Make your Magic known

The key to great content marketing and community engagement is to continually find new and engaging ways to get your message across in a way that resonates with your target audience - particularly when what your customers might believe prevents them from engaging with you in the first place.

The Monsters and Myths multi-format show is exactly this and is a great compliment to your current content marketing initiatives!

The show is a relaxed (but structured) format and the aim is to surface your insights through a casual conversation around the three biggest Monsters or Myths that impact your industry and your customers, along with the "Magic" you have to offer to overcome them - without this being a "hard sell" to your target audience.

Share your insights and Magic

A professionally moderated live show is a fantastic opportunity for you to showcase your insights, knowledge and expertise in a "non sales" way while at the same time generating leads during the audience signup process.

The unique Monsters and Myths interview format works across any industry or topic you wish to expose - the key being that YOU know and can provide the Magic of how to overcome these barriers and obstacles.

As an experienced MC, show host and panel moderator I'll work with you to set the scene and shape the questions and narrative in a way that will keep the audience engaged the whole way through.

Please note that although the session will be recorded, it will NOT be published in full on any social media channels. This creates a sense of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and encourages people to sign up for the session (thereby generating leads) as opposed to them simply viewing the session afterwards without providing any contact info.

Uncover the Mayhem & bring your Magic

Holding roundtables with your existing and prospective customers, partners in your ecosystem, or a mix of them all is a tried and tested way to uncover their pain points - so long as you can get the participants to join in!

Example completed card

A Monsters and Myths roundtable brings a unique element of engagement and interest to the traditional roundtable format and is a great way to hear first hand what your customers believe that might be holding them back. The participants are briefed on the concept prior to the roundtable and are requested to share three Monsters or Myths that they frequently encounter in their roles. A simple PowerPoint template is provided for them to create Monsters and Myths "cards" to complete (an example shown on the right) and send back to me a few days before the roundtable takes place in order to best structure the approach for the available time.

During the roundtable, I'll pick participants to share one of their three cards and having seen those of the rest of the participants, I'll be in a position to encourage contributions and input into the topic across the audience.

After the roundtable, the cards that have been created by the participants serve as a great summary of the challenges and obstacles that they face and are extremely useful to your team from a strategy perspective to offer them your own "Magic" to overcome them.

Create the Magic your customers need

Your front line staff are guaranteed to run into your customer's Monsters and Myths on a daily basis. Sales, relationship management, marketing and customer services will face a constant battle with the biases, beliefs, misunderstandings and misconceptions of your customers that will frustrate their efforts at every move.

Running this workshop within your organisation (or with a mix of key customers AND frontline staff) will surface and consolidate the collective knowledge of your team and better equip them to conquer the Monsters and Myths - and you might well be surprised by the new opportunities for products and services that may arise from it!

The workshop takes the core concept of the Monsters & Myths summary cards used in the above customer roundtables to the next level of actionable detail with the addition of two more cards. This generates additional valuable artefacts and insights to lay a strong foundation for your future strategy.

Create digital and physical artefact cards

This style of workshop requires more in depth preparation than the customer facing roundtables outlined above. In addition to the Monsters and Myths "summary cards", participants are required to create one or more of each of the following cards for each Monster or Myth they have identified:-

• Mayhem cards - to describe and quantify the impact of the Monster or Myth
• Magic cards - outline a suggested solution to overcome the Monster / dispel the Myth

Creating these additional cards may require some research on the part of the participants. For example, they may "believe" that a particular bias or misconception (Monster) has a major impact on the organisation - but they may never have attempted to quantify precisely how much of an impact it has.

Similarly, they may not have any idea of the "Magic" required to overcome an obstacle - which will require them to investigate how others might have solved the problem in the past. If they are still unable to think of a suggested way forward, that too is OK and will become a discussion point for the workshop where the other participants will be called on to suggest approaches - leveraging the collective knowledge of your team.

If by the end of the workshop, no Magic has been identified, this becomes an action point for further investigation according to the priority of the problem, which is determined by the (quantified) amount of Mayhem it causes!

To begin with, the workshop follows the same format and structure as a Customer Roundtable, however the conversation can get into far more detail given the additional cards that have been completed.

We then move on to an "affinity sorting" visualisation of the Monsters, Myths, Mayhem and Magic.After making an initial attempt at grouping similar cards, participants add further contributions by creating new cards on-the-fly.

Affinity sorting

The aim is to end up with something that looks like the example shown on the right - where the problems, impacts and solutions are visualised all on a single "map" which would lay the foundation for your strategy moving forward.

IF the workshop sponsor is brave enough ......... we can optionally introduce one final golden card - the "Muster" card (please forgive my use of alliteration - I have a daughter that works in Marketing ........ enough said 🙂 )

The Muster card names the team responsible for taking up the challenge to overcome one or more Monsters and Myths.