Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

A pain in the neck

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In case you were wondering how come I have not posted anything to the blog for the past couple of weeks, here’s an update!

Over the past eight weeks, I have been suffering with an increasingly painful trapped nerve at the top of my neck. The end result was that for the past two weeks, I have been totally unable to type with my left hand (hence no posts to the blog.)

After realising that the medication I was on was not going to work, I decided it was time to call in a Chiropractor – and there’s a valuable lesson here, for anyone in sales!

I actually met with three qualified Chiropractors, before picking the one I trusted the most to get me out of pain and mobile again. Interestingly, the one I picked was NOT the least expensive. He was actually the most expensive by some margin!  However, he WAS the only one of the three to actually ask me about how the pain was making me feel; how the sleepless nights were impacting my quality of life etc.  He engaged me on the most basic level, by connecting with me as a human being. He fully understood my exact position and all the problems the pain was causing me.

Twenty minutes later, he had a new client.  Within 24 hours of my first treatment, he had reduced my pain by around 50%, I was able to throw the pain killers away and most important of all, I started being able to sleep again, after weeks of sleepless nights.

Sales lesson?

There’s an old saying in sales, which tells us that; “you buy the person, not the product / service.” By identifying the impact the pain was having on my life as a whole and showing me genuine empathy, my Chiropractor had set himself apart from the other two people I met. Their talk was all about them, how great they were and how affordable their services were.  They came across like salespeople, which is always a mistake, because there’s so much resistance out there to sales / marketing messages!

As Seth Godin, a friend of this blog said recently, “Selfish short-sighted marketers ruined it for all of us. The only way out, I think, is for a few marketers to so overwhelm the market with long-term, generous marketing that we have no choice but to start paying attention again.”

By the way, you REALLY should subscribe to Seth Godin’s blog – it’s excellent!

I have made many, many millions of pounds and dollars worth of sales over the years for my clients and myself and can honestly say, I have NEVER sold anyone, anything! However, LOTS of people have bought things from me!

Enough with the pitches – it’s 2009 for heaven’s sake!

Look for ways to contribute for free to your marketplace.  Engage people and show them you understand their ‘pain.’ There’s a recession on right now and many of those in your marketplace are hurting – get out there and find a way to help as many of them as possible.  For example, I offer free advice to people via this blog and my marketing newsletter. 95% of the people who read my material never even say thank you or comment here or email me – but that’s not important!

You see, there’s a MASSIVE 5% of people; who say great things about me, who recommend me to their clients and friends, who invite me to speak on their TV shows and radio programs and who pay me to handle their marketing for them.  These people forward my newsletter on to other people, they recommend my blog to everyone and they link to me. That’s why this blog as almost 13,000 links, even though it’s just 6 months old.

This is also the reason why I have no advertising on this blog.  I don’t want to sell you anything. I want you to come here, knowing that there’s no sales pitch.  I want you to know that when I say Seth’s blog is great or that FriendFeed‘s a great service, I am saying it for free, because I genuinely believe it.  If you like my work, use my ideas and see great results and THEN decide you want me to work with you, you will have to dig around the blog and find the one page, which tells you about my services.

Attraction marketing

Some call this approach ‘attraction marketing.’  That’s a fairly accurate description, because it’s an approach to business development and sales, which ‘attracts’ leads, enquiries, sales, orders and new clients / customers – rather than the traditional ‘pursuit marketing’ model.  There’s another post all about attraction marketing here.

Have a great day and please feel free to be one of that rare 5%, who forward this post, tweet about it, get in touch or leave a comment!

6 words to transform your results!

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“Start with the end in mind.”

Those 6 words contain a piece of business advice, which is of more commercial value than many entire books on business success.  The information in that simple, short sentence, could have saved many businesses from going broke and transformed many struggling businesses into super-star success stories.

By focusing with clarity on your desired end result, before starting something new, you massively increase your chances of success. However, many businesses will, for example, start a new marketing campaign, introduce a new service or maybe start a new blog / website – with only a vague idea of what they actually want to achieve.

With only a fuzzy picture of what they want to achieve, it’s very hard to know if they are even on target or not.  It’s like setting off on a journey “up north” for the first time, without the address of the destination.  You might know that you need to head north, but that’s not enough information – You need an address if you ever want to find the place.

Social media can be low leverage

I am seeing this more and more with businesses deciding to invest huge amounts of time and effort on social networking / social media, with no clear idea why.  They will start blogging, using LinkedIn, FaceBook or Twitter – simply because they think they should. However, without a clear goal for all that effort, you can waste a LOT of time and effort!  Social media can be a very low leverage activity and can eat into a vast amount of your time, unless you start with the end in mind.

In the past few weeks, several people with massive social networks have called or emailed me, asking what I think they should do “to monetize” their following. One guy, with over 40,000 followers on Twitter has told me that he is investing an amazing 4 hours a day, 6 days a week, building his Twitter network and has almost forgotten why he even started!  Here’s what he told me;

To be honest Jim, I started off without a clear idea of what I wanted to achieve, so I just decided to get as many followers as possible.  Now, I have all these followers, but 99% of them are not even in the market for my services; which is pretty niche.

Twitter focus

I started off using Twitter, in order to offer another channel of communication for the community of people who read my blog and my newsletter. Because of the number of readers I have, I soon gained a massive following.

Initially, I followed them all back and then quickly realised that I was following over 20,000 people, which was too time consuming. Because I had a clear picture of what I wanted to achieve from Twitter, I was able to literally reset my Twitter account (and delete the 23,500 “follows” I had too,) knowing with 100% certainty that I had made the right decision.

Before you start off with a new project, make sure you have a crystal clear idea of what you want to achieve from it.

You can only remain on target, if you know what your target is.

Blinded by the light?

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I was in a busy coffee shop yesterday, when I noticed that 25% of the tables were empty. The empty tables were all along one side of the shop, which was saturated with brilliant sunshine.

The sun, magnified through the shop’s 20 foot high glass windows, made those tables impossible to use because it was just too dazzlingly bright.  People were walking into the shop, seeing the only available places were in direct sunlight and leaving again for the coffee shop along the road.

As I left, I spoke with the owner about this obvious problem.  His response was typical of the way many small business owners think about investing in their businesses.

“Yeah, no one ever sits there when the sun comes out, but it’s just too expensive to fit blinds along that side of the shop.” I asked him how much he had been quoted for the blinds. “I haven’t actually looked for any quotes, but it’s got to be really expensive, those windows are 20 feet high!”

When is a cost not a cost?

Forgetting the huge additional electricity bills he’s going to have this summer, because of his air conditioning being needlessly overworked – what about the loss of trade?  Even if his customer’s average spend is only £5 per hour, the 24 seats rendered unusable will be losing up to £120 an hour, each day between 11am and 3pm, when the sun is, as he calls it, “in the wrong position.”  Ironically, his busiest period is between 12 noon and 2pm – when those seats would be filled with people on their lunch breaks!

I wonder how many times he will have to watch those 6 empty tables, before realising the difference between a cost and an investment?

What if someone sees this?

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I read an interesting post on Seth Godin’s blog yesterday.  It tells the story of someone, who had three people short-listed for a job as a housekeeper.  The employer decided to Google their names and found they were totally unsuitable; all because of the information she found about them online.

Only last week, a web designer told me he had lost a highly profitable piece of work, after his prospective client checked him out online.  He hadn’t written anything offensive and there were no negative comments anywhere about either him or his services.  The client withdrew the project, simply because they were uncomfortable hiring someone who was regularly posting to Twitter after midnight!

Apparently, they said his late night Twittering suggested to them that he would not be awake enough during the working day, to handle their project professionally.  The next day I read an article on the BBC website, about a lady who was fired, for saying that her new job was boring, on FaceBook.

Whatever you happen to think about these decisions, there’s a valuable lesson here.

We live in an age where most of what we do online is visible AND searchable.  We also know that employers and prospective clients are now checking people and companies out online, before making hiring or buying decisions. Before you post searchable information online, ensure that is consistent with the image you want to project; either of yourself your business or both.

Thriving or surviving in a recession?

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You can’t open a newspaper or watch a news report these days, without hearing how bad the economy is.  The media’s focus is pretty-much exclusively on huge, national and multinational companies, reporting drops in profits and job cuts.

However, whilst many huge corporations really struggle right now, there are countless small businesses out there, doing really well!  Of course, their success is almost invisible, because it’s not carried in the newspapers or reported about on the news.

Marketing success in a recession

I spoke with a man yesterday morning, whose main problem at the moment, is recruiting enough good quality people to cope with the 300% increase in business he has seen since last June.

I spoke today with the owner of a recruitment business (one of the industries hit hardest by the recession), whose business is growing faster right now than ever before.  I also spoke with an accountant earlier, who has seen an amazing 50% increase in the size of his client base in the past 6 months!

All three of these businesses are clients of mine, so their marketing is brilliant! However, their success is only possible, because they are focusing on growing their businesses rather than survival. Their competitors are ‘hunkering down’ and hoping to just stay afloat, so my clients have been able to gain market share and will continue to do so!

Recession thinking

Because of the wall-to-wall negative news coverage, most small business owners right now are focusing on what they might lose.  Their thinking and strategies are all designed around avoiding loss – Rather than developing their business.

Even in a good economy, ignoring the development of a business and focusing on loss, will guarantee that a business fails!

That’s because what we focus on determines the actions we take.  Let’s look at a very simple example, which shows how a business owner’s focus will dramatically influence what he does; based on whether he focuses on survival or growth.

If Bob asks himself; “How can I avoid going broke during the recession?” He might come up with answers like:

  • I could cut back on everything.
  • I could work harder / longer hours.

However, if Bob asks himself; “How can I double my profits, even during a recession?”  He might come up with answers like:

  • I could find a great new service to offer all my existing clients, which is also highly profitable.  Existing clients already trust me, so a high percentage will go for it.
  • I could get my website professionally copy written, so we get more sales leads from all those hits we get.
  • I could build an Introducer network, people who recommend me to their contacts in return for a commission. This way, unlike advertising, I only have to pay when a new client joins me AND I get an army of salespeople out there telling the world how great my business is.

I am certainly not suggesting that the current economy is a bunch of roses. It definitely isn’t!

What I am suggesting, is that we tend to get what we focus on; so why not focus on what you want – rather than what you fear?

Boost sales with your advertising!

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In this post, I am going to show you how to get massively better results from your advertising – starting right now!

Making advertising work!

If you tried advertising in the past and found that the only winner was the person who sold it to you, you’re not alone.  Over the years, I have helped market the services of thousands of businesses, spanning just about every industry and profession.  During my initial conversations with the people behind these businesses, I would often hear a version of the following statement:

“We tried advertising – it doesn’t work!”

Advertising actually DOES work (really well), but only if you use it correctly.  I have personally sold many millions of pounds (and dollars) worth of products and services for my clients and myself, with the help of advertising.  In this post, I am going to share one of the secrets of my advertising success with you.

If you have a small or medium sized business and are advertising with the intention of making sales, boosting your profits and transforming your income; I suggest the only form of advertising worth investing in is action advertising.

Why is ACTION advertising so effective for smaller businesses?

ACTION advertising is designed to make the reader take action.  Big companies are usually seeking to get someone to switch from one brand of cola, razor blade or sports shoes etc to another.  These adverts can be effective by simply associating good feelings or famous / beautiful people with their ‘brand.’

Small businesses typically advertise in order to generate sales.  Their advertising needs to; get their phone ringing, fill their store with eager buyers or fill their inbox with sales requests and enquiries.  This means their adverts need to inspire some form of direct response or action from the reader / listener.  A good quality action advertisement includes the following:

–  It tells the reader who the advertiser is.
–  It tells the reader what the benefits of their product or service is.
–  It gives them a motivating reason to ACT NOW – to call, visit or e-mail the advertiser.
–  It tells them to contact the advertiser – usually with a time sensitive or limited availability element!

Here’s an example of a simple action advertisement I read (with the company’s details changed):

“ACME Widgets can save you a recession-busting 45% on your annual widget costs, that’s why we are inviting you to attend our wine and widget evening on 26th February at 7pm.  You can reserve your place now by calling Rachael on 012345 123123.  As places are limited, please call now to avoid disappointment!  Acme Widgets, 22 East Street, London.”

In contrast, most small business advertising creates little motivation for the reader to take action.  These ads are often based around the following:
–  They tell the reader the name of the service or business.
–  They show the reader the advertiser’s logo.
–  They tell the reader a little about what the advertiser does or their benefits.
–  They sometimes list a ‘special offer’.
–  They usually give the reader some contact details.

These ineffective adverts provide information about who the advertiser is and what they do, BUT give no reason for the reader to take action and contact them.  Guess what – generally, no one does!  Here’s a real life example, (with the company name/details changed):

“Acme Widgets have over 20 years of experience and our customer service is second to none.  Last year our widgets were voted ‘Best Value Widget’ by What Widget Magazine.  Our best selling Orange Widget is just £250.  Acme Widgets, 22 East Street, London”.

The majority of small business advertising I see in the press or in trade journals, is far less effective than it could or should be.  There is nothing compelling about what they say – nothing to inspire the reader to do anything.  When I started out in marketing, back in the 1980’s, we used to call these ineffective advertisements ‘flick-through ads’ – because people would literally see them and just carry on flicking through whichever publication they were in, without doing anything.

Remember, all motivation comes from motive

If you want your advertisement to generate masses of new business, you can!  But you need to advertise where your ideal future clients/customers are and give them a BIG enough reason to inspire them to take the action you require.  People are not stupid and will only contact you if there’s a compelling / motivating enough reason for them to do so.  Just having your message “out there” is simply not enough!