Marketing tips Marketing help

These 4 business owners grabbed the attention of their marketplace. You can too

August 11, 2018 by Jim Connolly

It’s not hard to make your business stand out and attract lots of great clients. In fact, it’s easy.

Here are 4 examples, from business owners who are getting it right.

The accountant, who set up a network just for her clients. So they can connect with one another, help one another and buy from one another.
The dentist, who provides sessions for people who have an irrational fear of dentists.
The coffee shop owner, who offers customers poetry evenings and creative writing events.
The gardener, who not only keeps your garden looking great, but also provides all the garden consumables you need and delivers them to you.

The challenge isn’t that it’s hard to stand out. You simply need to Choose An Edge.

The challenge is that it’s easier not to.

Going premium

August 7, 2018 by Jim Connolly

If your clients paid you significantly more:

You could give them considerably more of your time and attention.
You could provide them with a far, far better level of service.
Your clients would value you more. So, they’d keep returning, delighted with the service they receive from you.
Your clients would also recommend you to their friends, many of whom would then become clients.
And these new clients would be just as delighted. And recommend you to their friends.
Repeat.

Before you know it, you could have a premium quality client base, growing organically.

So maybe it’s time you considered offering a premium version of your services? Your marketplace already has a highly profitable subset, who value quality and will very happily pay more for it. In fact, they eagerly seek it out.

But that’s not all

The premium quality corner of your marketplace is not only the most profitable. It’s also, by far, the least competitive. It’s the middle ground, which is always overcrowded.

Now imagine for a moment how your business would thrive, with higher fees, higher profits, happier clients and less competition.

Average is overrated.

I feel like I already know you

August 1, 2018 by Jim Connolly

I’d like to share a short, easy to understand, yet extremely valuable idea with you today. It’s all about attracting high quality leads on a very regular basis.

I was prompted to write this, after some emails I received this morning. As usual, a number of them contained a version of the following statement: I feel like I already know you. These emails were from people I’ve never met. In each case, they were referring to knowing me via the ideas I share, either on my blog or the email version of the blog.

Why am I telling you this?

What this means for you and your business

Now imagine that instead of me receiving those highly targeted, premium quality leads, it was YOU.

You received them. With more tomorrow, the next day and the next. More leads than you need. And all from people who feel like they know you. People who know your work. People whose attention you have. People who already trust you. (Think about that for a moment).

This opportunity is open to you. Wide open. It requires a couple of things.

You’ll need to generously, regularly share valuable information. Information so useful, that people will eagerly want to receive it and share it.
You’ll need to accept that no matter how great your information is, very few people will take notice at the beginning. Which is fine. Because all you need are your first 10 people. They’ll share your stuff with 10 like-minded friends. Now you’re at 100, which becomes 1000 or 10000 or 100000. If you stick with it.

That second part is where most people fail.

They invest time and effort for weeks, sometimes months, and see little audience growth. They get demotivated. Then quit. Largely because they have been given incorrect expectations of how growing an audience actually works. Despite what many content marketing gurus say, building a valuable audience takes time. It requires patience and commitment.

Focus on the 10

The key is to focus ONLY on earning the attention and trust of those first 10 people. Turn up regularly and give them your best ideas (not sales pitches or advertisements). As long as the information you share is useful enough and you turn up regularly enough, your audience will grow. And the growth accelerates as more people subscribe. When I started my blog, it took me an age to get my first 100 readers. Today, I can get that many in 24 hours. So, stick with it.

I hope you found this information useful. But more importantly, I hope it inspires you to build an extremely valuable community.

How to totally avoid fee sensitive clients. Yes, it works in your industry too

July 30, 2018 by Jim Connolly

You don’t need to sell your services or products based on price. You don’t need to waste your time on fee-sensitive clients or customers, either. In today’s brief post, I explain why.

Sort by price

One of the most common features on shopping sites, is the “sort by price” filter. It lets us see products in the category we’ve searched for, listed in price order.

The reason sort by price exists, is that the marketplace demands it. When presented with 5 or 50 options for a commodity product, the lowest price wins. This is known as the race to the bottom. Bottled water is bottled water. It makes no sense to pay more for it than you need to.

But what about Bob?

Bob is passionate about helping people worldwide have access to clean drinking water. He then finds a water brand, which donates money from every bottle sold, to build wells in areas where there’s no clean water. So, Bob’s happy (very happy) to pay more for his bottled water from this well-building brand. Plus, because people like Bob know lots of other people like Bob, he tells his friends. They do the same. Water gets sold. Wells get built. And people get to make a meaningful difference to the lives of those who need it.

The lesson here? If you want potential clients or customers to stop focusing on your fees, give them something more important to focus on. This means differentiating your products or services from the competition.

The good news? If it works for a commodity like water, it can definitely work for you. Regardless of your industry.

Agile Thinking: A new mindset for a new landscape

July 26, 2018 by Jim Connolly

Business is changing. Moreover, business is changing fast. This is great news for agile thinking business owners, who embrace the opportunities. However, it’s not such great news for business owners who are working in 2018’s rapidly changing environment, with an outdated approach to business.

Today, I’m going to share some ideas on how you can benefit from the exciting opportunities that are all around you.

First, I’d like to demonstrate how things have improved and why we need to apply a new mindset, to the new landscape.

A new mindset for a new landscape

Many of the world’s most influential businesses were unknown 20 years ago. Some, such as Facebook and Twitter, weren’t founded until the mid 2000’s.

That kind of global growth was previously unthinkable.

What’s more, billion dollar companies that lead their industries have been started by relative unknowns, in very untraditional ways.

Here’s a great example. Writing in Techcrunch, Tom Goodwin summed up the new age of agile business:

“Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.”

Tom is right. Something interesting is happening. None of those achievements or business models were possible until very recently. The game has changed. And it has changed for ever.

The age of agile business

When I look at small businesses, they tend to fall into one of the following 2 broad categories: They are either dinosaurs or agile operators. That’s to say their approach to the agile business landscape means they are facing extinction or facing unparalleled success.

Armed with a laptop and an idea, there’s very little an agile business cannot achieve.

The new business landscape allows an agile small business owner to have an idea in the morning, and put that idea into play before the end of business that same day.
Using social networks, we can listen to what our marketplace wants and provide that want. No more guess work. No more focus-groups. You can get it right every time. And in a fraction of the time.
Instant access to data, means research that took weeks or months can now be done in days. And at a fraction of the price.
With a great marketing email and some email software, a struggling business can generate a fortune in sales… and fast!
With the correct strategy, anyone can develop their own community. I reach thousands of people every day, many of whom are prospective clients, without spending a penny on advertising. You can too.
If you have a great business idea, you no longer need a bank loan. Today, you can use crowdfunding to get the investment you need. People are doing this all day, every day.

Make no mistake, this is the golden age of business, which people have dreamed about for decades.

Yet, in spite of all this potential, almost all small business owners operate their businesses with a 2000’s mindset. They lack agility. This places them at a huge disadvantage.

For example:

They still take just as long to make a decision, even though they can get the feedback they need in a fraction of the time. As a result, their agile competitors have already eaten their lunch.
They use social networks to follow the crowd, rather than lead their marketplace.
They have a website that’s almost an online brochure, when it should be and could be, a lead-generating machine for their business. If you didn’t start work today with leads from your website waiting for you, you should have. Fix it. You’re leaving money on the table.
They waste money advertising, when they should be building their own platform.
They waste time, money and energy attending networking groups, like people did in the 1970’s, rather than build their own community.

No matter what industry you are in. No matter where you are. Your potential right now is limited only by your willingness, or otherwise, to embrace the mindset required for business success in 2018.

What an opportunity. Grasp it with both hands.