Thin slice your content

Hey, everybody, Drew Mclellan here from Agency Management Institute. This week coming to you from Austin, Texas. You know, I was in a meeting with leadership team yesterday, and we were talking about their content strategy. And one of the people said, "Well, you know what, we have to be really careful that we don't tell them everything, that we don't give it all away." And I said, "Actually, you do need to give it all away. That's exactly what you need to do. You need to tell them everything they need to know to do what we do." The difference is, and the important part of this is that you want to thin slice it. You want to think about what you're about to teach, and you want to slice it as thinly as you can and give them tiny little pieces of it. So, it's literally taking, like taking a recipe for an elaborate dish and saying, "Today I want to talk to you about oregano. In this recipe for this great dish, we're going to use oregano. And let me tell you, you're going to use about a pinch of oregano and here's why. And here's what oregano does to the meal and blah, blah, blah."

And you talk about the oregano for the whole piece of content. Now, again, this is if you're slicing and dicing things like a video or a blog or something like that. You can't do a whole podcast, an hour-long or a 30-minute podcast about oregano. Well, maybe you could. But my point is, then the next episode, if you will, of whatever your blog post, your video, maybe your podcast, is about, you know, thyme. And saying, "Okay, so thyme is a really interesting spice. Here's what it does to a dish and blah, blah, blah. And here's why it's important. And here's what happens when you combine. Remember last week we talked about oregano. And so here's what happens when oregano and time get together."

So, what you're doing is you're going to give them the entire recipe, but you're going to thin slice it. A, because you're adding value by teaching them about each ingredient. But B, because what you're showing them is how complicated what you do is, and they can then decide, do I want to listen to these episodes? And do I want to go buy the oregano and the thyme and whatever else the other ingredients are? Or do I just want to hire these people to do this work for me? So, you absolutely want to give it all away, but you want to make sure that you give it away ingredient by ingredient, or story by story, or piece by piece. So, you want to be 110% helpful in that you're going to give them everything they need to do it themselves. But, you also want to give it to them in a way that A, it enriches and enhances the content experience. But B, it also suggests to them how good you are, how much you know, and how easy it would be just to hire you to do the thing that you're talking about. But do not get stingy and not tell them that oregano is one of the things that needs to go in the dish. You need to give it all away. But just give it to them, ingredient by ingredient. All right? Hopefully that's helpful. I'll be back with maybe thyme next time. All right?

See you then.