Marketing ideas to help you grow your business
Here’s a 3 step marketing tip, to help you attract massively more word of mouth referrals.
Get it right and it will give your customers or clients an experience, which they want to tell everyone about.
Today’s post is all about how to attract more sales or enquiries.
Their are 2 types of marketing that get noticed:
Almost all small business marketing is outside of those 2 categories. It’s neither personal or spectacular. It’s neither memorable or impressive. It’s neither thoughtful or motivating.
The successful minority of business owners invest in expertly produced, motivating and highly personalized marketing. It’s no coincidence their results are so impressive. Cause and effect.
Conversely, the typical small business will go broke within a few years or struggle on for years, working long hours and making little real progress. That’s because a casual approach to marketing causes casualties. Cause and effect.
No business owner sets out to struggle or make little meaningful progress. It is, however, a choice they have made, albeit an unconscious one.
At some point, the struggling business owner decided to relegate marketing to an low-level task. They did this unaware that everything their business does is marketing. As a result, they are dabbling with the development of their business. This produces predictably poor results.
If your business is not growing the way you want it to, it’s time to take heed. Because whatever you believe about the quality of your marketing, it’s clearly not working.
The great news here is that by adopting the same attitude to marketing as the most successful business owners, the law of cause and effect comes into play. You can have the business and financial security you have always wanted, so long as you do the right things, correctly.
Read this, it will help: Everything your business does is marketing.
There are 2 ways to think about the work you do.
Interestingly, the work itself has little impact on the way you feel. However, the way you feel has a huge impact on the work you do and the results you achieve.
In fact, you can significantly improve your success in every area of your business, if you improve the way you think and feel about it.
A common example of this happens when someone changes employers. They stay in the same industry and do a very similar job, yet they become far happier and more successful. Their job description, goals and targets remain almost the same. However, their new environment completely changes how they feel about what they do. It nurtures them. It inspires them to do their best work, which is followed by better results.
My friend Joanne did this a few years ago. Although her career had stalled with her previous employer, she earned a series of promotions with her new employer.
Here’s the thing: As a business owner, you’re free to improve your working environment whenever you wish. I know from personal experience how effective this can be.
I decided one day to make what I thought was a relatively small change to the way I work. Instead of working from my office, I decided to rename my office… my studio. Initially, the actual room itself looked pretty similar. However, it immediately improved the way I felt about work. I felt more creative.
Soon, the room I worked from looked totally different. It went from being a traditional office with everything you’d expect, to a creative studio. Suddenly there were pencils, pens, paper and notebooks everywhere. My desk was replaced by a huge table, which gave me more room to create and play with ideas.
It completely changed the way I felt about work. It improved everything. I went from working in an office to making things happen in a studio. That was 15 years ago and remains one of the most productive things I have ever done for my own business.
One of the reasons people start a business of their own, is that they want the freedom to do things their way. It’s easy to forget this. It’s easy to wake up one day and find you have created a business, which is far less enjoyable and less rewarding than it could be.
If that sounds like a familiar story, here are a few areas where you can improve things.
It’s your business. You make the decisions. So, build a business that you love.
Then watch what happens to your results.
Here are 3 things for you to remember, the next time you’re worried about your business:
So, stop worrying about what could happen. Instead, focus on improving your strategy.
Then work that strategy.
Okay… it’s confession time.
Whenever I read a marketing message, where the words you are get shortened to your, instead of you’re, it changes how I feel about the message and the person who wrote it. It makes me wonder what other basic errors that person makes. So, I no longer treat the message with as much importance or interest.
I know I’m wrong to do this. It could just be a one-off mistake that slipped past them.
I’m not the only one who feels like this, when they see that kind of basic error in a marketing message. It’s a natural response.
When someone claims to be a business professional, yet they make sloppy mistakes or allow errors to be published without correcting them, we doubt their message.
It works like this: By claiming one thing with a marketing message [professionalism], yet demonstrating something different with our actions [rookie errors], we create a fractured message. Fractured messages lead to confusion and doubt.
Once a prospective client doubts you, the chances of them doing business with you plummet.
It turns out that when it comes to marketing messages, the little things can often have a huge impact.
If you’re currently following marketing advice, yet your business isn’t achieving the results you need, this post is just for you.
I’m fortunate to work every day with clients worldwide. Since starting my business in 1995, I’ve worked with clients in over 40 countries. This has given me a wonderful insight into the differences, when it comes to successfully marketing in various parts of the world.
What I have found, is that some very popular marketing publications and marketing blogs are either unaware of the differences or they choose to ignore them. Instead, they tend to offer general advice, which is provided as THE WAY to do something, when it’s often totally unsuitable for many of their readers.
One very often repeated piece of bad advice is, “the best time to publish your newsletter, blog post or social media updates”. There is no general, one-size-fits all answer to this.
Here’s the thing: Different countries have different working cultures. For example, my American clients usually start work earlier than my European clients, however, my European clients often work later. So, if your business is in Europe and you’re reading a marketing blog for American businesses 9or vice versa, any information on the best time to publish something is incorrect.
Equally, even within the same countries, different industries work different hours. For example, designers, developers and those in the hospitality industry, often work later than other industries. So, using generic advice on the “best time to publish”, even if it’s from a locally-based marketing expert, is a waste of your time and money.
I see equally inaccurate information shared on content marketing blogs. No distinction is made between the kind of copy required to sell expensive, professional services — and the kind of copy needed to build an affiliate website or sell low priced items. A very different approach is required for each of these. As a result, I get emails from professionals with terrible blogs, newsletters and websites, who want to know why their readership isn’t growing and why they get few if any enquiries.
(Note: To find out what happened to one of my readers when she took that kind of advice, read this.)
Those examples of non-specific, general advice are sadly typical of what I see many hard-working small business owners waste time and money on. So, before you use general marketing advice, make sure it’s applicable to your business. If it isn’t, that free advice could lose you a fortune.