational social media content) than competitors or even paying customers receive to build goodwill and attract more clients. Includes a neighbor/tool metaphor and a tax-consultant example to illustrate the strategy.
Chapters
This psychology concept is going to make selling to your customers way easier. I'm talking about the law of reciprocity. Imagine your neighbor lets you borrow his leaf blower. That would probably make you way more likely to let him borrow one of your tools eventually, right? But what if you use the same concept in business? Give your audience more value for free than your competition would give a paying customer. This builds goodwill and it makes working with you way more desirable for your audience. There's a lot of different forms this can take, but one of my favorites is creating free content on social media. If you're a tax consultant and you put out videos on Instagram, just straight pitching your services, you might get one or two clients. But if you put out videos educating people on tax strategy, you're going to get more clients coming in than you know what to do with. And I know this because this is exactly what one of my clients does. So stop worrying about giving away too much for free, because that's exactly how people are going to want to work with you in the first place.