In this short blog post I’m going to show you how we at UpSpark Digital created 470 new leads in two months for wowfires.com with just 6 unique pieces of image content on Pinterest.
I’m then going to go on to talk about the importance of creating your own unique content and how this leads to more income for your business.
But first I want to mention one of the fundamental principles we live by at UpSpark Digital that ties into the reason we were able to achieve these numbers.
Assets enable income
We all know the saying that the rich get richer. Well this typically happens because the rich have money to invest in assets like property, business portfolios and shares. These people don’t have to invest time and money into sales and marketing to make money. They can leverage their assets to do this for them, they can rent the property and sit back and watch as their portfolios and shares pay out dividends.
At a very fundamental level its not about your skills and experience and how hard you work, it’s intrinsically about your business’ assets. I’ll give you an example. Joe, has never sold anything in his life before, his Auntie dies and leaves him a 3 bedroom flat in Chelsea. Do you think Joe is going to have to take a sales and marketing course before he is able to sell or rent the property? Of course not, because the asset Joe owns already has its own value. Assets have always enabled income. If a caveman was the first to work out how to produce fire then his value goes through the roof. In this example, the caveman has actually developed his own intellectual property. He has a unique asset that no one else has. Imagine if he could then patent fire, he would be one wealthy caveman.
We all know of this assets enable income principle, we learn it as kids, green houses and red hotels win at Monopoly. The person who holds off from buying anything and continues to lap the board will eventually lose to the person who invests strategically in assets and ends up owning the board.
As we move into the digital age this principle has shifted to include digital assets. The most valuable assets on the planet are now digital. Airbnb is worth more than all the major hotel groups without owning a single property. Uber is the most valuable transportation company without owning any vehicles. What underpins the income of these companies and your Facebooks and Googles is their investment in digital assets such as Content, Software, Data, Algorithms, Brand and Intellectual Property.
Facebook and Google make their money through content. But what sets them apart from traditional businesses is that they don’t produce the content. They produce tools and systems that leverage unique content others produce and then generate income from this asset. This unique content is their core asset, imagine Google with a blank page of search results or Facebook without any text, images or video on its feed. All of a sudden, these companies would be worthless to us, regardless of their sophisticated algorithms and IP that stop others from copying their business. Within its search engine, Google actually works really hard to stop duplicated pieces of content. If you duplicate content by copying an article someone else has written then you’re going to get penalised by Google. Google knows the power of unique content. It understands that unique content is an asset and that assets enable income.
So how does this tie in with the title of this blog post? Well, we created 6 unique images of fireplaces that didn’t exist anywhere on earth before we made them. In essence, we invested in 6 new digital assets. This one-off investment continues to generate views and leads for wowfires.com wherever they are used. Wowfires.com hasn’t spent money on sales, marketing or lead generation. It invested in building assets that now generate leads for the business. This lead generation activity goes on in the background and continues to generate leads without any active operational involvement by the business. Just as a property owner derives income from property or as a shareholder derives income from a dividend.
Like property and shares, content and other assets also have differing levels of value. This is why it is so important to create your own unique content/assets. If we had simply used images from Gazco, Evonic or Dimplex we wouldn’t have had anywhere near the same page views or leads generated. We also didn’t use stock images for the room-settings. The room-settings were unique digital creations. The purpose of this strategy was two fold:
1). To create truly unique imagery that have their own value
2). To create room settings that more accurately represent the houses of the target market i.e. consumer’s homes in the UK.
I see so many images that use stock room-settings of houses in the US or in Europe where the homes don’t look anything like the ones that are owned by the people looking at the images or who are looking to buy the product. I just think this undermines the value of the content/image and of the actual product the piece of content is promoting.
Equally I see this problem on social media where companies only repost other company’s content. Sure, a little bit of this can be helpful to the consumer, if you think it is solving a problem for them but consistently taking this approach isn’t going to generate much value for the consumer or your business. This is also true of fireplace retailer’s websites that only use images, video and text written by manufacturers. If you want your business to be valuable then you have to create uniquely valuable assets.
With these 6 unique images we generated 100,000 views within two months on Pinterest alone. These digital assets can now be used across all forms of social media, on wowfires.com’s website, on youtube, in paper and TV ads, in brochures and flyers…you get the picture.
If you want more income being generated in your business then invest in new assets and work to improve your existing ones. Is your website truly an asset to your business? Do you produce content that brings in revenue? Do you use manufacturer’s images and brochures and end up looking like everyone else? Do you find you always have to compete on price?
Investing in unique assets will help you sell more, save time, and stand out. By producing unique assets you’ll become more well known, liked and trusted by customers, you’ll save time and money by needing to invest less in sales and marketing and you’ll stand out as you’ll have differentiated yourself from the majority of the market who aren’t investing in their assets.
If business really was as simple as work hard, sell and hustle then every street seller in India would be a millionaire. So don’t just lap the board, build green houses and red hotels.