Last week, whilst I was cleaning the ice from my car, I burned 3 of my fingers and my thumb on the ice!  I was in pain for several days and will make sure I don’t repeat the same mistake again.  Most people, don’t associate scraping ice of their car with getting burnt.  After all, ice is cold.  Cold is the opposite of hot, and hot is what burns you.  Well, as I discovered, extreme cold burns you too!

Just like the law of gravity, which works regardless of whether you know about it or not, ice can burn you, even if you were previously unaware.  This is because ignorance of a process does not stop the result from occurring.

The people you see filling their social media accounts with sales pitches, are unaware that they are actually damaging their reputation by pushing their marketing on you and failing to connect.  The same with cold-callers and those who send you DM spam on Twitter, etc.  In fact, no one in business sets out to hurt their reputation or alienate potential clients or customers.

These ineffective marketing techniques are like my burnt fingers; they are the result of ignorance!

Why not take some time out to think about the impact of what YOU are doing, on the network of people who are exposed to your marketing.  For example, how do you currently reach people?  Do you have permission to contact them?  If you do have permission, do you contact them too frequently?  Do your marketing messages offer advice and answers, or does the reader feel like they are “just” being sold to (or sold at)?  Can they easily see the value of your services?

Taking an outside look at our own marketing activities can be extremely illuminating.  We know the intent behind our actions is good, but by taking an objective look at our actions, can we see how they may be perceived by the marketplace – BEFORE they hurt our results.

Today, I’m going to share some ideas with you, to help you massively increase the power and impact of your marketing!

Tim Ferriss, author of the best selling book, The 4-hour Workweek, recently said in an interview with Copyblogger’s Brian Clark, that some people following his book’s ideas will still have to work 40 hours a week.  However, if they had previously been working 80 hours a week, that’s a huge improvement, right?  The book isn’t actually a step-by-step guide for how to work for exactly 4 hours or 240 minutes a week.  It’s a series of useful ideas and tactics for people seeking to work smarter and get more done in less time.

Tim’s book is well written and worth many times the cover price (buy it, I did), but how many copies would he have sold, had the book simply been called, “how to work fewer hours” or “how to work smarter”?  Chances are it would have been lost, in the sea of time management and professional development books that have flooded the marketplace.  The title, along with Tim’s extremely successful marketing (and bloody hard work), meant that this superb book got the audience it deserved, whilst other valuable books on the subject remain largely unknown.

Titles matter

Titles really matter.  A good title creates expectancy and motivates people.  It captures people’s attention.  It causes them to read on. Whether it’s the title of; a book, a website, a blog post, a report, a marketing email/letter, a group, a podcast or a twitter account etc, you should carefully craft the most compelling title you can.  Many small business owners will spend a huge amount of time, for example, writing a blog post or marketing letter, then spend 5 minutes thinking of a title.  They then end up with a great piece of work, which few people are motivated or compelled to read.

What titles do you use, for the products and services you provide?  How motivating are they, for your prospective clients or customers?  If you think there may be room for improvement, here are a few suggestions on how to develop more inspiring titles.

• If you want more people to read and share your blog posts, look at the blog titles used on the most read and shared blogs.  Most blogs display the number of times a post is tweeted, giving you an indicator of how popular each title and post is.
• If you want a better title for your next book, check out the best selling business books.  Remember: there’s a big difference between the best selling books and the best written books.  Some great books sell a handful of copies and some dross sells by the truck load.  Look at the best selling books list and search for common themes in the way a title is structured.
• If you want to write attractive email marketing or direct marketing (mail shot) titles, look at the marketing emails and mail shots that YOU opened.  Think about it, most of the offers you get go straight into the bin or are deleted.  Very few have titles or subject lines, which actually inspire you to open the letter or email.  Keep a file with everything that motivated you to “read on.”  Don’t just copy them though – LEARN from them.  That’s where the real value is.

Great titles take time

It’s not uncommon for me to spend as long writing the title of a successful piece of marketing, as it is for me to write the actual marketing message.  The value of a great title, in encouraging people to actually READ your message, means that it is worthy of as much time as required, to get it as motivating as possible.

In my experience, the title is the most important single element in written marketing.  If you are going to invest some time in improving your copywriting skills, this is the area to start.  It can improve your marketing results by thousands (yes thousands) of percent!

How selective are you, regarding the people you work with?  Many small business owners make the costly mistake, of working with anyone, who has the ability to pay them.

In this post, I explain why this is a bad idea and how you can avoid wasting YOUR time and money working with low value clients.

Many small business owners attract too few good quality inquiries and end up building a client base that’s of little real value.  Even though they know from their conversations with a prospective new client, that this person will be a total nightmare to work with, they still decide to work with them because they need the money.

With a low quality client base, working for people who are a pain in the rear, their work ceases to be enjoyable and their business suffers in every respect, as a direct result.

The answer?

You can increase your income, lower your stress levels and develop a more robust business, by focusing your marketing messages so that they exclusively target inquiries, from people with your ideal client profile.

This means moving away from the mindset that any business is good business and using a more strategic approach to your business development.  It means not wasting another minute of your time developing large, untargeted networks and email lists.  It means no longer writing your marketing messages, so that they are of some relevance to almost everyone, and focusing them like a laser-beam, so they are 100% directly relevant to your ideal profile of client.  Of course, by making the content of your website/blog as relevant to this group as possible, your SEO should also improve, as Google and Co are always looking for the most relevant sites.

What next?

I recommend that you spend some time determining exactly what type of clients or customers you most want to work with, and then shift your marketing focus so that you are as relevant as possible to them.

What are their challenges?  Find out and demonstrate that YOU have the answers.

Where are they, online and offline?  When you know where they are, you know where to connect.  Look for groups, forums etc online and also the exhibitions or conferences they attend offline.

The bottom line: If you want the right people to get in touch with you, you need to motivate them to send you an email or compel them to give you a call or visit your premises.  This means that what they see/hear when they connect with you, either on your site, blog, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc, needs to be as relevant as possible to them and their needs.

A message that’s designed to appeal to too wide a group, is just not powerful enough to motivate people to take action.

The worst thing you can do if your car is stuck in the mud, is to accelerate harder and harder.  Far from getting you free, it actually gets you deeper in trouble.  In the same way, if you are using a form of marketing incorrectly and you decide to “fix it” by pushing it harder and harder on people, you can similarly make things increasingly worse for yourself.

For example, if you are sending ineffective marketing emails to people and getting a poor response, so decide to send them out more and more regularly hoping to get some business from them, you will simply start angering the people you’re writing too.  Slamming people with poorly thought out marketing like that, can see you listed as a spammer and seriously damage your reputation!

Likewise, I think we have all seen those people on Twitter, who are always asking their followers to ReTweet links to their website or blog posts, (Pls RT) hoping to increase traffic.  That may be a great way to quickly show everyone you are desperate for business, but it will do little to inspire confidence in you or your services.

The answer is simple: Develop a marketing strategy that works – Then work that strategy.  In other words, do the right things correctly, rather than throwing more of what doesn’t work out there, hoping the numbers will save you.