Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

1 Word that can destroy your marketing, plus 12 better alternatives

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Marketing words, power words

Photo: Shutterstock.

When it comes to creating successful marketing, the word ‘new’ is overrated. Moreover, it can critically damage the effectiveness of your marketing, losing you sales or client enquiries in the process.

There are 2 main reasons this happens.

  1. A new product or service is always seen as a risky bet. Untested. Less robust. At best, it’s a bigger gamble than the existing solution. At worst, the customer feels like a paying guinea pig. Ouch!
  2. A new product or service is seldom, if ever, the best. It lacks the improvements that come from years of customer feedback.

Yes, when you have an announcement to make, (like moving to new premises), people expect to see ‘new’ and they understand the context.

The challenge comes, when a key part of your marketing message is that you offer a new way to do something. Even some big brands struggle to sell ‘new’ to people, despite multi-million dollar marketing campaigns.

Thankfully, you can totally avoid this problem.

Use better alternatives

Instead of relying on ‘new’, offer your marketplace something more compelling. More secure. More attractive. More motivating.

For example, rather than offering them a ‘new’ way, look at the core benefit of your product or service. Then, market that benefit to them instead.

So, instead of a ‘new’ way, you could offer them one or more of the following 12 alternatives.

  1. A faster way.
  2. A secure way.
  3. An enjoyable way.
  4. A greener way.
  5. A stylish way.
  6. A stress-free way.
  7. An original way.
  8. A premium quality way.
  9. A proven way.
  10. An ethical way.
  11. A guaranteed way.
  12. A cost effective way.

So, use words that paint better mental pictures. Pictures that build trust and inspire people to take action.

For almost 25 years, I’ve helped business owners worldwide to achieve their best results ever. Today, I’m offering you the same opportunity, on my Marketing Mentor Program. Read this. It’s the most popular and the most valuable service I’ve ever offered.

7 Things that will grab the attention of your marketplace (and how to use them)

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markeing, get noticed

Photo: Shutterstock.

I’ve talked a lot lately, about the importance of being useful with your marketing. A number of you have asked me, if I can give you some specific topics you can use, which your prospective clients (or customers) will be attracted to.

And that’s exactly what I’ve done for you today.

So, for Ashley, Hasan, Thomas, Noah, JJ, Padraig, Ben, Melissa, Calvin and Georgia (and you, dear reader), here are some almost-universally useful topics. Each one represents something, which your clients and future clients are attracted to or extremely attracted to.

Start off by thinking about the services you provide or your product range. Then, consider the following topics and how you can incorporate them into your content marketing or general marketing messages. Each topic ends with a question, to help you focus on how it applies to your business.

  1. People have an inbuilt need to feel connected: What are you doing, to connect them with useful contacts? The Wall Street Journal wrote about how I achieved this, for one of my clients – 4 Marketing Strategies That Paid Off For Small Companies
  2. Everyone is trying to succeed at something: What are you doing, to help people achieve their targets, goals or dreams?
  3. We all need security: What are you doing, to help people reduce risk or feel secure and safe?
  4. We also share a common need for a sense of belonging: What are you doing, to create a community?
  5. Everyone wants to avoid wasting time: What are you doing, to help people maximize their time, or help them complete certain tasks, faster?
  6. People want to improve and expand their knowledge: What are you doing, to share useful information with them. This is the cornerstone of successful content marketing.
  7. Everyone wants to avoid unnecessary stress: What are you doing, to help people feel more relaxed and assured?

Are any of those topics missing from your marketing messages or content marketing? If they are, look for ways to incorporate them. Whatever industry you’re in, you should be able to benefit from all 7 topics. And if your business doesn’t do anything to address one or more of these needs, look for a way to add it to your services.

3 Ideas to help you create content, which your marketplace will love

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content marketing

Photo: Shutterstock.

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.

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 in 2020; focus on being useful, see your average ideas as necessary steps to your useful ideas, and give your work the respect you deserve.

Lead magnets: Do they work and should you use them?

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lead magnets, marketing leads

Photo: Shutterstock.

Business owners often ask me “do lead magnets work?“, as a way to grow their newsletter lists. If you’re considering using them, or you’re wondering why they’re not working for you, you should find the following useful.

Let’s go.

Lead magnets?

For those who don’t already know, the term lead magnets was made popular by internet marketing gurus / social media gurus (and pretty much every get-rich-quick guru). However, the concept has been around for decades.

It refers to a freebie, which is used to entice people to give you their contact details. The most common freebies include ‘special reports’, white papers, ‘exclusive’ audio / video content or some kind of information that’s only available via email. In return for the freebie, people are asked to provide their contact details.

Because of the extreme negativity attached to lead magnets, many internet marketing gurus refer to them as ethical bribes. I’m not sure why they think a bribe sounds better!

Building your list

Probably the most common use of lead magnets, is list building for newsletters. On the surface, they seem like a no-brainer. You certainly can attract lots of contact details with them.

However, there’s a major downside.

Lead magnets are notorious for attracting the lowest possible quality contact details. That’s because the use of free stuff as bait, is most attractive to so-called freebie hunters; who are attracted to freebies like moths to a flame.

Why does this result in such amazingly low quality?

Many / most freebie hunters use dedicated email addresses, just for getting their free offers. They check the email address only when they’re waiting for the freebie to arrive. As such, lists built from lead magnets can be really poor quality. Yes, you’ll probably attract some genuine contacts, too. But the overall quality will be massively lower than a normal list.

That said, there are some instances where lead magnets are worth considering.

Really?

Yes. Really.

Lead magnets can work

One example where lead magnets can work, is if you’re building a newsletter readership, where your business model is advertising. Offering a freebie, to people who pay you with their attention, and never need to pay you financially, can be a pretty good fit. So, if you’re offering a newsletter, and your advertisers pay based on the size of your list or reach (which they shouldn’t, but that’s another post), lead magnets will work.

I’ve also seen lead magnets used successfully for the sale of low-cost, downloadable content.

Interestingly, this is exactly what internet marketing gurus sold for years. Before they all switched to selling online training courses, they used to offer ‘information products’. Remember them? Those ebooks that claimed to blow the lid off your potential, or show you how to make a fortune while you sleep… and all for just $29.99.

Sigh.

Where lead magnets work least well

Without doubt, the area where lead magnets work least well, is with service providers; lawyers, accountants, coaches, consultants, mentors and designers, etc., etc.

I regularly hear from service providers, who have built lists using lead magnets and seen terrible results. In fact, I was prompted to write about this after an email I received from a reader in Sydney, Australia. She’s a copywriter and has built a list of over 45,000 lead magnet contacts, which she’d mailed for 12-months. It didn’t generate one paying client. She showed me some of the emails she’d sent, and as you’d expect from a professional writer, they were superb. But the list itself just wasn’t worth mailing.

There are a couple of key reasons why lead magnets are so ineffective for service providers:

  1. The level of trust and commitment required to download a freebie, is close to zero. The trust and commitment required to buy a low-cost information product is moderate. BUT the trust and commitment required to hire the services of an expert is absolutely HUGE.
  2. The service provider needs to somehow reposition themselves as a professional, who offers a high quality service. This, after showing they were fine offering ethical bribes / freebies, in an effort to get clients. At best, it looks needy. At worst it looks shoddy. Either way, that’s a heck of a barrier to overcome!

Conclusion

Before you think about using lead magnets, consider why you need them. Unless you sell advertising based on list size, it’s a pretty poor strategy.

The most valuable lists, by far, are those that grow organically. Organic lists grow because people are genuinely interested in knowing more about what you do. These interested people are of enormous value to your business, as an excellent source of prospective clients.

Exposed: Why email marketing doesn’t work

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marketing tips, email marketing

Photo: Shutterstock.

A reader shared an interesting observation with me.

She told me she had “found out the hard way that email marketing doesn’t work”.

She asked me for my thoughts on why email was so ineffective. I said I’d share them here, as I’m sure some of you will find it useful.

Email marketing works

In fact, it works extremely well. It works predictably, too. Just ask any business owner who’s using it correctly. What doesn’t work is ineffective email marketing. That’s because ineffective email marketing can’t work.

Here are just a few, very common examples of how small business owners get email marketing wrong.

  • A poorly written email won’t work. It will fail to motivate the reader to take action; to call you, email you, visit your website, whatever. And almost all small business marketing emails are DIY attempts.
  • A professionally written email, sent to the wrong people, won’t work. It will fail to reach those with a demand for your services.
  • A well written email, sent to the right people, with a dull subject line, won’t work. That’s because no one will open it.
  • A well written email, sent to the right people, with a compelling subject line, offering a generic service, won’t work. No one wants to switch to a service that’s no better then their current service.

You get the idea.

In short, before you reject any form of marketing as being ineffective, make sure you’re using it correctly. This is something to keep in mind, as you look to grow your business in 2020 and beyond.

Sorry to disturb you

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Marketing pester, don't bother

Photo: Shutterstock.

I received an email this morning, which contained an extremely valuable marketing lesson.

It started with the following 4 words: “Sorry to disturb you”.

There’s a lot of information packed into those 4 words. Enough for everyone who received the email, to form an opinion on the sender.

  • The sender knew what they were doing was wrong, which is why they opened with an apology.
  • The sender also knew that their email was a disturbance. An unrequested interruption from someone I’ve never heard of.
  • Knowing all this, they still decided to send it anyway.

Here’s the thing

Like everyone else who received that email, I stopped reading after the opening sentence. After all, a stranger just emailed us, saying they were sorry for spamming us. It’s an instant delete.

However, that email may have contained a great message. It might have offered an outstanding deal. It could have provided details of a wonderful opportunity. But their email let them down, so no one will know. The list they used. The copy they used and the tone of their opening line destroyed their email campaign.

Oblivious to this, the sender will be wondering why they received no positive response. Especially if they genuinely had something valuable to share. They’ll perhaps be pondering whether they need to lower their prices, or if email marketing is a waste of time, or if their great offer isn’t actually great.

If we consider this to be merely an example of ineffective email marketing, we totally miss the point!

It’s way, way bigger than that.

This example provides us with a powerful insight of how easy it is, for a business owner to offer an amazing product or service, only for ineffective marketing to let them down. It’s the difference between being inundated with enquiries from eager prospective customers, or being greeted by crickets.