Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

What’s the big idea?

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big ideas

Big ideas fill you with motivation.

Big ideas force you to grow.

Big ideas crush apprehension and replace it with excitement.

Big ideas compel you to leave your comfort zone.

Big ideas attract the attention of others.

Big ideas spread.

If you feel demotivated, feel like you’re not growing, feel apprehensive about the future, feel trapped in your comfort zone or feel ignored, you’re probably not working on a big idea right now.

You and your big idea

Big ideas are the fuel, which every successful business needs. They inspire us and they inspire those around us. They’re the source of that ‘buzz’, which every thriving business has.

Get to work on a big idea. Think big. Plan big. You’ll be amazed what a BIG improvement it will make.

Tip: The 6 Idea Trick will help.

Have you tried the 6-idea trick?

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marketing ideas

Do you ever find it difficult to come up with answers or ideas for your business? If you do, you may find this simple ‘6-idea trick’ extremely useful.

I can’t take the credit for this super-useful technique. I discovered it in the late 1980’s, whilst listening to an author being interviewed on the radio. And I’ve used it ever since.

A flow of answers and ideas

The interviewer asked the author if she’d ever suffered with writer’s block. She said no, then shared her secret.

  • Start your working day by coming up with 6 ideas. I do this before I check my phone for messages or switch my computer on.
  • The ideas don’t need to be work related. They can be about anything.
  • They don’t need to be great ideas or even good ideas. They just need to be ideas.
  • The key is, don’t stop until you have 6 ideas written down.
  • Do this whenever you’re going through a dry period, until your creative juices are flowing.

I honestly don’t know how this technique works. What I do know, is that I’ve shared it with countless people over the past 30 years, with almost universal success.

Not the results I expected

Interestingly, although some of the ideas I jot down have proven useful to me, that’s not where the results came from. The actual ideas on the list are not where the real value is. Others have told me their experience is the same.

It seems that by starting your morning focussed on creating ideas, your mind sets off on a more creative track, which helps you think more creatively throughout the day. Ideas and answers seem to flow more naturally.

Of course, it could simply be that because you expect to feel more creative and resourceful, you become more creative and resourceful.

Regardless of how it works, it’s been extremely useful to me and the vast majority of people I’ve shared it with over the years. I hope you find it useful too, my friend.

The marketing power of exceeding expectations

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exceeding expectations, exceed expectations
Photo credit: Notability

If you’re looking to get massively more client referrals, today’s post is just for you.

I was prompted to write this, after my friend Jennie email me earlier. She was excited. I could tell, by the way she started her email.

“Jim, I have to share this with you!”

So, what was all the excitement about?

Jennie is a client of mine and she knows I take lots of handwritten notes. She’d just found a note-taking app for the iPad Pro and it blew her away. So, she wanted to share it with me. The app is one I already use, Notability. I love it and regularly recommend it.

Let’s unpack that for a moment:

  • I use the app daily and have told thousands of people about it on Twitter.
  • Jennie has a very senior position in one of the world’s best known tech companies. When Jennie talks, people listen. And she’s telling her friends about the app, too.
  • This is happening because the product significantly exceeded our expectations. Neither of us have been paid in any way to promote the product. We’re simply customers, sharing something with our friends because it’s share-worthy.

The marketing power of exceeding expectations

In business, every person we connect with has an expectation of us and our industry. They know what they expect.  When we meet their expectation, we achieve the baseline. The minimum required. Unremarkable and certainly not worth talking about.

However, when we significantly exceed expectations, we break their preconceptions. It jolts them! This is sometimes called the wow factor. And it has a powerful impact.

  • The way people feel about us dramatically improves. All activity is preceded by feelings. Including the decision to buy from us, hire us and tell their friends about us.
  • The experience that exceeded their expectations becomes a story. When we give people a story worth sharing, they spread the word.
  • We retain our clients (or customers) for longer.
  • Our clients also become a spectacularly valuable source of new clients.

Clearly, exceeding the expectations of clients should be a primary business activity for every business owner. It should be something they dedicate a great deal of thought and attention to.

It should be, but our experience suggests it isn’t. Think about it:

Of all the service providers you’ve used in the past 30 days, how many have exceeded your expectations enough, for you to tell your friends about them?

Maybe 1 or 2 percent? Here’s the thing: most, if not all, of the service providers you’ve used in that time, care about the service they provide.

  • They want you to be a happy client.
  • They want you to stay with them.
  • They want you to tell your friends.

The question is, why did so few of them exceed your expectations?

The 3-point explanation for why this happens

Over the years, I’ve helped countless business owners to overcome this problem. In almost every instance, they had 3 things in common, prior to hiring me.

  1. The business owner cared a lot about their clients and was working hard to look after them.
  2. They got very few complaints from clients, so assumed everything was okay.
  3. However, they also got very few referrals from their clients. They’d say they wrongly thought it was because their clients ‘just weren’t the type of people who recommended service providers’.

The very fact they were not getting regular referrals from their clients, was undeniable proof they were not exceeding expectations. Clients recommend service providers, but only when their expectations have been blown out of the water.

“Okay” isn’t good enough to motivate clients, who already pay for a service or product, to tell everyone how amazing the provider is. Okay isn’t amazing. It isn’t remarkable. It’s just okay.

Our task is to go beyond what’s expected. Our task is to settle for nothing less than exceeding expectations. The rewards for getting it right are transformational.

What next?

The process starts by baking ‘the wow factor’ into the product or service you provide. Then, backing it up with a daily commitment to create opportunities to exceed expectations.

Wanted?

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marketing advice, marketing help

What are you doing, to make people want your services?

  • Bob may need to relax, but unless he wants to relax at your coffee shop, the place down the street gets his custom.
  • Bob may need a new service provider, but unless he wants to hire you, someone else will get his custom.

If you’re not attracting enough new clients, start by looking at how big a ‘want‘ your marketing is creating, compared to your competitors.

Then make sure you’re visible to prospective clients. This means being where their attention is.

Because when prospective clients want the service you provide and they can easily find you, you win. Again and again and again…

10 Email marketing mistakes, which can destroy your open rates

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email open rates, email marketing

One area of marketing I often get asked about, is how to improve email open rates. So, I thought I’d share ten of the most common reasons for unopened email marketing with you.

In no particular order.

  1. The email subject line didn’t motivate the recipient to open it. Getting this right is trickier than it sounds. That’s because many of the words used to inspire people to open an email, are also spam filter triggers.
  2. You sent the email at the wrong time of day or on the wrong day. This can have a huge impact. Despite what some people say, there’s no universally ‘best day or time’ to optimize email open rates. For example, different timing is required when you target consumers, than when you target businesses. Different times also work better for different industries; hotels work completely different hours than accountants. They also have totally different peak times, when they’re unavailable to check email and are least likely to see your message. One time doesn’t work for all. Test and measure until you find your email open rate sweet-spot.
  3. The recipient’s email address is on a list you bought, so they have no idea who you are. And the people on these lists get bombarded with tons of marketing emails. This means they’re far more likely to have aggressive mail filters.
  4. Your list is out of date, with lots of addresses that no longer exist or are no longer monitored. Non existent email addresses will register as ‘bounces’, and are easily cleaned with email marketing software. Unmonitored addresses will still be able to receive emails, so they don’t bounce. Depending on the software you use, you can either set things up so addresses are deleted after ‘X’ number go unopened, or remove unresponsive addresses manually.
  5. The content of a previous email didn’t engage the reader, so they were less inclined to open subsequent emails.
  6. You send marketing emails direct from your desktop software, rather than use a trusted email marketing provider (mailchimp, aweber, constant contact, etc). If you send large numbers of the same email from your own IP address, your address can become blacklisted. When that happens, your emails won’t even reach the recipient’s spam folder.
    Tip: You can check if your IP address is blocked, using Spamhaus.
  7. The email content (or body) contained certain words, which trigger email filters, so the email is wrongly identified as spam.
  8. The email contained too many links or images. These are also common spam filter triggers.
  9. You included an email attachment. Attachments are major sources of malware, so are often blocked.
  10. The recipient uses Gmail. Gmail has started to dump valid emails into the recieptient’s promotions folder. They get no notification when these emails arrive. As such, open rates plummet. I know from personal experience that my Gmail subscribers can miss up to 50% of my emails.

Email can be a spectacularly powerful marketing tool. And sometimes just a few improvements can lead to massively better results.

Never underestimate the power of being first

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marketing ideas

It’s 2018, yet we still remember Roger Bannister as the first person to run a mile in under 4 minutes.

Apple became the world’s most valuable company, largely because of profits from the iPhone; the world’s first smart phone.  (Here’s the original iPhone press release.)

There are 2 useful lessons here:

  1. When you are the first to do something, it’s remembered for a very long time. We remember Bannister, even though Australia’s John Landy broke Bannister’s record just 6 weeks later. Landy was faster, yet remained relatively unknown because he wasn’t the first person to go sub 4 minutes.
  2. It doesn’t have to be perfect. The first iPhone was really buggy. It even lacked a basic copy and paste facility for over a year! However, it was extremely useful.

This begs the question

What product or service could you be the first to create for your marketplace?

Fortunately, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. For example, a service which is common in another industry may be unheard of in yours. It just needs to be new to your industry, profession or marketplace.

And it absolutely doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be useful.

Let’s grow your business!

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