Jim Connolly Marketing

Quick marketing tip

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Right now, no matter what kind of business you are in, one person or company is leading the way; locally, nationally or internationally.  These elite providers get to work with the most commercially valuable clients and their name is usually on everyone’s lips – but why?

A great marketing question

Most businesses spend their time focusing on their own little ecosystem.  They focus on their own business and their client’s or customers – that’s it.

Why not take some time out and do some research on what the top people in your industry are doing right now, which you could learn from or improve upon? This study of success can be extremely illuminating and a very effective way to make a lot of progress, very quickly!

Trust me – We’re great!

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This post is all about how to increase your sales and profits, by matching your actions to your promises.

Marketing & trust

Trust plays a BIG part in sales and marketing.  That’s because we buy from people we trust.  It’s also why testimonials and referrals are such powerful marketing tools.  They provide a short cut to the trust building process.  Even if you don’t know a service provider, the fact that a friend recommends them to you, immediately makes you massively more likely to do business with them, than with a stranger.

Marketing & consistency

There has been a lot written about the importance of building trust, yet very, very few marketing professionals ever mention one of the most important elements in the trust-building process. Consistency.

Even if a person or company has been recommended to you, you are unlikely to go ahead and use their services if they seem inconsistent, when you speak with them or check them out.  For example, if Bob recommends an accountant to you, but when you call them you are left waiting for ages before an uninterested person answers the phone, you still won’t use them.  That’s because there’s a lack of consistency between what you have been told and what you have experienced. This causes confusion and in marketing we know that a confused mind ALWAYS says NO!

Consistency & image

Many businesses (of all sizes), think that this consistency problem can be overcome by investing in a snazzy new logo and some well designed marketing material.  Banks and phone companies are a great example of this. They will often invest a fortune (millions) on beautifully designed websites, brochures and commercials – only for you to find that when you call them, you are placed in a queue, before your call is transferred to someone who’s clearly not interested and usually reading from a script or check list!

Whilst it’s REALLY important to invest in great design, this is only part of the challenge.  You also need to make sure that a prospective client’s experience of your business is consistent with that polished, professional image.

Marketing & customer service go hand in hand

Why not take a look at the overall experience a prospective client is likely to encounter, when connecting with your business?  Examine every part of the process.  This should include (though not exclusively), things like; how you deal with their initial email enquiry or phone call, how you handle the initial meeting and the follow-up.

How does their experience in these areas match up with your marketing promises of great customer service?  Remembering all the while that GREAT customer service means that you offer significantly better customer service than your competitors! Every business I have ever studied promises great customer service, yet most provide an average service at best.  They seem to do as little as they can ‘get away with’ – when they should be constantly searching for better ways to improve their customer’s experience.

This simple exercise should be expanded to include how well you look after your existing clients too – that’s if you intend keeping them!  Right now, with so many businesses really struggling, your competitors are working harder than ever to persuade your clients / customers to switch to THEM.

When you decide to offer truly great customer service you; add value to your service, generate more referrals, win more new business and just as importantly, retain more of your existing clients / customers too.

Keep it focused

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When you write a marketing message, make sure that it’s focussed 100% on getting the right message to the right person.

Too much marketing is vague; intended to appeal to as wide a group as possible.  However, by being vaguely relevant to everyone, the message is going to be directly relevant to no one!

Motivation and marketing

The word motivation comes from two words; motive and action. If you want to motivate someone to take action, (email you, call you, visit you, buy from you) your message must be motivating.

Never dilute your marketing in order to give it a wider appeal.  Instead, make your marketing as focused and compelling as possible, to the kind of people you want to do business with.

Do this right now

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Question: What happens whenever the economy gets tough?

Answer: People become massively more value focused!

Right now, there are businesses in the same industry, in the same town, selling to the same people; with very different results. Some will be struggling, whilst others will be seeing their market share increase – even in a recession.

We know that people are searching for great value right now, so ‘right now’, could be the perfect time for you to look for new ways to pump more value into your product or service.  No matter what you do or how well you do it, there will be something you can add or refine, which will increase the market value of your offering.

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.