Ever wondered why I don’t write about how or where to spend your marketing money?

Well, today I spill the beans.

There are a lot of ways you can spend money on marketing. Advertising and promotion is available via thousands of providers. It’s so easy.

• You pay them the money.
• They say they’ll get your message in front of X number of prospective clients (or customers).
• Hopefully, a percentage of these will contact you.
• And a percentage of that percentage, could spend money with you.

So far so good, right?

It would be, if your competitors didn’t have the exact same options.

But they do.

And as you know, competing businesses advertise to the same marketplace.

Here’s why this matters: Your ads will always be competing against their ads. Whoever spends most *should* get most of the attention. This is equally true when you advertise on different platforms, as digital advertising reaches the same target groups regardless of where they are.

Buying attention via ads and promotions is also extremely precocious! Your reach will always depend on the marketing money your competitors choose to spend. It’s out of your control. It’s also impossible to plan the future growth of your business with confidence.

Why?

A well-funded competitor can, quickly and easily, wipe your visibility out before you even know what’s happening.

Thankfully there’s an effective alternative.

Marketing creativity over marketing money

I choose to focus 100% on a very different marketing model. It’s a model that is impossible for your competitors to copy, as they can’t see what you’re doing, unlike paid ads / promotion.

• They’ll know that you get talked about a lot more often.
• They’ll also sense there’s a real buzz around your products or services.
• They’ll notice their existing clients or customers switching to you.

BUT they won’t know why.

That’s because my marketing model is entirely based around creativity, not money.

It’s about attracting attention, not buying attention. It’s about giving your prospective clients something to talk about. It’s exceptionally effective. In fact, The Wall Street Journal came to me for an example of how I achieved massive marketing success for small businesses, using creative marketing strategies – – and NOT A PENNY spent on advertising or promotion.

In short, I don’t write about how to buy attention because it’s a risky, lazy and exceptionally limited way to grow a business. And there are hundreds of better options.

So now you know.

I’d like to ask you a relatively easy question. How many business contacts do you have?

You can easily get an approximate figure by adding together your social network contacts, the contacts in your address book and email lists, etc. For most reading this, the number will be in the high hundreds. For many it will be in the tens of thousands. And hundreds of thousands for some.

Here’s a harder question. How many business relationships do you have?

Business relationships are harder to count. That’s because they are people you connect with on a deeper level. Not just numbers on the social networks you use. Not just names in your address book, who you have no history with.

Contacts = vanity

Building more and more contacts can be intoxicating. It’s often referred to as a vanity metric, because most of these numbers are visible, such as our social network contacts / followers / friends. The bigger the number, the more it strokes our ego.

We can be like the popular kid at school. Look at us. We’re a big deal. Even though we know hardly any of these people. We have the BIG contacts number.

Go us!

Relationships = sanity

Building relationships doesn’t seem as intoxicating. That’s because there’s no publicly visible number attached to it.

Think about it: Who else knows how many people rely on you when they need help? Who else knows how many people trust you or how many influential people you know. And who else knows how many people go to you for advice when they’re faced with important decisions?

Sanity numbers are a lot less public than our vanity numbers, but a lot more meaningful and massively more valuable.

With this in mind, how much time do you dedicate each day, to building and nurturing relationships? I’m talking here about going deeper than contact building.

For example.

Everyone who reads my newsletter can chat with me by simply replying to the email. I see it and reply to you personally. I’ve built countless relationships with people, who went from being a reader (contact on my email list), to being in regular dialogue with me (person I have a business relationship with and whose business I know).

The bottom line, is that business is ultimately all about people. That’s why it’s essential to focus on people and the strength of our relationships with them.

It turns out that everybody in your marketplace has at least 2 things in common.

1. They hate being sold to.
2. They hate having problems.

The most successful business owners have figured this out. In fact, they’ve taken those pet hates, and used them to develop a powerful, extremely effective growth strategy.

Instead of selling to prospective clients (or customers), they help them solve problems. And they do this via the products or services they offer.

Think about it, your business (and mine) exists in order to solve a problem or a number of problems. Every business does. Therefore, we should be approaching prospective clients as a problem solver.

This means talking to them, instead of pitching to them.

It means listening to their needs, so we get a clear understanding of their problem, then explaining how we can help.

When your marketplace sees you as a source of answers, they’ll regard you as a useful asset. And that changes the whole dynamic of how you do business. You become a massively more attractive proposition. Because we’re drawn to those who can help us or assist us.

In short, doors that were closed to you when you were trying to sell stuff, will fly open when you approach them as a problem solver. And you’ll find people start hiring you or buying from you, without you having to sell anything.

You can’t build the right kind of business, with the wrong kind of people.

• If the wrong kind of people work for you, they’ll ruin your business.
• If the wrong kind of people hire you, they’ll ruin your business.

The solution seems simple: Decide exactly who the right people are. And then intentionally hire, and market to, the right people.

The tricky part? Saying ‘no’ to the wrong kind of people!

That’s why the best time to hire someone is before you desperately need a position filled. And the best time to choose a new client, is before you desperately need a new client.

It’s that easy.

And it’s that difficult.

But it’s required.