Jim Connolly Marketing

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

How to create marketing that works

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Marketing that sells

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 attention 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, selfish 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, articles, 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 powerful marketing asset, by sharing real value, rather than pushing unwanted messages. If you want to thrive in today’s exceptionally volatile economy, this is the kind of marketing you need.

The kind of marketing that increases in value every day.

The kind of marketing that requires zero advertising spend.

The kind of marketing that connects you with prospects in a way they actually look forward to and share with their friends.

In fact, the exact kind of marketing I have been creating for my clients, since the mid 1990’s. It works. And it works in every economy.

Using an asterisk can ruin your sales results

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asterisk, small print, marketing copywriting, copy writing

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 exclusions, restrictions 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.

Your guard is up.

You’ve switched from eager buyer to sceptic.

Eliminate the asterisk risk

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

The most effective alternative, is to make the product or service as good as you said. This eliminates the need for an asterisk. Plus, it simultaneously pumps more value into your offering, making it more attractive and giving you a huge competitive advantage.

Another powerful alternative is to state, in honest and clear language, exactly what you’re offering. And include whatever would have been behind the asterisk, out in the open.

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 up front. Let people 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 at the regular price.

Social networks give your prospects a powerful voice. That voice can either be used to tell everyone how great you are, or how disappointed they are. Thankfully, you 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. It’s also why they refuse to hide the truth behind an asterisk.

How to get people to take action, right now

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Here’s the foundation of all successful marketing. In just 7 words.

It motivates people to take action, now.

Let’s break that down and also see how it works.

Marketing motivation, take action
  1. It motivates people: It gives them a compelling reason. A reason, which is powerful enough to grab their attention and generate enough desire within them that they’re ready for the next step.
  2. To take action: It makes a direct request. It asks them to; call us, click here, proceed to checkout, visit us, read this, subscribe, etc.
  3. Now: It asks them, whilst their motivation is high, to take the action required. Right now. Straight away. That’s because even if they love what you said and are genuinely interested, their attention will soon jump onto the next thing. This could be a notification on their phone, a delivery person might arrive with a package for them or they suddenly notice it’s time to meet their friend for lunch… and you’ll lose them. They tell themselves “I’ll do it later” and later becomes never.

The marketing from most small and medium-sized businesses is missing at least one of those essential steps. It’s either not motivating enough, lacks a direct call to action or doesn’t generate sufficient urgency. And it’s losing these businesses an absolute fortune.

We have to be smarter than that.

How to overcome the problem

Take a look at all your marketing messages and check you have all 3 of those steps fully covered. Try to be as open-minded as possible. Make sure it’s motivating, action driven and urgent. If you think any of those areas can be improved, improve them. Repeat this process until you have fully maximized everything.

Then remind yourself that you’ll always be able to wrestle another few percent improvement… and do it again. It’s hard to overstate what a massive, positive impact this will have on your marketing and sales results.

3 Tips to help you regularly create great Content Marketing

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content marketing tips

If you’ve ever wondered, how some people are able to regularly produce effective content marketing; (newsletters, blog posts, articles, podcasts, etc), and how you can do the same, this post is for you.

I’ve divided it into 3 core tips.

1. Is this useful?

There’s a sign on the wall in my studio. It’s a small sign, containing just 3 words: “Is this useful”. That’s the mark I set for everything I create. Nothing gets published unless I believe you’ll find it useful. I don’t try and be clever. Just useful. And as long as I think you’ll find an idea or observation useful, I share it.

Some small business owners are put off creating content, because they over-complicate things. They dig into minute detail. And try to make everything as close to perfect as possible.

The thing is, your prospective clients or customers want something useful, not perfect.

Once you stop aiming for perfection you’ll find it a lot easier. You’ll also get massively better results.

2. Don’t let crappy ideas block you

If you’re anything like me, you’ll find that most of the ideas you get are pretty average. Most of mine are bloody terrible! But maybe 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 are good enough, to be turned into a valuable (useful) piece of content marketing.

The challenge is that in order to get that 1 useful idea, you need to allow yourself to have the crappy ones… without getting disheartened.

The way I overcame this, was to deliberately give myself permission to think of lots of crappy ideas, knowing that something useful would come from it.

When you view the duff ideas as essential steps in the development of better ones, they switch from being disheartening to highly motivating.

3. Give your work the respect it deserves

We often overestimate the ideas and the work of others and underestimate the value of our own. Here’s a great example of what I mean.

A business owner told me how she was taking some files off a computer for archiving, when she discovered an old documents folder. It contained loads of articles, which were really interesting. She looked to see who wrote them and found they were all her own work, from 9 years earlier!

She didn’t publish them at the time, because she thought they weren’t good enough. It was only when she thought they were written by someone else, that she saw them for what they really were. Your work is almost certainly way, way better than you think.

So get it out there!

In short, if you’re looking to improve the quality and quantity of your content marketing, focus on being useful. See your crappy ideas as necessary steps to your useful ideas.

And give your work the respect it (and you) deserve.

It’s the biggest lie in business

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Biggest lie in business, marketing motivation

Are you tired of prospective clients (or customers), who don’t get back to you when they say they will? If you are, here’s something you may find extremely useful. It’s all about the biggest lie in business.

Here’s the thing. Whenever a prospective client tells you they didn’t have the time to meet you, return your call or consider your offer… they’re lying.

The biggest lie in business is…

They had the time!

And you already knew this.

You already knew full well that.

  • They had the time to do all the urgent or important things. Obviously.
  • They also had the time to do stuff that interested them; check the news about that big story, text a friend, share a funny TikTok video.
  • Oh, and they definitely had enough time to check their social media accounts. Multiple times.

What they lacked wasn’t time.

No.

What they lacked was… motivation.

Specifically, the motivation to do whatever you requested. They just didn’t want to tell you. They thought they were being nice. The truth is that as far as they were concerned, whatever you requested wasn’t important or urgent enough. So, they didn’t consider it a priority. And that’s why it didn’t get done.

Okay Jim, how do I stop this from happening, and massively improve my results?

That’s a great question!

Here’s an answer…

Motivation, attraction and deadlines

To motivate your prospective clients and customers to take action, you need to do the following.

  • Make your offer as attractive as possible.
  • Start by looking at what you’re asking your prospects to do and make it sound more captivating. More interesting. More compelling. Remember, motivation comes from the words Motive and Action. When the motive is powerful enough, the action follows. So, use all your creativity to make whatever you’re offering as compelling as possible.
  • Then give them a deadline. Deadlines focus the mind. They create urgency, which is exactly what you need in order to motivate prospects to take action!
  • Note: Here’s another example of how to use deadlines.

Make no mistake, the most powerful way to motivate your prospective clients to take action, is to provide them with a highly compelling offer, which is attached to a deadline.

Get those 2 steps right and you’ll find the marketplace will make time for you. You’ll also enjoy a dramatic improvement in your sales and marketing results. And you’ll become pretty-much free from the biggest lie in business!

Publish the process: How I write almost everything

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ia writer, distraction-free, writing

I thought it was about time that I shared another Publish the process piece with you. These are where I publish (or share) the process behind my work, including tips I have learned along the way.

Today, I’m sharing the app I use for writing my newsletter, my articles, my posts, my client’s marketing copy… every digital word I produce.

Let’s go!

The above image is taken from my Mac. It’s an app called iA Writer and you can visit their site here. It’s available for Mac, iOS, Windows, and Android and it’s surprisingly inexpensive, especially as it is sold as a one-off purchase, with no annual or monthly fee. For example, the Mac version is currently $29.99.

Why do I use it for everything?

Simple.

The app massively increases my productivity and dramatically improves the quality of what I produce. It gets out of the way. Allowing me to focus exclusively on whatever I choose to write about.

iA Writer and distraction free writing

With iA Writer there are no distractions.

None at all.

The moment you start to type, the screen goes blank. Except for a flashing cursor. The app uses something called markdown. This means you don’t need to use a mouse. You don’t need to access a menu.

Formatting text, adding links, inserting images, in fact everything can be done without taking your hands off the keyboard!

Once you have text on the screen, you can set iA Writer to focus only on the sentence or paragraph you’re currently typing. The remainder of the text fades into the background. It’s there, but fainter. This helps me remain 100% engaged with exactly what I am thinking / typing in that moment.

It’s a feature that by itself, has been of huge benefit to me.

The lack of distractions provides a very productive writing experience. An experience that for me, and many others, has radically improved our writing.

There are a number of distraction-free apps out there. I’ve tried a few, but none can match the level of focus I enjoy with iA Writer.

Is iA Writer what YOU need?

As regular readers will know, I don’t do reviews. However, there are lots of iA Writer reviews available if you do a quick search. This video review is amongst the best. It also has lots of handy tips if you already use the app and want to get more from it.

Yes, as you can see I love iA Writer.

That said, it’s one of those tools that people tend to either love or fail to see any reason to use it. So do your research. Because it might, just might, give you the same kind of productivity boost that it has given me over the past decade.

Update:

Since writing this, iA Writer 6 has launched. It includes additional features. Read more here.