Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

A comfortable way to attract new customers

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marketing approachable

How easy is it, for your prospective clients or customers to get in touch with you?

I’m not talking about how visible your phone number, email address or contact form are. I’m referring to something that is just as important and yet seldom written about: How approachable you seem to be, to a prospective client or customer.

For example.

  • When a prospect is reading your newsletter, how approachable do you sound to them? The best newsletters are written, so that the author comes across as friendly and informed. The worst are written by people who come across as lacking in personality or distant.
  • When a prospect reads your comments on social media, how approachable do you sound to them? Some business owners can appear patronising or sarcastic when people dialogue with them or ask questions. This is a really, really bad move, if you want prospective clients to feel comfortable contacting you.
  • When a prospect reads the about page on your website, how approachable do you sound? Many small business owners write their about page in the 3rd person, rather than speak directly to their reader. Instead of saying; ‘Hi, thanks for stopping by. My name is Bob and…’ they start with ‘Bob has worked in web design since 2002…’

Why does this matter to you?

All things being equal, we much prefer to do business with the vendors we like. We also tend to remain loyal to them and recommend them to our friends and contacts.

By building the human touch into the very foundations of your business, including your marketing, you start to nurture a positive relationship with your prospects. You help them form warm feelings toward you, long before you ever speak with them.

This combines to help them feel massively more comfortable contacting you, hiring you or buying from you.

When you’ve run out of all possible options

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… you haven’t!

There’s always an answer. A way forward. A way to turn things around.

marketing tips

  • Often, the answer you need is already within you, but you need to dig a little deeper in order to uncover it. Start by asking yourself a better version of the question you need answering; because better questions will always lead you to better answers. Try taking your challenge for a walk, something creative people have done for centuries, with great success, in order to find the answers they need.
  • Sometimes, another person already has the answer you need. So talk to people. Especially those with specific, expert experience in the relevant area you’re challenged with. Your answer could be literally, just one conversation away.
  • Other times, the answer you need is in a book, a blog post, an article or newsletter. Thousands, maybe millions of other people have already had, and resolved, the same core challenge as you. Many of them have shared how they did it. So do the reading.

The key thing here, is that once you’ve accepted that there is an answer, you’re now free to focus 100% on finding it. And knowing this makes all the difference.

Think.

Talk.

Read.

You’ll be amazed how quickly you’ll find exactly what you need, my friend.

Scaling your way to success

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What’s the best way to scale your business for success? Here are my thoughts.

marketing tips

But first, a quick question for you: What do the following all have in common?

  • Kindness.
  • Honesty.
  • Caring.

The answer is that they’re attributes that are valued, extremely highly, by everyone. We are attracted to people who are kind, honest and caring. And given the opportunity, we prefer to do business with people (and brands), who are kind, honest and caring, too.

Now. Hold that thought.

Scaling your way to success

One of the BIG buzzwords right now, is ‘scaling’. Business owners are being told that it’s the cornerstone of commercial success. And that the best way to scale their business, is to automate pretty-much everything.

For example.

  • To let chatbots handle first-line customer service enquiries.
  • To automate their social media accounts.
  • To create impersonal, email / forum-based, drip-fed versions of their services.

In short: To cut back on the human touch as much as possible, whenever possible and wherever possible.

The huge limitation with that approach is clear. Automation software is…. well… software. And as such, is incapable of the human characteristics of kindness, honesty and caring.

The reason for the growth in automation-based scaling, is that it promises a lot and is extremely simple. It requires almost no effort. And it’s sold by the gurus pushing it, as a magic way to cut your overhead back to the bone; both in time and money.

Here’s the snag

As more business owners embrace automation-based scaling, prices and fees in their industries are being driven down and down. It’s a race to the bottom for those who’ve bought in.

Paradoxically, it’s also a race, which no one actually wants to win. This is why we hear these same business owners complaining about attracting fee-sensitive clients and how hard they find it to stand out and get noticed.

They’re discovering that it’s extremely difficult to build a successful business, with the most fee-sensitive clients, wafer thin profits and a customer base who will drop you in an instant, for a lower priced competitor.

Shrug!

Another way to scale… that actually works

While some business owners embrace the race to the bottom, where the winner is the cheapest provider, others have identified a far more profitable way to scale.

It’s a different race. A race to profitability and success. A race, where the winners attract the best clients, work on the best projects and earn the best fees.

You see, it turns out that kindness, honesty and caring, scale. In fact, they scale to infinity. People tell their friends about remarkable service. So, the word spreads. And they remain loyal to providers, who go the extra mile to look after their needs. So, they keep their clients for way, way longer too.

Yes, the cheapest clients in your marketplace will always shop for the bottom dollar provider.

But that’s fine.

Because every marketplace has a massively profitable niche, who eagerly pay a premium fee for a premium quality service. Why not scale your business for them, instead?

Today: An incubator for opportunities to flourish

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marketing tips, incubator for opportunities

There’s no doubt that these are worrying times.

There’s equally no doubt that this scenario is an incubator for opportunities to flourish.

Allow me to explain.

We’re looking at 2021 with no clear idea about what impact COVID-19 will have. None of us know when things will return to normal.

Perhaps just as worrying, is that things are almost certainly going to be very different from before, when they return to normal.

So even ‘normal’ will look different, whenever it arrives.

Here’s the thing: When faced with confusion, the tendency is to worry. To hunker down until things go back the way they were. That’s not going to happen. The past truly is the past.

This means that business owners waiting for the old, familiar ways to return before planning what to do, have no end point. No defining date to bounce back stronger. So they’ll drift, which is a lousy idea because you can’t drift your way to success or even survival.

Two points about this confusion and worry

Firstly, as business owners we need to learn to dance with the confusion. Move with the challenges. Live with the changing direction of our marketplace. This means planning for the super short-term as well as the medium and long-term. Checking the numbers once a month is like running blind. Keeping our finger on the pulse is essential.

Secondly, as business owners we have to be very aware that this same confusion and nervousness is impacting everyone else. Our clients and customers are confused. So are our prospective clients and customers. Their decision making is likely to be a lot less predictable than it used to be. We need to keep this in mind, as contracts come up for renewal. We also need to acknowledge that our marketing has to adjust (and adjust and adjust) to the evolving situation, or we’ll become irrelevant.

Flourishing

Every business challenge creates an incubator for opportunities to flourish. Before calling bullshit, take those two points I just mentioned.

  • One business owner will see them as 100% negative.
  • Another will identify (at least) a dozen opportunities to improve their business and own their competitors.

What makes this a perfect storm to flourish, is that the vast majority of business owners are focused on the gloom. This static majority wait and hope, leaving their marketplace wide open to the motivated and agile minority.

  • Interestingly, both types of business owner are equally fearful.
  • All that changes is the reaction they choose when faced with fear. Their response.

Fear either inspires us to respond with positive action, or causes us to respond by hunkering down and doing nothing. It’s where the phrase ‘scared stiff’ comes from.

The key here is that both responses are a choice we make. And our choice is a critically important factor in our results over the coming months and years.

In short, look for the opportunities. If you can’t see them, find someone who knows where to look. Adapt and adjust as required. If you don’t know how, find someone who does.

Revealed: Why email marketing doesn’t work

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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 is 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.

Contacts for vanity. Relationships for sanity

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I’d like to ask you a relatively easy question. How many business contacts do you have?

You can easily get an approximate figure by adding together your social network contacts, the contacts in your address book and email lists, etc. For most reading this, the number will be in the high hundreds. For many it will be in the tens of thousands. And hundreds of thousands for some.

Here’s a harder question. How many business relationships do you have?

Business relationships are harder to count. That’s because they are people you connect with on a deeper level. Not just numbers on the social networks you use. Not just names in your address book, who you have no history with.

Vanity

Building more and more contacts can be intoxicating. It’s often referred to as a vanity metric, because most of these numbers are visible, such as our social network contacts / followers / friends. The bigger the number, the more it strokes our ego. We can be like the popular kid at school. Look at us. We’re a big deal. Even though we know hardly any of these people. We have the BIG contacts number. Go us!

Sanity

Building relationships doesn’t seem as intoxicating. That’s because there’s no publicly visible number attached to it. Who else knows how many people rely on you when they need help, how many people trust you, how many influential people you know, or how many people go to you for council when faced with important decisions?

Sanity numbers are a lot less public than our vanity numbers, but a lot more meaningful and massively more valuable.

With this in mind, how much time do you dedicate each day, to building and nurturing relationships? I’m talking here about going deeper than contact building.

For example.

Everyone who reads my work via email, can chat with me by simply replying to the email. I’ll see it and reply to you personally. I’ve built countless relationships with people, who went from being a reader (contact on my email list), to being in regular dialogue with me (person I have a relationship with).

Business is ultimately all about people. That’s why it’s essential to focus on relationships. This has never been more true than it is today, my friend.