Planting seeds of doubt

A lot of times when I’m writing content for my agency website I’m not really thinking about SEO — I’m thinking about a specific customer or prospect and how I can educate them.

Let me give you an example…

A few days back, Matt wrote to me telling me how a prospect came back to him saying that he was the highest bid on a logo project, but the client thought he would also do the best job. The client wanted to know if Matt would come down on his prices so they could move forward.

Not able to go any lower, Matt politely declined.

I told them that this would actually make for a great blog post he could have sent along with his reply explaining why he charges what he does (and giving the client a lot more to think about that they had probably never considered).

In the post, he could explain things like:

• It’s important to have your logo in the right formats
• The logo has to work at scale (even teeny-tiny!)
• The colors should pass accessibility standards
• There needs to be versions that work horizontally, vertically, and in a square
• They would have to make sure they are using fonts they have license to
• They will need some kind of brand standards set so the logo can be used consistently going forward
• Etc.

All these things are extremely important when a company has a logo developed — but most business owners don’t know all these things… They just want a logo.

Suddenly, and without being pushy, paying a higher price makes a lot more sense. It’s not “just a logo”, there are a lot of things that need to be considered. Without saying it, it plants a seed of doubt in the “cheaper options”. Are they offering all this? Are they cutting corners? Do they have the experience?

Posts like this win jobs, and they can be used over and over again.

We run into situations like this constantly… And as you develop more and more of these types of articles you have an entire fleet to support you.

As Lyndsay and Martin put it in their book Content Fortress, “People don’t care what you say, they care what you publish”.

By having articles like this, not only are you able to educate your clients, you prove that you have been there before and know what you’re doing — or else, why would you write and publish an entire article on the subject?

And chances are, your competitors haven’t.