Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

Quick tip: How to get more prospective clients to say ‘yes’

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marketing, confusion, clarity

Here is a very quick marketing tip to increase your sales. This works online and also when you’re giving a presentation to a prospective client or customer.

It’s based on one of the foundations of successful selling: 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’ or walk away, rather than risk making a bad decision. And you, the business owner, are the one who pays the price for that lack of clarity.

Clarity sells

With this in mind, I’d like you to think for a moment about all the different options or choices your prospective clients are faced with.

Here’s why it’s critically important for you to get the balance just right.

  • The more options you 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 their decision making process is, the less likely they are to hire you or buy from you.
  • They move on.
  • You lose a prospective client or a sale, to a less confusing competitor.

We don’t want that to happen to you.

The marketing power of clarity

I’d like you to take some time to go through all your marketing materials, especially your website. Then review your sales presentation content.

Now, look closely for all unnecessary confusion.

Some good places to start (depending on your industry) may include; the number of service levels you provide, your various pricing options, the number of bundles or different packages you offer, over-long feature lists, the amount of information you require on your contact forms… you get the idea.

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

In short, aim for maximum clarity. Because a confused mind always says “no!”.

How to motivate people to take action, right now

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marketing

Here’s a short, powerful look at one of the basics of all successful marketing. It can be summed up in just 7 words: It motivates people to take action, now.

Here’s how this works, in 3 simple steps.

  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. Their phone will hit them with a notification or they’ll jump on a Zoom session… 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.

The BIG marketing problem that no one talks about

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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.

Does your marketing look needy? Find out now

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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.

Here’s 1 word that can ruin your results. And 12 better alternatives

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When it comes to creating successful marketing, the word ‘new’ is overrated. Moreover, it can critically damage the effectiveness of your marketing, losing you sales or client enquiries in the process.

There are 2 main reasons this happens.

  1. A new product or service is always seen as a risky bet. Untested. Less robust. At best, it’s a bigger gamble than the existing solution. At worst, the customer feels like a paying guinea pig. Ouch!
  2. A new product or service is seldom, if ever, the best. It lacks the improvements that come from years of customer feedback.

Yes, when you have an announcement to make (like moving to new premises), people expect to see ‘new’ and they understand the context.

The challenge comes when a key part of your marketing message is that you offer a new way to do something. Even some big brands struggle to sell ‘new’ to people, despite multi-million dollar marketing campaigns.

Thankfully you can totally avoid this problem.

Use better alternatives

Instead of relying on ‘new’, offer your marketplace something more compelling. More secure. More attractive. More motivating. And a great deal more appealing.

For example, rather than offering your prospects a ‘new’ way to (whatever), look at the core benefit of your product or service. Then market that benefit to them instead.

Here are 12 alternatives that I have used successfully over the years.

  1. A faster way.
  2. A secure way.
  3. An enjoyable way.
  4. A greener way.
  5. A stylish way.
  6. A stress-free way.
  7. An original way.
  8. A premium quality way.
  9. A proven way.
  10. An ethical way.
  11. A guaranteed way.
  12. A cost effective way.

The key is to intentionally use words that paint better mental pictures. Pictures that build trust and inspire people to take action. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen this simple adjustment lead to radically better marketing results.

Does your marketing pass the coffee shop test?

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Coffee shop marketing

Last month, I shared an important idea with you about logic, and how it can absolutely ruin your marketing and sales results. You can read it here.

The article was popular and attracted a lot of feedback. This included a request from a number of readers, for an example of the idea in action. And I remembered this one. It’s extremely short but makes the point with absolute clarity. It comes from one of the industries that really nails the concept.

I’m talking about coffee shops. Consider the following.

  • People don’t visit coffee shops for the coffee.
  • They already have coffee at home.
  • They pay between 300% and 500% more for coffee at the coffee shop, because of how the experience makes them feel.

Logically, they’d save a ton of money by drinking their coffee at home, sitting in their own super-comfortable chair.

But people, including your prospective clients or customers, don’t make purchasing decisions based on logic. They make them based on feelings. I explain how emotions drive decisions, here.

If your marketing message is based around a list of benefits, that’s way too logical. And it’s possibly losing you a lot of money, too. Your service or product may be less expensive, more premium, faster, or better designed. All those things are valid reasons why you should gain a huge chunk of your marketplace.

However, are you explaining how your service or product will make your prospective customers feel?

If not. Then start.

Because logic tells. But feeling sells.

The switch from selling based on logic to selling based on feelings is not just important. It’s essential. I hope this short post has caused you to think about a more feelings based approach to your marketing message. More importantly, I hope it motivates you to at least test it and compare the results.