Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

Your business, Steve Jobs and Malcolm Gladwell

by

marketing ideas reality

Image: Mika Baumeister

Today, I’d like to share a business development idea with you that’s seldom talked about. However, it’s a key factor in the success of some absolutely remarkable people and businesses.

Malcolm Gladwell was once asked in an interview, if he would reveal his “secret sauce” for writing a best-selling book. After all, he should know! His reply was extremely interesting. Here’s a snippet from what he said:

“The moment you write a book hoping it will be a best seller, your chances of it becoming a best seller go downhill. […] You write the book you would want to read.”

He then went on to make an excellent point about Steve Jobs. He explained that Jobs never commissioned the development of a product or service, based on what he thought would be a smash hit. Instead, Jobs developed the type of products that he himself wanted to own.

Now, let’s unpack that and look for the common thread.

  • Malcolm Gladwell writes the kind of books, which he would want to read. And interestingly, his books are unlike any other books in his niche. (Until ditto-head authors decide to rip his ideas off). Gladwell’s books are also among the best selling non-fiction books of the last 2 decades. And those 2 factors are directly connected.
  • Steve Jobs created products he wanted to own. He famously shunned focus groups, deliberately striving to produce the kind of remarkable products he longed for. In doing so, Jobs’ success with Apple led to his company being the most highly valued in the world. Again, those 2 factors are directly connected. Recommended reading – Steve Jobs, marketing and liars!

In short, deliver the level of service that you’d love to receive. Create compelling products that you would love to own. Develop solutions for pressing challenges, which you’d love someone to solve. And make the experience of doing business with you so exceptional, that it would knock you off your feet if you were the customer or client.

Success leaves clues. Our job is to find them and apply them.

He’s very optimistic, as he slowly kills his business

by

Image: Bruce Mars

It’s important to feel optimistic about your business. However, the wrong kind of optimism will crush your chances of success.

Let me tell you about the meeting I had with Bob. His story explains exactly what I’m referring to.

I last spoke with Bob (not his real name) regarding his business, back in 2015. He’s the friend-of-a-friend and seems like a really nice guy. He’s also very optimistic about the future of his business. Optimistic enough to refinance his home, something he said he’d already done “more than once”. I found his optimism interesting, as in the 6 years since we last spoke, his business has barely limped along. And back then, he’d already been struggling for years.

So, his business has been going nowhere for a very long time. And based on the plans he shared with me, there’s no realistic chance the business will see any future growth. That’s because his business development ‘strategy’ totally fails to address his actual problems. Sadly, he’ll simply be repeating the same common errors that have been hurting his business all this time.

So, why is this happening and what’s the lesson?

The 2 types of optimism

Like I said at the beginning, it’s great to feel optimistic about your business. In fact, we have to be optimistic. But only if our optimism is justified. You see, there are 2 types of optimism. One is essential. The other one is toxic.

I’m referring to justified optimism and unjustified optimism.

  • Justified optimism is based on sound planning. It’s the confidence that comes from knowing you’re doing the right things, correctly. And the knowledge that your business is making measurable progress in the expected timescale. This kind of optimism is clearly justified.
  • Unjustified optimism is very different. It comes from ignoring the reality of your situation. It comes from hoping things will ‘just get better’, without making the improvements your business is screaming for. It’s rooted in fear; the fear of change and ironically, the fear of loss.

Unjustified optimism comes with a very dangerous side-effect: It has the exact same power on your mind, as justified optimism. If your business is stagnating or even shrinking, yet you choose to believe everything is going to be great, it acts like a narcotic.

A narcotic?

Yes, a narcotic!

Why?

Because pumping yourself up with optimism, even unfounded optimism, takes away the pain (or urgency) you need to feel, in order to motivate yourself to fix what’s wrong.

Here’s an example I use, when explaining this to groups of young entrepreneurs.

It’s like seeing black smoke bellowing from the back of your car, but choosing to ignore it and instead, telling yourself that your car is doing great. Even if you 100% believe your car is in amazing shape, the engine will still get trashed if you ignore all that black smoke. The unjustified optimism does nothing to solve the problem. It just stops you doing what’s required.

Business owners tend to be optimistic. Let’s face it, we have to be! The fact we started a business in the first place, with zero guarantee of success, takes a lot of optimism.

The key here is to make sure that our optimism is always justified. And that our optimism is grounded in the reality of our situation today, along with the plans we’re making for tomorrow.

The BIG marketing problem that no one talks about

by

Marketing silence, feedback marketing

Image: Nick Fewings

You’ve probably heard the old phrase; “Silence is golden“?

Well, that’s not the case when it comes to the marketing of your business. In today’s post, I’ll show you how silence can have a devastating effect on your results, plus how to avoid it from happening to you.

I was in a coffee shop once, when a guy with a very obvious hairpiece came in. He had natural, thick brown hair around his ears, with a jet black hairpiece on top. Of course, no one mentioned it to him. People just smirked when he wasn’t looking. Whether this guy needed the hairpiece for vanity or medical reasons, it’s entirely possible he has no idea that it’s so poorly matched to his natural hair.

A very similar kind of silence happens regularly in business. And when it does, it costs you a fortune.

Allow me to expand on that.

  • We check out the social media accounts of a potential vendor. We notice their updates are mostly just a series of sales pitches or automated quotes from famous people. We don’t tell them their social media activity is so dull that we leave in seconds. We silently move on.
  • We go to a website to check out a potential service provider. We then see that their site looks amateurish and decide not to consider them. We don’t email them to let them know their site created such a bad impression. We silently move on.
  • We start reading a poorly-written piece of marketing and quickly discard it. We don’t call the company and tell them their content is losing them business. We silently move on.

Faced with all this silence, how do you figure out if what you’re doing is working for you?

You ‘listen’ to what your results are saying. That’s where the most accurate signal is.

Don’t wait for someone to tell you your marketing sucks. Because they won’t. Your friends don’t want to upset you. Your competitors don’t want you to become a threat. And strangers don’t give a rat’s ass.

In short, the silence of your marketplace is easy to miss. If things are too quiet, for too long, take action.

Highest Ethical Return. Something to get excited about

by

marketing

You’re going to love this.

I tend not to write about the specific work I do with my clients, or how effective / exciting some of the strategies I use are. Today, I’m going to show you behind the scenes. You’re going to discover an amazingly powerful marketing process that I use daily, but haven’t written about in over a decade!

I call it the Highest Ethical Return strategy. If you followed my work back in the 1990’s, you’ll remember this as a foundational part of my marketing ethos. It’s also how I earned an international reputation for results, despite being one of the youngest, independent marketing professionals out there.

Here’s a very quick look at how the Highest Ethical Return strategy works. You’ll also get an idea of how I, as a Marketing Mentor, work with my clients.

The Highest Ethical Return strategy

I use this term to describe a strategy where you ethically achieve the highest possible return from every element of your sales and marketing activities. To achieve the Highest Ethical Return, you optimize multiple different marketing activities, so they compound on one another.

You start, by taking one marketing element and optimizing various, high return aspects of it. I’m going to use the example of email marketing because it’s so widely used.

  • You choose to optimize the subject line of the email and manage to increase open rates by 20%. (I’ve achieved increases of hundreds of percent)
  • You choose to optimise the timing of your distribution, so it arrives at the optimal time on the optimal day of the week. You increase open rates by another 5%.

At this point, you’ve increased the number of prospective clients or customers who will see your marketing by 25% and it hasn’t cost you a penny.

It hasn’t increased your risk. It hasn’t taken much effort. And you’ll benefit from these improvements again and again and again!

Naturally, you don’t stop there

  • You choose to optimize the content of your email and your CTA (call to action) so that it’s more compelling, and increase your sales rates by 15%. (Again, this increase can be 10x or 100x higher – depending on your baseline).
  • You choose to optimize your marketing proposition (offer) by pumping more value into it, and your 15% increased sales rate grows to 25%.

At this point, you’ve increased open rates by 25% AND you’ve also increased your sales conversion rates by 25%. This means you’re reaching 25% more people with a prospective need for your services AND 25% more of that bigger number are hiring you or buying from you.

Depending on the size of your marketing list and the lifetime value of your clients, you may have just increased your income or revenues my thousands… On just one mailing.

Continue improving it, and thousands can become tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, maybe millions.

Did you notice something?

All that additional revenue and profit came from using your same old list, but using it to achieve the highest possible return.

No additional money was required, there was no additional risk and very little additional time required. Extremely high return. Extremely low exposure. Exciting eh?

This is a tiny example – a quick glance of a few optimizations, of just one marketing activity. There are tons more things you can deploy, to further increase your email results. (For instance, think how you could ramp up your sales numbers by getting the Highest Ethical Return on your email follow-up process. That one additional step compounds on the others to radically increase your results).

Remember: You’re still only getting started. Even after you’ve fully optimized email marketing, there are numerous, additional (and more profitable) marketing activities to apply the Highest Ethical Return strategy to.

The strategy is only fully utilized, when you’ve applied it to every element of your sales and marketing. Consider how this could improve your revenues and profits, if you choose to use it correctly.

I mean that. Ponder on the idea.

I hope you found the Highest Ethical Return strategy as exciting as my clients do. It’s just one of the strategies I provide, from a pool of dozens, depending on the unique needs of each client.

Acres of high profit, low hanging fruit. Are you missing it?

by

endorsed relationships, joint ventures, jvs

On a purely commercial level, something has continued to baffle me since the start of the pandemic.

It’s simply this:

Why have so few small and medium-sized businesses collaborated with one another?

There has never been a greater need for businesses to collaborate or a greater opportunity for commercial collaboration. Reaching out to another business, which offers a complimentary, non-conflicting service to yours is so easy. Joint ventures, endorsed relationships and many other forms of mutually beneficial opportunities are available.

Yet at a time when so many business owners are really struggling, they’re isolating themselves from acres of exceptionally profitable, low hanging fruit.

I don’t know all the reasons why this is happening, but I believe it’s partly caused by focusing so much on survival, that business opportunities are not on their radar. If you’re hunkering down until things go back to ‘normal’, your mindset is all about how to survive, when it should be on how to thrive.

I’d like you to consider that thriving right now is not only possible, it’s highly probable, so long as you do the right things correctly.

Commercial collaboration in action

If you’d like to very quickly start attracting great new clients (or customers), try this.

  • Consider for a moment who your ideal client is.
  • Now think about non-competing providers who have access to your ideal profile of client AND who offer a service that in some way compliments yours.
  • Do some research and identify those who have a professional reputation. And reach out to them.
  • The way you reach out will depend on your industry or profession, whether you’re both local businesses, whether you’re members of the same association or group… and a ton of other things. There’s no one size fits all approach.
  • Find a suitable way to get the ball rolling. And roll with it!
  • Now identify the next collaboration partner and repeat the process.

If you’re not proactively developing commercial collaborations you really should. The opportunities are there. Just waiting for you.

Does your marketing look needy? Find out now

by

marketing, needy, pushy

Image: Alexis Fauvet

No one wants their marketing to be seen as pushy or needy. It turns people away and hurts their brand. Why then are we constantly bombarded by that exact kind of marketing?

The answer is that it almost always happens by accident! In this post, I’ll explain why, PLUS I’ll show you how to avoid making the same mistake.

Marketing messages fall into one of the following broad groups.

  1. Pushy: I want you to buy my stuff. And I want you to buy it now.
  2. Helpful: You have a problem, and my product or service can solve it for you. This is how it works.

Here’s the challenge

Lots of great business owners who are in that second group, accidentally market their services, as if they were in the first group.

In other words, their marketing looks needy or self-serving, but that’s NOT what they are like! They’re great people. Dedicated, hard-working professionals and they genuinely want to help you.

So, why does this costly confusion happen?

Here are the 2 main reasons I have identified, plus how to avoid this from happening to you.

Misunderstood passion

When you’re eager to serve your marketplace, your passion can easily be mistaken as needy. You’re ready, willing and extremely capable. However, because you really want to help, because you really want to make a difference, your motivated message can wrongly appear to be self-serving. Maybe even desperate.

The irony in this scenario, is that the same passion that prospective clients value so much, is now actively working against you.

The way to avoid this from happening, is to be very intentional regarding your marketing messages.

Go through your marketing. But read it from the perspective of your marketplace. Think about the words you use. Make sure that everything is “them focussed”.

Tip: I give 2 examples here, which explain exactly what I mean.

Copying the wrong approach

Many, (perhaps most) small and medium-sized business owners use the wrong marketing strategy and tactics for their industry. This example from one of my readers gives you a powerful insight into how devastating it can be. It demonstrates why you need to be really careful about the tactics you use. It also shows you the specific, and common, errors that were losing her a fortune. I strongly recommend you read it.

There’s no shortage of marketing tips and advice out there. As you’d expect, the quality ranges from rock solid, to average, to toxic. And even when the advice is rock solid, it needs to be in harmony with your industry, your reputation and your business development goals.

I hope you find those ideas useful. More importantly, I hope you do something with them.