Digital Selling – Combined relevance

Dave Harries: Grant, in the context of content, you talk about something called combined relevance, which kind of jumped out at me when I was reading that part of the book. Could you tell me a bit more about that?

Grant Leboff: Combined relevance is really a media technique which takes what you do and makes it more relevant to your audience. I’ll give an example, it’s about what’s going on in the wider world that’ll be engaging your community in any one time. You take something big like the world cup of football or the Olympics. Your community might be accountants, but buy definition some of those accountants will be watching the Olympics. If you were a recruitment agent, you say, “What we can learn about talent management from the Olympics?” Straightaway you’re making something relevant for an audience by combining with something they’re currently interested in. It’s the idea of taking something that’s current and linking it to what you do and making it just more interesting in that way. Big political events, big sporting events, big TV programs, big happenings in any particular community or territory, any of those things that you can leverage to make what you say more interesting as well and seemingly more relevant to those people is a very useful technique.

Dave Harries: I can see a few obvious pitfalls here, though. For a start, you might have to use a bit of a crowbar to make … There’s some great event, the Olympics, or whatever, and you’re desperate to kind of write about it in your blog. It kind of comes across as a bit forced. I mean, presume you’ve got to be a bit careful about how you use it.

Grant Leboff: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. You’ve got pretty careful but A: It’s not forced, and B: It’s not tired. I’ll give you an example where it was not forced. I worked with a car loan company, and during European championships, we did sort of the best cars in different countries versus each other. If France were playing Germany, you might do Renault versus Mercedes or something. It was kind of a bit of fun. It was a bit flippant, but it worked very nicely. There was a relevance to it. It made it very interesting, sort of the European championship of cars, if you like. It wasn’t tired, because what I could see, no one else did that. Where it can get very tired is everybody’s aware of that fairy tale of Leicester City winning the premiership. If I see one more article about Leicester City winning the premiership can teach you, whether you’re a business coach or a this or a that, I think I’ll slit my wrist. Yeah. It’s been overdone and overused and it’s become very tired, very, very quickly in the context of combined relevance.

You’re absolutely right. Be very careful that A: There is a relevance to you and you’re not crowbarring it in as you say, and the second thing that there’s freshness to what you’re doing. Sometimes, if they’re very big events, they get sort of overused to the point that during the Olympics, you get so many articles about the Olympics that, actually, it doesn’t achieve what it’s suppose to achieve. What should make you interesting actually makes you dull. Yeah, you got to be careful.

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order make it more readable.