Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

Regularly create content your marketplace will love, with these 3 ideas

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Content Marketing tips

Image: Tony Hand

If you’ve ever wondered, how some people are able to regularly produce effective content marketing; (newsletters, blog posts, articles, podcasts, etc), and how you can do the same, this post is for you.

I’ve divided it into 3 core ideas. So, let’s get started!

1. Is this useful?

There’s a sign on the wall in my studio. It’s a small sign, containing just 3 words: “Is this useful”. That’s the mark I set for everything I create. Nothing gets published unless I believe you’ll find it useful. I don’t try and be clever. Just useful. And as long as I think you’ll find an idea or observation useful, I share it.

Some small business owners are put off creating content, because they try and make everything as close to perfect as possible.

The thing is, your prospective clients or customers want something useful, not perfect.

Once you stop aiming for perfection you’ll find it a lot easier. You’ll also get massively better results.

2. Don’t let crappy ideas block you

If you’re anything like me, you’ll find that most of the ideas you get are pretty average. But maybe 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 are good enough, to be turned into a valuable piece of content marketing.

The challenge is that in order to get that 1 useful idea, you need to allow yourself to have the crappy ones… without getting disheartened.

The way I overcame this, was to deliberately give myself permission to think of lots of crappy ideas, knowing that something useful would come from it.

When you view lower-value ideas as essential steps in the development of better ones, they switch from being disheartening to highly motivating.

3. Give your work the respect it deserves

We often overestimate the ideas of others and underestimate the value of our own. Here’s a great example of what I mean.

A business owner told me how she was taking some files off a computer for archiving, when she discovered an old documents folder. It contained loads of articles, which were really interesting. She looked to see who wrote them and found they were all her own work, from 6 years earlier!

She didn’t publish them at the time, because she thought they weren’t good enough. It was only when she thought they were written by someone else, that she saw them for what they really were. Your work is almost certainly way, way better than you think.

So get it out there.

In short, if you’re looking to improve your content marketing, focus on being useful. See your average ideas as necessary steps to your useful ideas. And give your work the respect you deserve.

How to know what your clients and prospects truly want from you

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marketing uncover wants

Give the marketplace what it wants. It seems easy enough.

  1. Ask them what they want.
  2. Provide them with what they want.

The trickiest part there, by a very long way, is step one. That’s because history assures us that time after time, people don’t tell us what they really want.

They tell us what they think we want to hear. They also tell us what they think makes them look smart. They sometimes tell us what they think makes them look considerate, edgy, unique, creative or kind.

If you really want to know what people think, you need to study what they do. Their actions speak louder and with greater honesty, than their words.

Take that into account, the next time you’re tempted to survey your clients or prospective clients. Heed what people do, far more than what they say.

Every List: Discover my super effective list writing technique

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Marketing, list writing

If you ever find yourself struggling with a business challenge and want to get it resolved, here’s one of the fastest and most effective ways to do it. I use this daily and have taught it to thousands of people.

It’s about making a list… but not just any old list. I’m specifically referring to an every list.

If you’ve never used an every list before, here’s a quick look at what they are and how they work.

How to use an every list

In this example, let’s imagine you want to improve your email marketing open rates. You’d start with a list called something like:

Every way to increase my email open rates.

Then, you would begin writing every possible way to increase your open rates.

When you start, you find the first things on your list come easy.

  • Write subject lines that are more compelling, so people are really curious about what’s inside.
  • Make sure my subject line doesn’t contain trigger words or characters, which are blocked by some junk mail filters.
  • Use fewer images, as these can also trigger junk filters.
  • Identify the best time of day and best day of the week to send my emails, by testing new times / days.
  • Try different gaps between emails – increasing or decreasing how often I send them.
  • Improve the content. If my emails have become less useful or interesting, my readers will be less inclined to open them.
  • Use professional email marketing software, from respected providers. They are experts at getting emails delivered and bypassing the kind of hurdles that block emails. They also use clean IP addresses, which increases delivery rates.

Then it gets trickier, because you’ve listed the most obvious things. However, you still find some more.

  • Put fewer links into my emails as this can be a red flag for some email servers.
  • Use fewer merge tags.
  • Check the meta data in the images I use.
  • Clean my list, so abandoned (hard bounced) email addresses are removed.
  • Make my emails look more like regular email.

Now things get really tough. You’ve already listed the obvious and the less obvious ways to increase open rates. Plus, you now have a number of options to look at, so it can be tempting to start working on those.

This is where an every list makes all the difference

It causes you to dig deeper. Because you know there must be more possibilities. This additional commitment to keep going, even though it can be extremely frustrating, pushes you to the edges. And it’s at the edges where we find the innovative, creative answers.

So, you keep going. And find one more possibility.

  • Look at my open rates over the past 12 months and see if there’s a point, where open rates started to drop. If so, there’s probably a clue right there.

The example used here is based on a marketing professional I’ve mentored, and her experience using the every list technique with one of her clients. In this case, the 2 things that created 75% of her client’s improvement was cleaning the email list… and the very last possibility; examining historic open rates and looking for clues.

Had they stopped after the first 8 or 10 items on their list, they’d have missed the answers they needed. And they wouldn’t have massively increased their open rates.

When we’re faced with a pressing challenge, we need to invest the time and energy required to solve it. And the every list helps us do just that.

Einstein famously said, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” Well, he was “so smart”. He was a genius. Yet his core point is solid. If a man like Einstein is willing to dedicate more time and dig deeper, when solving problems, then surely we should too.

Use an every list and keep looking for ideas even when (especially when), you think you’ve exhausted the possibilities. Because you almost certainly haven’t.

10 Important things to ponder, before the weekend

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marketing ideas

In no particular order.

  1. The pandemic has impacted everyone, to a lesser or greater degree. Factor this in. If someone’s being more unreasonable than you expect, cut them some slack.
  2. A business can only be as successful as the weakest link in its leadership. Many potentially great businesses never achieve the results they should, because one senior team member’s influence is holding them back.
  3. When opportunity isn’t knocking, it’s time to build another door.
  4. To earn better fees, or charge better prices, solve better problems. This is also foundational in retaining more clients (or customers).
  5. To get more word of mouth referrals, give your clients an experience worth shouting about.
  6. Check your assumptions. One of the easiest ways to massively improve your business results, is to make decisions based on the most accurate feedback or data possible.
  7. Take mini vacations, before you feel forced to take them. This could be a 30 minute break or a long weekend, depending on your unique circumstances.
  8. Always leave people better than when you found them.
  9. You can’t eat low quality food and expect to have high quality energy.
  10. Create a new and utterly compelling reason, why someone should buy from you… and not a competitor.

Stay safe.

Marketing 101: Don’t rush the process

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don't rush the process

One of the best pieces of business advice I ever received, is just 4 words long. And today I’m going to share it with you, so you can apply it to your marketing.

It’s simply this: Don’t rush the process.

I know. Without a little context, it doesn’t sound particularly useful. But over the years it’s been essential to the way I work and helped clients of mine worldwide enjoy profoundly better results.

Don’t rush the process (in context)

Business owners and marketing professionals tend to be a pretty motivated bunch. We have to be, right? Not only are we motivated, we also believe in the value of our product or service. When you combine motivation with belief, you create a potent mix. An essential, high energy blend that keeps us moving forward and inspires us to persist even when things are tough.

However.

Sometimes that mix of belief and motivation can work against us.

Really?

Yes, really!

For example, we speak with a prospect and immediately see that our product or service is the perfect match for them. We’re now eager to help them make the right decision.

Here’s the thing: There’s a thin line between encouraging someone to make the right decision, and rushing them to decide. When that line is crossed it radically changes how the prospect feels about us. It can quickly lower their confidence, create uncertainty, cause wariness and make them feel apprehensive.

Based on my experience and observations, this seems most likely to be a problem during the follow-up process. If we don’t get a yes or no answer on the day, we need to be spectacularly mindful regarding how soon and how often we follow-up with an email or call. Because different industries have different accepted time-frames for decision making, there’s no universally perfect timing for following-up. So be sure to consider the size of the decision the prospect is making, (financially or in terms of their reputation, etc.) then follow-up accordingly.

Don’t rush the other processes

Obviously, the ‘don’t rush the process’ advice has much wider marketing utility than I’ve mentioned here. It holds true for everything from; building rapport, copywriting and outreach, to growing a valuable network, developing new products and decision making… and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Important note: Don’t confuse rushing the process with being appropriately proactive.

There are times when we need to be swift. To move quickly. Most opportunities in life and business come with a use-by date. If we take too long, we’re often too late.

The key word here is ‘rush’. The advice is don’t go too fast. Fast is fine. Too fast is rushing.

I hope you find this idea useful. More importantly, I hope you do something with it.

Expanding your marketplace? Consider this

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Marketing, grow your niche

This could be the right time to expand the marketplace you serve.

It really could.

But often when a business owner explains their scenario and asks for my advice, the solution is not to expand. Their marketplace tends to be big enough.

Usually, the answer is for them to make their prospects more interested, engaged and reliant upon the products or services the business provides.

This means pumping more great value into their offering. It means looking at every detail of their product or service, for opportunities to massively improve it. It means building the “wow!” factor into it, so it’s compelling enough to attract attention and create the essential word of mouth publicity they need.

If you’ve been through this process already, and seen a significant increase in your market share. Then it’s time to either look for additional value you can add, or expand your market.

However, if you haven’t yet given your products or services a radical review and implemented the improvements, consider doing that first.