Jim Connolly Marketing

When the vision pulls you, you don’t have to be pushed

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when vision pulls, don't need pushed, Steve Jobs vision

One of the most common questions people ask me, is in relation to blogging. Specifically, they want to know how I manage to push myself, to write and publish content as often as I do.

Here’s the answer.

Push or pull?

This quote from the late Steve Jobs answers that question beautifully:

If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.

– Steve Jobs.

If your vision of blogging is that it’s a necessary evil, you will fail on every metric.

  • You will fail to write as well as you can, because when you work through gritted teeth, it shows.
  • You will fail to show up with new information, often enough.
  • You will fail to engage people.

My blogging vision was different

I saw it as a professional and personal development opportunity. I knew that in order for me to share useful information regularly, I needed to feed my mind with useful information regularly. I quickly found another massive benefit to blogging, which is that writing regularly makes you a better communicator. That’s a huge asset for anyone.

So, even if I failed to attract a commercially valuable reader community, I’d still benefit. Firstly, I’d become far more informed. Secondly, I’d be better able to communicate my ideas than I would have been, had I not written all that content. This made it impossible for me to fail.

If you’re struggling to publish content regularly enough, don’t carry on working through gritted teeth. Change your vision. And then let that vision pull you.

Thankfully, Jobs’ concept works in every area of your life and isn’t limited to content creation.

Tip: If you found this useful, you can get my latest ideas delivered direct to your inbox, for free, right here.

Agility is the new growth

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marketing, agile growth

Photo: Shutterstock.

Since the start of the pandemic, I’ve written a lot about the need for business owners to adopt agile thinking. So it may come as a surprise that the title of today’s post is taken from Matthieu Pellerin, the founder and head of Google’s Growth Lab.

Pellerin wrote a very interesting post yesterday, Inside Google Marketing: Agility is the new growth. In it, he generously shares what he’s seeing, regarding changes required when marketing during the coronavirus pandemic. I found the following quote especially interesting:

“Our raison d’être continues to be driving responsible and sustainable growth, but we’re now operating under a new mantra of ‘organisational agility’.”

Whilst his post focuses on what his team at Google are doing, there’s clearly a core message we can all benefit from.

The needs, wants and situation of your clients and prospective clients is changing rapidly. In some cases, daily. Your marketing messaging needs to be just as agile, if you want to be as useful, valuable and relevant to them as possible. This includes your email marketing, website content, blog posts, social networking updates and vlogging, etc.

You simply cannot expect a pre-pandemic marketing message to strike the correct tone. Pellerin gives an example of just how important he believes it is, to get agile and move fast:

“We readjust these plans regularly and continue to switch resources as needed. Our key product priorities are shifting at lightning speed”.

Next steps

If, like many people reading this, you’re getting fewer sales or new client enquiries, check the messaging you’re using. If it fails to address the new and evolving priorities of your marketplace, it will also fail to deliver the results you need.

Whenever possible, hire a professional marketing copywriter to create compelling, relevant content for you. If that’s not within your budget, do something yourself. And in either case, review the message at least every 7 days. Sooner if it isn’t generating the results you need.

Yes, this means spending more time on your marketing. However, an agile situation demands an equally agile response.

7 Hard truths about marketing your business

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marketing tips

Photo: Shutterstock.

  1. Embrace brevity. Your marketing content is almost certainly 50% to 75% too long. Fix it. Your prospective clients are being bombarded with emails, texts, social media updates, phone calls. Their time (and attention) has never been under so much pressure. This will become an increasingly bigger issue in 2020. So get to the point. And fast.
  2. Be cautious of anyone offering tricks or short cuts to marketing success. Short cuts to success are seldom short cuts and they never lead to success.
  3. Avoid general marketing advice. Why? Because it’s extremely risky. Your marketing problem is specific to you and your unique situation; your industry, budget, location, size of business, competition, mindset, assets, etc. And your specific situation requires a specific strategy.
  4. In business, everything you do is marketing. Yes, everything. From the way you answer the phone, reply to emails and the design of your website… to your ability to meet deadlines, the customer service you offer and your opening hours. It’s all saying something about you. Either positive or negative. Nothing is neutral. It’s making you money or it’s losing you money.
  5. Don’t expect professional marketing results from amateur marketing. Marketing is the life-blood of your business. So stop treating it like some DIY project or you’ll run out of money, time (or both).
  6. If you need to attend networking events, to try and get people talking about your business, you have a major problem. Ask yourself “why”? Why aren’t people automatically talking about your service? Spend more time fixing the problem. Spend zero time pestering strangers at networking events for leads.
  7. You will never be one Facebook Live ‘event’ or online course away from marketing success. Ever.
  8. Always over deliver. Take time to focus on being of as much value as you can be. You can’t do this if you spend too much of your time, producing content for your newsletter, Linkedin, Facebook, Youtube and a podcast. Choose one or two channels. And put your time and energy into being useful or helpful in those areas.

Words matter

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Ogilvy marketing quote

They matter because your prospective clients aren’t mind readers. And they’re in a hurry. So, they need you to get to the point.

Think about it. There’s a world of difference, between measurable outcomes and superb results. Wasting 50 grand of your client’s money is a very measurable outcome – but it’s not a superb result! However, we see vague nonsense like that in marketing messages every day.

The key is to aim for clarity and impact. And only use as many words as necessary. (I used fewer than 90 words here).

How to make your marketing massively more effective

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content marketing, trust

Take a quick look at the following 2 statements. Which of them do you find the most appealing?

  1. I wrote this blog post, now I want you to read it.
  2. Business owners often struggle with this challenge, so I wrote this quick tip to help you.

Unsurprisingly, your marketplace is massively more attracted to the second statement. Despite this, the majority of small and medium sized businesses use the first approach in their marketing.

Rather than focusing on the wants and needs of their marketplace, they focus on what they themselves want. And it’s costing them a fortune in missed sales opportunities or client enquiries.

I received one such email earlier today. It started off with; “We’re delighted to announce our summer 2019 range is in stock and available to order”.

Let’s unpack that headline and see what message it sends to the reader.

  1. The vendor is excited.
  2. The vendor has an announcement.
  3. The vendor has new stock.
  4. They want me to order it.

As you can see, they’ve given me (I’m an existing customer) very little motivation to do anything. Their message is all about them and what they want. By switching the focus to their customers, they could have built a more compelling message. Instead, they’ll be wondering why that email’s response rate is so low.

The lesson here

The lesson is pretty obvious when you see an example broken down, like the one above. But sometimes in our eagerness to market our products or services, we can unintentionally make similar mistakes.

This is why I recommend you deliberately check, to ensure the focus of your future marketing is always about “them”. Also, review your existing marketing and shift the emphasis of any self-focused material, so that it’s them-focused… their wants and needs.

Show them how passionate you are about helping them. Show them you care.

And make solving their problems the cornerstone of your marketing.

Marketing Tip: How to hide stuff in the fine print

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marketing lies, liars

Have you noticed something about the fine print we find in marketing and on packaging?

It’s printed really small.

And there’s a reason for that. They would rather we didn’t see it. So, they do their best not to make it stand out. It’s one of the reasons I hate sales and marketing.

The fine print is where they hide caveats. It’s where they bury disclaimers. It’s where they tell us that the promises in their marketing are grossly inflated. Or that their product doesn’t look as good as it does on the packaging, etc.

This got me thinking: Surely there’s an ethical, positive way to use the fine print?

So, I had some coffee.

Then I went for a long walk.

I came back to the studio, had another coffee, put “A Love Supreme” by John Coltrane on… then it came to me.

Imagine this.

  • How would you feel, if you read the fine print and discovered that it actually confirmed the product to be just as good as they said, in the LARGE print? Maybe even adding an additional benefit?
  • How would your prospective clients feel, if your fine print confirmed your marketing claims and reiterated you were being totally honest with them?

That’s the kind of eye-popping surprise that people remember. It helps build trust. And it’s also the kind of story, which people like to share with their friends.