Copywriting Archives | Jim's Marketing Blog

It’s a lie: The customer is not always right!

January 11, 2019 by Jim Connolly

Photo: Shutterstock.

That old saying, that the customer is always right, is bogus. Worse still, if you believe the customer (or client) is always right, it will damage your business.

That’s because the customer is often wrong.

Allow me to explain!

That saying still persists, because fearful service providers are scared that if they say the customer is wrong, they might take their custom elsewhere. So, generations of business owners have worked under the erroneous belief that they should simply agree with their clients all the time.

That’s a really, really bad idea. It fails the client and it fails you.

Here are a couple of examples:

Designers end up producing ugly work, because the client made terrible design demands. The client is left with low quality design, which won’t work for them. The designer will never get to work with that client again.
Copywriters end up writing junk, because the client demanded uninformed changes. So, instead of a professional piece, the client gets something amateurish, which they could have written themselves. The copy fails to work. The client ends up unhappy. The copywriter is never hired again.
Coaches and mentors end up delivering a poor quality service, because the allow strong-willed clients to dictate what happens. The client then ends up hearing what they want to hear, rather than what they need to hear in order to succeed. It fails the client. It fails the provider. Lose-lose.

It’s hard to grow a business with unhappy former clients and no referrals!

No, I’m not suggesting you argue with your clients. That’s a really bad idea and extremely unprofessional.

However, you do need to guide your clients. As a professional, it’s your job to help them make the right decisions, so they get the very best results. That means providing the client with your informed, expert guidance. It means steering them away from avoidable mistakes.

Because you’re an informed expert in your field, and they are not, there will be disagreements. When this happens, the key is to respond with education, not anger. This leads to helpful exchanges of ideas, rather than unhelpful arguments.

Your clients deserve your very best work. Agreeing with a client, when you know they are making damaging mistakes, doesn’t help them and it doesn’t help you.

Give your clients your very best. That’s what they pay you for. That’s what they deserve. And you cannot, on any level, afford to give them anything less.

Recommended reading on this subject: The secret behind the best paid, most valued people in your industry.

How to create marketing that spreads and sells

December 24, 2018 by Jim Connolly

Image: Shutterstock.

I have a very effective marketing idea to share with you today. I’m going to show you how to create marketing, which people will value and that’s powerful enough to inspire them to hire you or buy from you. It’s based on the work I do with some of my clients and includes a brief case study, which you can learn from.

So, let’s get started.

Receiving or paying attention?

It starts with understanding that there’s a huge difference between someone receiving your message and someone paying attention to it.

For example, TV viewers are sent targeted marketing messages (commercials) during TV shows. What do most of us do? We fast forward through them or if watching the show in real-time, we go and make a coffee. Just because they send their messages, doesn’t mean we are paying attention.

For your marketing to work, you need to get a great message in front of the right people. In order to get this correct, here’s the key question we need to ask ourselves:

If I stopped my email marketing campaign or I stopped publishing my blog posts, newsletter etc, would people really MISS them?

As a quick look at the marketing you receive every day confirms, for most people the honest answer to that question is NO! We get bombarded with dull, uninspiring sales messages all day and see them as an intrusion, rather than something of value.

Of course, for that tiny minority of small businesses who DO produce marketing, which people genuinely value and would miss if it were to stop, the sky is the limit.

I’m going to share the process required to make this work for your business later in this post.

First, we need to understand why there’s so much dull and ineffective marketing out there.

Dull is cheap. Dull is fast. Dull is easy!

It’s cheap, fast and easy to create a dull marketing message and push it to a lot of people. As a result, there’s no barrier to entry today.

Things were very different 15 years ago. Back then, if a small business owner wanted to send a mail shot to 50,000 people, she’d have to spend some serious money.

She’d have to cover the cost of the mailing list.
Then she would need to pay for all that paper and the printing.
Next she would need to pay a company to get the letters folded and inserted into the 50,000 envelopes.
Then there’s the huge postage costs for those 50,000 pieces of mail.

All in all, it would cost many thousands. She would need to think long and hard about the value of what she put into those envelopes. Get it wrong and she would pay a hefty price.

Today, everything has changed

That same business owner today, can hit 50,000 people using cheap email software and her laptop. It costs just a little of her time. If it fails, maybe tomorrow’s one will work.

In short, it’s never been cheaper or easier to push dull, uninspired, poorly thought out, uncreative marketing out the door.

So, that’s exactly what millions of people are doing. This is why there’s so much junk in your email inbox and on your social networking accounts.

How to get it right

There is an alternative approach I want to share with you, so people welcome your marketing, share it and hire you or buy from you. It requires that you take the exact opposite approach, to 99% of the marketing you see out there.

It’s about shifting the focus of your marketing, so that it’s primarily of benefit to the people who receive it and secondarily of benefit to you.

It’s about producing content (audio, video, blog posts, newsletters, social networking updates etc), which provide independent value to those who receive it. This means they get genuinely valuable or useful information from it, independent of them needing to spend a penny with you.

An example of how this works, based on one of my clients

Imagine you are a dog owner and after a trip to the vet, you subscribe to their dog owner’s newsletter. It gives you useful tips and ideas, to help you keep your dog healthy, fit and happy. At the bottom of each email are their contact details, so you can call them when you need a vet.

You find this free information so valuable and interesting, that you send it to 10 of your dog-owning friends.

They subscribe and then do the same.
Then these new subscribers share it too, and on and on it goes.
The amazingly valuable, highly-targeted readership just keeps on growing!

Soon, that vet (a former client of mine) was talking to thousands of local dog owners and positioned themselves in their marketplace, as THE place to take your dog for all its veterinary needs.

Their newsletter was eagerly anticipated by it’s readers. Yes, people wanted to hear from them and valued what they had to share.

Compare that vet’s approach to the typical marketing messages we see.

That vet doesn’t need to run expensive radio ads.
They have no need to waste time on Facebook. They own the communication channel with their prospective clients (by using email)!
They have no need to buy mailing lists.
They don’t need to waste valuable hours at networking events.
They certainly don’t need to pester people on social networks or ask strangers for recommendations on Linkedin.
They don’t need to invest in anything, other than the creativity required to produce a genuinely valuable newsletter, with useful content.

That example shows how a business can grow a massively valuable marketing asset, by sharing real value, rather than pushing unwanted messages. If you switch to this kind of value-driven marketing in 2019, it will improve your business beyond recognition.

Now what?

I’ve got you covered! I’ve created a massive, free marketing guide (over 4000 words) that’s packed with marketing tips and ideas you can use. Here it is.

Stop using buzzwords in your marketing. Really. Stop it

November 8, 2018 by Jim Connolly

Photo: Shutterstock.

One thing in business is certain. There’s no shortage of buzzwords and phrases. Here are just a few that I’ve seen in use recently.

Intersection.
Deep-dive.
Disrupt.
Ruckus.
Knowledge transfer.
Ideate.
Pragmatic.
Wheelhouse. (As used in “that’s in my wheelhouse”)
Paradigm.
And all those compound words, ending with ‘hack’ or ‘hacking’

Those buzzwords and countless others, are used by people in an effort to appear informed or fashionable. Interestingly, buzzwords have the total opposite effect.

Here’s how they work against us (and our marketing).

Buzzwords make informed people cringe. Not only is this embarrassing, it’s a terrible idea if we want our peers to take us seriously or recommend us.
Buzzwords confuse the uninformed. And that’s the last thing we need, when we want people to understand our message.

In short, buzzwords not only add nothing positive to our marketing, they actively weaken it. And because they’re 100% unnecessary, we can remove them with no negative impact.

Remember: One of the keys to effective marketing is to always aim for clarity.

Why?

Because clarity sells.

Is too much choice destroying your marketing results?

October 18, 2018 by Jim Connolly

Photo: Shutterstock.

How many different levels of service or pricing options do you offer?

That’s a really important question. Because if, like many business owners you offer too many options, it’s needlessly ruining your sales results.

Allow me to explain.

Here’s what happens when we offer too much choice.

The more options we put in front of someone, the more choice they have.
The more choice they have, the harder it is for them to decide.
The harder we make their decision process, the less likely they are to hire us or buy from us.
So, they move on. And we lose a client enquiry. Ouch!

In short: Clarity sells.

Too much choice and ‘toxic complexity’

Too much choice adds what I call toxic complexity to a marketing message.

Toxic, because it causes confusion.

Complexity, because it makes our message too complicated for a prospective client to easily understand.

One of the oldest sayings in marketing is, “A confused mind always says no!”. In other words, when faced with a buying decision, a confused prospective client will not proceed. They’ll say no. And we are the ones who pay the price for their lack of clarity.

The solution?

Seek out unnecessary complexity. I recommend you look at the number of service levels, pricing options and packages you provide. Remember to take into account how many items are listed within each option or package.

Then consider whether you actually need to offer so much choice, so much complexity, so much potential for confusion. And if not, reduce. Everything that needs to be there should remain. But nothing else.

By simplifying the decision making process for your prospective clients, you make it easier for them to hire you or buy from you. And when that decision is easier, more prospective clients will become actual clients.

Copywriting Warning: Using an asterisk can ruin your results

October 13, 2018 by Jim Connolly

Photo: Shutterstock.

You’re reading about a product or service.

It sounds amazing.

Then you spot it!

You spot the dreaded *asterisk. And your heart sinks.

You know you’re about to be disappointed. You’re about to discover the caveats, exclusions and conditions, which means that offer isn’t as good as they said it was.

They could have told you the truth without hiding it behind the asterisk. However, they deliberately chose not to. They intentionally concealed it from you. And in a split second, they’ve totally changed how you feel about them.

You wonder what else they’re hiding from you.

And if you only discover afterwards that you’ve been duped, you won’t be happy!

Eliminate the asterisk risk

If a business owner feels they need to hide something behind an asterisk, there are better alternatives.

The easiest is to make the product or service as good as you said. Thus removing the need for an asterisk. This will simultaneously pump more value into your offering, making it more attractive.

Another powerful alternative is this: State, in honest and clear language, exactly what you’re offering. And include whatever would have been behind the asterisk, explaining why it’s there.

For example, imagine it’s an introductory deal, offering your service at a reduced price for the first 3 months. Rather than quote the introductory price (and hide the fact it increases after 3 months, behind an asterisk), tell them. Let them know that you’re so confident they’ll love your service, you’re offering it at a super-low discount, so they can discover for themselves, why it’s outstanding value for money, at the regular price.

Social networks give the marketplace a powerful voice. That voice can either be used to tell everyone how great a vendor is, or how bad a vendor is. Thankfully, business owners get to choose the kind of experience that’s being shared.

That’s why the smartest brands aim for honesty and transparency at every opportunity. And why they refuse to hide the truth behind an asterisk.