Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

Get your prospects’ urgent attention and immediate action

By

marketing hot prospects

What keeps your prospective clients awake at night?

There are 2 broad answers to that question.

  1. The things they’re worried about. Their fears, apprehensions, anxieties or concerns.
  2. The things they’re excited about. Their goals, dreams and the opportunities ahead of them.

Here’s why those answers are critically important to your business.

Urgent attention and immediate action

Anything that keeps your prospective clients awake at night, is an extremely high priority to them. They’re looking to take action immediately. It’s where their urgent attention is.

In order to help them, and for you to benefit from helping them, your task is twofold.

  1. You need to determine exactly what they’re worried about or excited about.
  2. You need to clearly demonstrate how your services or products will help them in that key area.

Most marketing doesn’t do this. Instead, it focuses on how great the provider is. How happy they are to help. How their clients or customers love them. And it’s spectacularly less effective than addressing the issue, which is both urgent and of high priority to your prospects.

Improve your strategy

If you want to attract vastly more red hot prospects, you should strongly consider using a better strategy. Like the kind I develop for my clients. Their marketing speaks directly to the most urgent wants and needs of their prospect.

It addresses that thing, which is keeping their prospect awake at night. Only after that, does it position my client as the answer.

  • Get this right and it attracts enquiries from super-motivated people, eager to take action!
  • Get it wrong and you’ll attract far fewer enquiries. And these will be from lukewarm people, who are in no hurry and who often lose interest. In other words, extremely low quality leads.

Take a look at the various marketing assets you use. Do they focus primarily and directly on the things that have your prospective clients’ urgent attention?

If not, you’re needlessly leaving money on the table. And you’re missing out on an amazing opportunity to attract the most motivated prospects. That’s the prospective clients currently kept awake at night, who are urgently looking for a service just like yours, right now, but they’ll go elsewhere, because you’re not speaking directly to their need!

It costs $26,000 a gallon and it’s less useful than water!

By

marketing stories, storytelling

Depending on where you buy it, there’s a popular liquid that costs around $26,000 a gallon. Unlike water, this liquid isn’t life-preserving. That’s to say you can’t drink it. It isn’t life-giving either, so you can’t water crops with it.

In fact it does just one thing… and LITERALLY NO ONE needs it!

Despite this, it sells very successfully for tens of thousands of dollars a gallon. Have you guessed what it is yet? The liquid I’m referring to here is Chanel No.5 perfume. So, why does a pleasant smelling liquid sell for such a huge price?

People buy stories

Chanel has successfully built a story around their perfume. It’s a story about style, opulence, beauty and sensuality. It’s nothing whatsoever to do with fragrant smelling liquid. It’s all about the feelings associated with the Chanel No. 5 story.

How the story works for Chanel’s marketing.

  • When we buy Chanel No. 5 for someone, they know they’re receiving an expensive, classy gift. They then connect us with the feelings they associate with the Chanel No. 5 brand. Beautiful people. Stylish locations. Wealth.
  • When we buy Chanel No. 5 for ourselves, the story we’re telling ourselves is that we’re now connected to the aspirational lifestyle embodied by the Chanel No. 5 brand. Beautiful people. Stylish locations. Wealth.

People buy the Chanel No.5 story. They have no need for the actual liquid. But the story behind the brand makes them want it.

The story behind your brand

If you’re like the vast majority of small business owners, you won’t have a compelling story to motivate people to want to hire you specifically or buy from you specifically.

So, ask yourself: Why should someone buy from you? Then get to work on building your story.

Because make no mistake, your ability to answer that question with a compelling story, could be the difference between you making a living… and making an absolute fortune.

Almost everyone will ignore you

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Marketing to everyone

Almost everyone will ignore you.

And that’s perfectly fine.

Because some people will love you.

The message in those 3 sentences is worth remembering. For example, when you’re creating a new product, or putting a marketing strategy together.

Here’s the thing

You can’t appeal to everyone.

You don’t need to appeal to everyone.

Think about it, if everyone wanted to hire you or buy from you, you couldn’t cope!

So focus your marketing, and wider business development, on some people.

Some people?

  • The kind of people who ‘get’ the way you work.
  • The kind of people who value your vision.
  • The kind of people who will love working with you or buying from you.
  • The kind of people who make the very best clients or customers.

In a nutshell, ignore everyone with your marketing and focus very specifically on some people.

It’s the fastest, least expensive and most straightforward way to dramatically improve your marketing results. And build a world-class client base.

How to access proven marketing ideas

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Engaged observation, marketing ideas, sales ideas

Today, I’m going to show you how to access an ongoing stream of great marketing ideas. Plus, these are all ideas that you’ve already seen working before you even use them! I call it engaged observation and it can massively improve your sales results.

Here’s a very quick example of how engaged observation works. It can be applied to ANY and EVERY element of marketing. However, here I’ll show how you could apply it to improve the results you get from your social media marketing content.

Engaged observation example

The next time you’re scrolling through Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc., and stop to read one of the posts, as an engaged observer you would look for what it was that motivated you to stop and take notice of that post.

  • Perhaps it was the image used.
  • Maybe it was the relationship you have with the person or brand posting it.
  • It could have been the headline.
  • Alternatively, the topic of the post is what worked.
  • Or something totally different.

Whatever it was, you personally witnessed its effectiveness when you were motivated to stop and give it your attention.

Once you’ve identified what worked (let’s assume it was the type of image used), you now have an opportunity to adapt it (use a similar, effective image), test it in your own marketing and measure your results.

The approach can be used pretty-much everywhere you have taken action. For example.

  • What motivated you to believe the product reviews on a certain website?
  • What motivated you to spend more than you had budgeted, when you bought something?
  • What motivated you to trust the people you do business with?
  • What motivated you to click on a call to action?
  • What motivated you to give free word-of-mouth publicity to a service provider or brand?
  • What motivated you to subscribe to the newsletters you receive?
  • What motivated you to allow a website to store cookies on your device, when you usually reject cookies?
  • What motivated you to take part in a survey?

Behind each of those actions is a motivating factor. Something that inspired you to take action. Something that could inspire your prospects to take action. Something you can identify, adapt, test in your own marketing and measure the results.

What I’ve done today, is show you a tiny number of examples, to open your mind to the huge number of marketing improvement opportunities open to you, using engaged observation.

I hope you find it useful. Because if you use it correctly, it can profoundly improve your sales results.

You control all the important stuff

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take control, business thriving

You control absolutely everything that matters, to the success of your business.

  • Your decisiveness.
  • Your initiative.
  • Your productivity.
  • Your focus.
  • Your commercial agility.
  • Your courage.
  • Your leadership.
  • Your enthusiasm.
  • Your dedication.
  • Your creativity.
  • Your eagerness.
  • Your work flow.
  • Your targets.
  • Your decision making.
  • Your persistence.
  • Your generosity.
  • Your investments.
  • Your responses.
  • Your delegation.
  • Your trust.
  • Your marketing.

Thriving small business owners

The business owners thriving today are the ones focused on what they can control.

They’re making great decisions. They’re using their initiative. They’re doing all the work required. They’re focused on what they want to achieve. They’re agile enough to adapt to the new challenges. They’re brave enough to do what’s right, rather than what’s easy. They’re leading their team, their customers and their industries. They’re spreading their enthusiasm, making others feel confident in them. They’re 100% dedicated to the success of their business. They’re creating new opportunities and new ideas. They’re eager and motivated. They’re working smart. They’re setting exciting targets. They’re making important decisions. They’re persistently doing the right things correctly. They’re generously helping their clients and their marketplace, with encouragement and solutions. They’re investing in what their business needs. They’re responding thoughtfully. They’re delegating their resources effectively. They’re trusting the right people. They’re marketing their business professionally.

Under performing business owners

Are not.

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.

.

.

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Service providers. Please stop making this mistake

By

marketing stop

This is borderline crazy. It’s totally unsustainable. And it applies to all service providers, not just the 3 examples I mention here.

There are training providers, coaches and consultants out there. Right now. Today. Selling training, coaching and consulting. And they’re wondering why no one is interested.

Seriously.

The economy is horrible, budgets have been slashed. But for some reason, these trainers, coaches and consultants are trying to sell their services.

That makes no sense at all from a marketing perspective. It’s literally the wrong way round.

Why?

Because no prospect on the planet gives a crap about the service the provider offers.

Prospects care exclusively about their own urgent need. So, prospects are looking for the end result. Prospects pay for the end result. Prospects hire those who offer the end result.

Telling a prospect who’s urgently looking for that end result, all about how amazing your service is, or that it delivers, is tone deaf. It loses you prospective client enquiries. It’s not like the prospect thinks the provider is going to say their service is terrible and fails to deliver.

Look at the marketing of any small business in the service industry. Especially their websites. The vast majority use their homepage, their primary opportunity to grab the attention of the prospect, to… tell prospects how great they are, list some high profile clients and testimonials.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

By this point, they’ve already lost the prospect’s attention, and their enquiry, to a professionally marketed competitor.

Any service provider making this mistake needs to fix it.

Then look at everything else. Because if they’re making that kind of elementary, fundamental marketing error, it’s certain they are making lots more expensive mistakes, too

Your top 2 marketing goals for 2023

By

increase value, client retention, attrition

There are two essential marketing goals for you to focus on in 2023, which I’d like to share with you.

First, some context.

In recent months, we’ve seen the start of a massive change. Consumer spending is falling and company budgets are in equally sharp decline. This is forecast to get worse in 2023 as we enter a global recession. And it has already started to change the way your prospects purchase things. They’re having to take drastic action and cut back on expenditure.

  • They’re looking for cost savings on essential purchases.
  • They’re eliminating or reducing non-essential purchasing.

Here are those two essential areas I’d like you to be aware of, along with some ideas on how to put them to work.

1. Increase your value and let your prospects know

You need to greatly increase the value of whatever you provide. Then, powerfully market that greatly increased value to your prospects. Your prospects are thinking really hard about purchases, making value for money an essential if you want their hard earned cash or company budget. I give some tips here on ways to create value.

A common way to greatly increase your value, is to greatly reduce your fees or prices. Lowering fees is a bad idea in any economy. However, when your own overhead is increasing, lowering your fees makes no sense at all. It’s also totally unsustainable, given the long-term economic forecast.

Of course, once you’ve created a way to radically increase the value of your products or services, you need to let people know. This means attracting their attention. Then clearly explaining the compelling benefits you offer, in a way that motivates them to buy from you or hire you. If your service is faster, explain why that extra speed is so valuable to them. If the quality of your product is demonstrably better, explain why that superior quality represents amazing value for them.

Don’t just greatly increase how valuable your service is and expect prospects to ‘get it’. It’s critical that you tell them, in a way that moves them to take action and make the purchase.

2. Work harder than ever on client retention

You need to make retaining your existing clients, a top-level business activity. Their income or budget is being severely squeezed. This means they’re vastly more likely to shop around. This includes clients who until now, have been loyal for years.

To compound things, your clients will be increasingly targeted by your competitors with attractive reasons to switch. Your competitors are experiencing similar challenges to you. Expect them to respond with increased marketing activity and hunger.

In part, you will already improve your client retention by implementing the previous suggestion.

But you’ll need all the commercial firepower you can muster. So, I’m recommending you do what the leaders in client retention do.

It’s simply this: Maintain useful, regular contact with your clients. Clients are used to being contacted when it’s renewal time or when they’re involved with you in a transaction or on a project. The type of regular contact I’m referring to, goes beyond that. And it’s spectacularly effective.

How do you maintain useful, regular contact?

Some common examples include sharing useful resources with them, maybe an app, productivity tool, or useful piece of information [like this]. Also, if you have a contact that could be a great fit for them, connect them. And if you learn of an event that could be helpful to them, let them know. You get the idea.

It’s about being mindful of your clients as you go through your working day, and collecting any resources worth sharing with one or more of them. No, don’t pester them every few days. In my experience, a few times a month is a great place to start. It keeps you front of mind. It’s a great way to become a semi-regular part of your client’s business. The closer the connection between client and provider, the more value you can be to your clients and the harder it is for a competitor to get them to switch.

Thriving in tough times

As we’ve seen over the past 36-months, there have been some huge changes to what we consider business as usual. Each time things took a turn for the worse, some business owners went broke, others struggled but survived, and others thrived. As you’ll know, there were small businesses in each of those three groups in just about every town and city. This often included businesses in the same industry, targeting the same prospects, facing the same restrictions and challenges, yet with very different results.

Certainly, some went into those struggles with significant resources behind them. But that was not so for the average small business owner who thrived. What allowed them to thrive was that they adapted their business to the new ‘normal’. They didn’t hunker down. They didn’t just carry on as if nothing was happening around them. They remained agile and benefited from opportunities that their competitors were not even looking for.

You should consider doing as they did, my friend.

Liars, surveys and Steve Jobs

By

steve jobs

Image credit: Shutterstock.

Steve Jobs understood something about marketing. And it gave him a huge competitive advantage. Today, I’m going to share that advantage with you.

It’s really simple to understand. It’s easy to deploy. It can save you an absolute fortune and also dramatically improve your results.

It starts with this age-old business fact: There’s often a very big difference between what people say and what they actually do.

Talk is not cheap

I spoke with a business owner once, who had recently surveyed his newsletter readers. He wanted to know if they’d be willing to pay for a premium version of his most popular service. He accurately described the service, including the fee.

In total, 78 people took time to respond, with 73 saying they would “happily pay for the service when it became available”.

With 73 people happy to pay for his new service, he built it, and launched it. However, despite what they said, just 8 of them actually signed up. He estimates that he lost almost $40000 in the process.

Steve Jobs understood this better than any of his competitors

Sure, it’s important for us to listen to what our marketplace is saying. But when we listen, we need to do so through a filter. We need to understand that in many cases, people will tell us:

  • Things they think we want to hear.
  • Things they think will make them look good.

This is why Steve Jobs shunned focus groups. He learned that people in focus groups tended to say smart, generous things in order to look good. He found their feedback to be not only of little real value, but potentially misleading. That’s a dangerous mix.

Whilst we need to listen to what people say. We tend to make massively better decisions when we watch what people do.

Early birds

This is why entrepreneurial business owners sometimes offer an early bird discount when they launch something new. For a short period of time, they offer the new (whatever) at a slightly reduced rate. They do this, primarily to measure what kind of genuine interest there is.

Here’s why.

  • If the marketplace is eagerly buying, the business owner knows there’s a significant demand. At least, at the early bird price.
  • However, if the marketplace isn’t interested, even at the reduced price, then something is wrong.
  • Maybe the marketing needs to improve. Perhaps the product / service itself needs more value pumped into it. And it’s possible that both areas need to significantly improve before the actual launch.

That kind of real-world feedback provides data you can make decisions on, with far greater confidence than data from a survey.

Polling people with a survey can be useful. However, in business we know that actions speak louder than words. After all, great ideas are not anointed.

What your clients need from you

By

marketing wants needs

Today, I’m going to explain how the world’s best service providers keep their clients happy, generate valuable referrals and build a great reputation.

It’s all about the difference between delivering what a client wants and delivering what a client needs.

Wants and needs

Think about some of the most powerful commercial logos. Apple, McDonald’s, Nike, Adidas and Target, etc. All of these designs look simplistic. A child could reproduce any of them in a few seconds.

Now, imagine for a moment what happens when a business owner hires a great designer to create their logo. The designer then gets back to the client with a powerful, extremely effective, yet simple design. Like one of the world-class examples I just mentioned.

Because the client is not a design professional, they want MORE for their money. So, they demand changes.

  • More detail.
  • More lines.
  • More complexity.

If the designer gives the client what the client wants, the client ends up with a confusing piece of junk.

If the designer gives the client what the client needs, the client ends up with an effective, professionally designed logo.

How to get this right

The best service providers use education, to help the client understand what the client needs.

When the service provider does this correctly:

  • The client ends up with what they want and what they need.
  • The service provider ends up with a happy client, who has a great piece of work. That’s the kind of client who provides valuable referrals and the kind of work, which helps you build an excellent reputation.

Your clients deserve your very best work. And so do you.

Maximum or minimum can make you a fortune in 2023

By

Business 2023

There are 2 business models, which have proven time and again to be extremely successful.

In today’s post, I’ll show you how both of them work, PLUS how to keep your current business model and open up a whole new marketplace!

The 2 models I’m referring to are:

  1. Focusing on the maximum you can deliver.
  2. Focusing on the minimum you can deliver.

Let’s start by looking at those 2 models.

The maximum model

The business owner who takes the first option, will focus on providing excellence. They’ll place a premium on exceptional customer service. They’ll set the highest possible standards and achieve them. They’ll need to unceasingly focus on delighting their customers at every opportunity.

There is a marketplace who are desperate to be treated this way. And they eagerly, willingly pay a premium. It’s an exceptionally profitable marketplace, too.

The minimum model

The business owner who takes the second option, will focus on cost efficiencies. They’ll consistently search for ways to lower their overhead. They’ll embrace automation and AI. They’ll know exactly what the minimum required is and then deliver on it.

There is a huge marketplace willing to pay for a stripped back product or service. We see them everywhere; no-frills airlines, feature phones, low price stores, etc.

The minimum model works. Really, really well.

Just don’t land somewhere in the middle

The problem comes if you fail to choose, and end up somewhere in the space between those 2 successful business models.

For example.

  • Better than the minimum quality, but not premium either.
  • Less expensive than the premium brands, but not inexpensive enough for the price-sensitive buyers.
  • Products or services that are absolutely fine, but not remarkable enough for people to tell their friends.

By failing to choose the maximum or minimum model, you land in the anonymous middle ground; where there’s very little interest and where it’s really, really hard to get noticed.

Middle ground businesses are why networking groups exist. They have to push for referrals, because their message doesn’t spread wide enough or often enough by itself. They’re stuck in a frustrating, unending and very expensive fight for attention.

Your highly lucrative, new income stream

Here’s something worth considering for 2023. Something that can help your business thrive, whilst still retaining your existing model.

What is it?

Develop an additional, new brand; dedicated exclusively to either the maximum or the minimum edge of your marketplace.

Think about that for a moment.

This gives you the safety net of your existing model. Plus, it provides you with all the amazing opportunities that come from serving one of those highly lucrative edges. It opens up a lot of potential, yet with relatively low risk.

Yes, it takes planning. But I’ve worked on this with many clients over the years, and the results can be spectacular. It will allow you to open up a whole new legion of prospective customers or clients. I’ve seen what’s possible and it’s definitely worth considering, as part of your 2023 business development plans.