Jim Connolly Marketing

Targeted marketing: See how easily you can make more sales!

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This post is all about targeted marketing and why YOUR marketing needs to be targeted, if you are serious about developing your business.

Here’s a great example of targeted marketing for you.  I am around 99% certain that you are a business owner.  In fact, I believe you either own a business, or are a consultant or a freelancer.

I was spot on or pretty close, wasn’t I?

How was I able to be so sure?

Targeted marketing

I have grown the readership of this site, via targeted marketing.  Everything I have done in order to develop this blog, has been based around attracting the attention of intelligent, small business owners who want better sales results for their businesses.  The content here is also targeted, with everything I have written, focused on the subject of marketing and business development.

As a direct result, I have a highly targeted readership of small business owners; the exact profile of people who use my marketing services.

Targeted marketing and time wasters

Just as targeted marketing delivers targeted results, the opposite is also true.  Small business owners, who use a less focused approach to their marketing, tend to attract a little of everything.  As a result, they typically get fewer business inquiries and many of the inquiries they do receive, are from the wrong kind of people.

For example, I spoke with a business owner recently, who told me how frustrated she was with all the time wasters who contacted her.  I asked her what she meant by time wasters.  Was she referring to people who were asking her for free advice?  No.  She said she was referring to the number of people who contact her looking for help in areas that she doesn’t cover.  Similarly, I receive emails all the time, from people who complain that their prospective clients are too fee sensitive.  With a little investigation, I often find that they are marketing a premium quality service, to people who buy bargain bucket services.  That’s what happens when you fail to target your marketing correctly.

If you find that you are attracting the wrong kind of inquiries, or enquiries from the wrong end of the market, it’s entirely possible that the focus of your marketing needs to be improved.  If you use social networks to randomly connect with people because they look interesting, that’s a GREAT strategy for socialising; however, it’s less effective if you are looking to build a targeted network of great business contacts and prospective clients.  It’s like attending a networking event and randomly talking only to the first 10 people you see; rather than being a little wiser and connecting with the 10 most suitable people in the room.

Targeted marketing messages

When you write, do you write for as wide an audience as possible?  Do you try to tell everyone who could possibly buy from you, every benefit of your services?  If you do, you are making a mistake!  Your marketing needs to be targeted to your prospective clients and their needs.  That’s all.  By trying to be vaguely relevant to everyone, your message becomes weakened.  In order to compel or inspire people to call you, visit you, email you or click your links, your marketing needs to motivate them to take action.  This means delivering targeted marketing messages to the right people!

If you want to be able to confidently predict who sees your marketing, and therefore contacts you, get specific.  Don’t focus on the size of your network or the number of leads you generate, until you are attracting the right people.

3 bad habits that lose you business!

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So, you want to make more sales and attract more targeted business enquiries?

Great!  That’s what this brief post is all about.  Here are 3 of the most common marketing copy errors I see, along with how you can fix them and improve your marketing results:

1. Are you writing for everyone?

If you find yourself writing marketing messages, which attempt to explain how your offering could be of value to almost everyone, I suggest you stop!  For your marketing messages to work, they need to be directly relevant to your core target group – not vaguely relevant to everyone.  People do not feel inspired to take action when they read something that’s only vaguely relevant to them.  Write with focus.  Become super-relevant to your marketplace.  It works.

2. Are you writing with confidence?

If you find yourself writing so that everyone either approves or agrees with you, I suggest you stop!  If you are a specialist in your field and you are writing about something you believe to be correct, have the confidence to state your opinion.  Your expertise is what people pay for.  Show the marketplace that you lack confidence or are wishy-washy and you have little chance of gaining their respect or their business!  Be polite, be friendly but also show confidence in what you believe.

3. Are you saying too much?

If you find that your marketing messages tend to regularly run to more than 500 words, I suggest you stop!  Almost every marketing email, mail shot and blog post I see is at least 50% too long – Often 75% too long!  If you want people to hear your core message, keep it short.  Focus on information rich content.  Learn to embrace brevity.  Make it as easy as possible for people to quickly “get” the point you are making.

I hope you found those three points useful. If you did, be sure to share them with your friends.

Let’s work together and grow your business. To find out more click here!

How to write marketing messages that really work!

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Marketing messages that inspire people to take positive action are what every business person needs, if they want to massively increase their sales, revenues and profits.

Here’s a simple idea, which can help you quickly improve your marketing messages and your marketing results.  It’s all about becoming a collector and a student.

Marketing collection

Look through your inbox, RSS reader, mail etc, for any marketing material that inspired YOU to take the kind of action you want others to take, when they read YOUR marketing messages.  So, collect the; emails, blog posts, letters, advertisements and anything else that you read, which inspired you to take action.

Marketing study

Next, study each message and see what you can learn, from the way it was written and presented.  For example:

  • What kind of headlines (sometimes called straplines) did they use?
  • What kind of calls to action did they use?
  • How long was the gap, between each of their marketing messages.  For example, did they email you once a week or three times a week?
  • What kind of promises did they make?
  • What kind of guarantees did they offer?
  • How many words did they use?
  • What kind of carrier did they use?  (In other words, what kind of envelope did the letter come in, what type of theme did the blog use, what style of template did the newsletter / email marketing use, etc.)
  • What was it that they said, which caused you to believe you could trust them?  How did they win your confidence?

In short: Keep a copy of everything that has inspired you to take the kind of action, which you want others to take regarding your business.  Then, study what you have collected and look for the gold.  Apply what you have discovered into your own marketing and see if you can replicate the magic!

By the way, if you found this useful, please subscribe to the blog for free and never miss another post!

Act first, think second, regret third!

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If you take a look through the settings on Gmail, there’s a feature which allows you to “undo” the sending of your email and stop the email being delivered.  This feature has been so popular, that last week they announced it has been extended and improved.  It seems a huge number of people send emails and then decide they have made a mistake.  They act first, think second.

They click send – THEN they think about what they just did!

Act first, think second

Many of the marketing problems people talk to me about, are examples of this act first, think second approach to business development.  For example, they send an email or 2 to a list of prospective  customers, get little if any response and then ask me why; rather than speak with me first or do some research.  Had they done a little marketing research, they would have discovered that one-off emails seldom work.  They would have seen that they need an email marketing campaign if they want worthwhile results; where each email builds upon the previous one.  Marketing in isolation is rarely effective.

There is an old saying that advises us; “act in haste, repent at leisure.”

Yes, it’s good to get things done, but not if speed comes before quality. Otherwise, we risk confusing movement with progress and end up working hard, yet achieving little by way of results.

Let’s work together and grow your business. To find out more click here!

Dead trees and a powerful copy writing lesson!

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Writing marketing copy or sales copy that really works can be a challenge, especially for people with little or no experience.  One of the best ways to learn how to write great copy, is to read great copy and then study what you have read. Why did that particular message compel you to click a link?  What was it about the specific offer you just read, that made you follow-up on it?

Copy writing and Dead Trees

One of the best pieces of copy writing I have seen over the past few years, is just a simple, short phrase.  It’s often used when online publications refer to paper-based; newspapers, magazines and trade publications etc.  The term is dead tree media.  For example, when referring to a headline on the front page of the traditional paper version of The Times, a blogger will often refer to it as the front page of the dead tree edition of The Times.

The reason this is such a clever phrase, is that those 2 words, dead tree, are extremely emotive:

  • The phrase dead tree immediately focuses our mind on the fact that in order for paper to be made, trees not only need to be cut down; they have to be killed!  Even recycled paper was once a tree.
  • By calling the traditional version of a newspaper, magazine or whatever the dead tree edition, we start to think of it as out-dated.  When we see the term applied regularly enough, it can be a very powerful way to reinforce the belief that paper-based media is either dying or dead.
  • When there are 2 options available to the reader; either a dead tree edition of a magazine or an online version, the online version is automatically made to sound more attractive, simply because it isn’t being referred to negatively.

A quick copy writing tip

If you are serious about the success of your marketing, you need to get serious about copy writing too.  Here’s a tip.  Collect all the; emails, marketing letters, articles or blog posts that motivate you to take action and study them.  Study what it was that compelled you to click their link, visit their store, call them or email them.

For example, look at the box below this post, with a call to action.  Every hour of every day, people click the link in that box to find out how they can work with me.  Look at the message and think about how you can apply something similar to YOUR site; something that will provide you with sales leads all day every day.

The bottom line: Your site should (and could) be a relentless, lead-generating machine for your business.  If it isn’t, you could well be missing out on more sales and higher profits than you currently believe is even possible.

Let’s work together and grow your business. To find out more click here!

Not all spam is created equal!

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I was just thinking how the term spam is being used right now, for a lot more than unwanted, unsolicited emails.

For example:

  • If someone sends you an unwanted sales message via a social networking site, we call them social media spammers.
  • When they leave comments on your blog, purely to build links or sell us something (rather than contribute), we call them comment spammers.
  • When they fill forums with cut and paste marketing messages, we call them forum spammers.
  • When they send you unsolicited text messages, we call them SMS spammers.
  • When they subscribe you to their newsletters without asking, we call them newsletter spammers.

Not all spam is created equal!

What you may not have known, is that some of the people who use the kind of techniques outlined above have NO IDEA that we regard them as spammers!

In many cases, they are often acting out of ignorance.  They see others using one of those techniques, so they think it’s OK.  They assume that it must work, to some degree.  They forget that even if a small number of people visit their site after they did any of the above, they may have just ruined their reputation with thousands or tens of thousands of other people in order to get those few clicks.

Whilst it may be popular to assume that everyone who you consider a spammer runs a suspect business, I have found that in many cases the businesses are legit.  The businesses look dubious, simply because they are being marketed using dubious techniques. I’m not talking about those who send automated spam emails to millions off people every day.  I’m talking about poorly informed business owners, who send you messages you never asked for, newsletters you never subscribed to and Tweets that read like a sales pitch.

The bottom line is that anyone, even legitimate people with a great service, can be written off as spammers if they pester or pursue people with their online marketing.  No one needs that kind of reputation, if they are serious about developing a long term, successful business.