Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

Outsmarting your competitors is not enough. Here’s the missing ingredient

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content marketing, trust

Every business owner knows that it’s essential to outsmart their competitors.

However, the most successful business owners add something extra to the mix. It’s a missing ingredient that makes all the difference. They outcare their competitors, too.

For example.

  • They care more about the success of their clients than their competitors do.
  • They care more about building great client relationships than their competitors do.
  • They care more about delivering on promises than their competitors do.
  • They care more about improving industry standards than their competitors do.
  • They care more about assisting their marketplace than their competitors do.
  • They care more about making great contacts than their competitors do.
  • They care more about quality than their competitors do.
  • They care more about service than their competitors do.
  • They care more about meeting deadlines than their competitors do.
  • They care more about ethics than their competitors do.
  • They care more about connecting with people than their competitors do.
  • They care more about professionalism than their competitors do.
  • They care more about their marketing than their competitors do.
  • They care more about leading in their industry than their competitors do.

It’s hard to think of a more mutually beneficial, effective and future proof way to succeed in 2021 and beyond.

Finally, from my home to yours, I’d like to wish you and your family a healthy, happy and prosperous New Year.

Energy and business success: The fascinating link.

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marketing enthusiasm

I have a question for you today. An important question.

The question is this: Does your business excite you and energize you?

Well, it should do.

In fact, it HAS to!

Seriously.

Here’s why

It’s impossible to build a truly successful business, unless that business fills you with energy and excitement.

Think about it.

  • The energy is what keeps you moving forward. It’s the essential fuel source behind every successful business owner.
  • The excitement is what fuels the energy. It’s also what the marketplace needs to feel, whenever they have an encounter with you or your business. It’s highly infectious. It’s what inspires people to hire you, buy from you and recommend you.

And that energy can be yours. If you want it.

You see, you get to choose

You can choose to either create an inspirational business, or carry on like 99% of small and medium-sized business owners, in a business you love, which doesn’t love you back.

Small business owners suffer more stress, work longer hours and work harder, than they would do if they were an employee. They work themselves harder than any boss would, with none of the perks of being a salaried employee.

And that’s nuts!

New clients often tell me they would see other business owners, who were brimming with energy, enthusiasm and ideas, and wonder how those other business owners managed to be so motivated.

Usually, they blame themselves for not being a very self-motivated type of person.

Thankfully, they’re 100% incorrect.

ANY business owner can become highly motivated and fully energized. However, it isn’t going to happen, while they’re working in a business that’s zapping their energy or failing to inspire them.

Business owners are intelligent people. They’re not going to feel highly motivated and energized, working in a business that isn’t fulfilling them.

Clarity is the key

All that energy only comes, when you are crystal clear about what you want from your business AND how to achieve it. This massively improves the way you think and feel about your business. That’s because you know what you want, know how to get it and can see progress toward your dream / goal / target. I see the impact this has on business owners every day. I’m telling you, it’s transformational!

That kind of clarity and direction is all that separates you from those supercharged (and highly successful) business owners.

The challenge you need to overcome, if you want to access that energy and excitement, can be summed-up in one word: Settling.

Settling: The destroyer of dreams

Most small business owners have spent so long with their daily grind, that they unconsciously start to settle for things the way they are. Sure, they hope things will improve. Occasionally, they’ll try something new. But they find themselves with the same core problem. So they (wrongly) blame themselves for lacking the self-motivation or energy.

To turn this around, you must refuse to settle.

  • Stop LOWERING your lifestyle goals, so that they fit around the limitations of your under performing business.
  • Start INCREASING your effectiveness, so your business provides everything you need (and more).

Here’s the best part.

You are in control

You don’t need to settle for ANYTHING.

You’re the boss. That’s the whole point of being a business owner.

You get to build whatever kind of business you want. You choose how enjoyable your “work” is. You get to decide what you earn, where you work, where you live, the number of hours you work and the quality of your clients. You get to choose how interesting and fulfilling your work is.

You get to choose it all, because YOUR business is directly under YOUR control.

So quit settling, my friend. Decide the kind of business that would really energize you. Then transition into it.

As this bastard of a year confirmed, life’s too precious and too short to waste it.

Now get moving!

Minimum or maximum can make you a fortune in 2021

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There are two business models, which have proven time and again to be extremely successful.

They are:

  1. Focusing on the minimum you can deliver.
  2. Focusing on the maximum you can deliver.

In today’s post, I’ll show you how both of these work, PLUS how to keep your current business model and open up a whole new marketplace!

Let’s start by looking at those 2 models.

The minimum model

The business owner who takes the first option, will focus all their smarts and creativity on cost efficiencies. They’ll embrace automation and AI. They’ll search for ways to lower their overhead on a weekly or daily basis. They’ll know exactly what the minimum required is and they’ll deliver on it.

There is a huge marketplace willing to pay for a stripped back product or service. We see them everywhere; no-frills airlines, feature phones, late booking websites, low price stores, etc.

The minimum model works. Really, really well.

The maximum model

The business owner who takes the second option, will focus all their smarts and creativity on excellence. They’ll place a premium on exceptional customer service. They’ll set the highest possible standards and achieve them. They’ll need to unceasingly focus on delighting their customers at every opportunity.

There is a marketplace who are desperate to be treated this way. And they eagerly, willingly pay a premium. It’s an exceptionally profitable marketplace, too.

The middle of the road challenge

The problem comes if you fail to choose… and end up somewhere in the space between those 2 successful business models.

For example.

  • Better than the minimum quality, but not premium either.
  • Less expensive than the premium brands, but not inexpensive enough for the price-sensitive.
  • Products or services that are fine, but not remarkable enough for people to tell their friends.

By failing to choose, you fall into the anonymous middle of the road; where there’s very little interest and where it’s really, really hard to get noticed. There are of course some established brands who successfully plug the middle ground.

However, it takes a ton of resources (and a MEGATON of money) to stand out, when by default, a business is doing middle of the road stuff. No one talks about the unremarkable. No one. So, these businesses need to push their message via paid advertising.

Middle of the road businesses are also why networking groups exist. They have to push for referrals, because their message doesn’t (can’t) spread organically. They’re stuck in a frustrating, unending and very expensive fight for attention.

Your highly lucrative, new income stream

You can enjoy all the benefits above, whilst still retaining your existing model.

How?

By developing an additional new brand, dedicated exclusively to either the maximum or the minimum edge of your marketplace.

Think about that for a moment.

This gives you the safety net of your existing model. Plus, it provides you with all the amazing opportunities that come from serving one of those highly lucrative edges. It opens up a lot of potential, yet with relatively low risk.

Yes, it takes planning. But I’ve worked on this with many clients over the years, and the results can be spectacular. It will allow you to open up a whole new legion of prospective customers or clients. I’ve seen what’s possible and it’s definitely worth considering, as part of your 2021 business development.

The business experts you absolutely must avoid in 2021

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marketing blogs

In life there are certain people who you absolutely need to avoid. The same is true in business.

Some are easy to spot

  • The web designer whose website is a piece of crap.
  • The marketing expert, who embarrassingly needs to pester people on Linkedin because their own marketing doesn’t work.
  • The consultant or adviser who claims to be in high demand, yet offers free consultations.
  • The self-proclaimed leadership guru, who clearly isn’t leading.
  • The copywriter whose content is poorly-written and lacks impact.
  • The creativity expert who’s just like all the other creativity experts. (Think about that for a moment).

Others are trickier to spot

  • The marketing consultant, who used tricks to attract a million social media followers.
  • The accountant who understands numbers, but can’t clearly explain what they mean to their client’s business.
  • The strategist whose own strategy is failing.
  • The business development adviser who has never built a successful business of their own.

Protect your business from bad advice

The personal recommendation of a trusted friend is usually the least risky way to find an expert provider. Just make sure the friend has recent, first-hand experience of the quality of the provider’s work.

Another option is to hire someone whose work you’re already familiar with. For example, if you subscribe to a provider’s podcast, YouTube channel, blog or newsletter and they regularly share useful information, they’re giving you some powerful clues.

  • The fact they have turned up consistently, demonstrates a degree of reliability. This is especially the case if they have many years worth of material available.
  • You get to experience first hand, how knowledgeable they are from the quality of information they provide.
  • In addition, you’ll know in advance if they share information with the clarity you need.
  • You also gain an insight into their personality and mindset, which can help you determine if they’re the kind of person you work best with.

With an attractive looking website and some testimonials, anyone can claim to be an expert at anything. And that’s why you need to look deeper.

The cost of taking bad advice is far, far higher than the person’s fee. And the importance of getting the right advice has never been greater, if you want to successfully navigate your way through 2021.

How to be a successful, serial entrepreneur

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Wherever you are right now, whatever your past, you can be a successful entrepreneur or serial entrepreneur.

First, let’s get the serial entrepreneur myth out of the way

Look around any business network and it won’t be long before you find people, calling themselves serial entrepreneurs.

They’re everywhere. Or so it appears. However, as is often the case, all is not what it seems. In fact, 99.9% of the people I see calling themselves serial entrepreneurs… are not.

They aren’t even entrepreneurs.

They are serial starters!

Allow me to explain.

Serial entrepreneurs or serial starters?

Serial entrepreneurs: These rare people build a series of successful businesses and fully realise the potential of each business, before they move on. A well known example is serial entrepreneur Ev Williams. Ev founded Blogger and sold it to Google for millions, then he co-founded Twitter and then, the hugely successful Medium.

Serial starters: These are the people we see everywhere, who start a series of enterprises, yet never successfully finish developing any of them. They lack the commitment shown by entrepreneurs. So when the going gets tough, they get demotivated and quit. The vast majority of self-proclaimed serial entrepreneurs fit in this enormous group.

This begs the question.

Why are serial starters so common?

It’s extremely easy to start a new venture. It’s exciting. It brings motivation with it. It gets them up early in the mornings and keeps them up late at night. Everything is new. A blank slate. A new beginning. Endless possibilities.

Then, after a while, the real work begins. Not the new enterprise, shiny work. The real nitty-gritty work:

  • The sales calls.
  • The rejections.
  • The unreturned mail.
  • The broken promises from those who said they would help.
  • The cash flow problems.
  • The hard knocks.

As the shine wears off, the momentum drops for the serial starters. So, they look for the next big thing, rather than finishing what they started. The cycle repeats unless they summon the grit to make it to the finish line.

More about grit than money

You don’t need to start of rich, to be an entrepreneur or serial entrepreneur. You do need grit though.

Yes, some entrepreneurs, such as Gary Vaynerchuk, inherit a multi-million dollar business from their parents, and can use that wealth to get all the additional investment they need and branch into other enterprises. However, most of us start off with little more than an idea, grit and commitment.

Ev Williams, who I mentioned earlier, is a textbook example of starting without money. Like most entrepreneurs, he had to do it the hard way. No wealthy parents. No million dollar assets. No easy way to access the financial investment he needed.

Ev was so broke when he started Blogger that he was living on a friend’s couch! He’s now worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

History shows us that when it comes to business, money is less important than grit. Remember, Steve Jobs came from a blue collar family! The key is to decide what you want and then commit to doing what’s required, to make it happen.

It’s that simple. And that hard.

The customer is not always right

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marketing blog

That old saying, that the customer is always right, is bogus. Worse still, if you believe the customer or client is always right, it will damage your business.

Allow me to explain!

That saying still persists, because fearful service providers are scared that if they say the customer is wrong, they might take their custom elsewhere. So, generations of business owners have worked under the erroneous belief that they should simply agree with their clients all the time.

That’s a really bad idea 

It fails the client and it fails you. Here are a few examples.

  • Designers end up producing ugly work, because the client made terrible design demands. The client is left with low quality design, which won’t work for them. The designer will never get to work with that client again.
  • Copywriters end up writing junk, because the client demanded uninformed changes. So, instead of a professional piece, the client gets something amateurish that they could have written themselves. The copy fails to work. The client ends up unhappy. The copywriter is never hired again.
  • Coaches and mentors end up delivering a poor quality service, because the allow misguided clients to dictate what happens. The client then ends up hearing what they want to hear, rather than what they need to hear in order to succeed. It fails the client. And the provider is never hired again.

No, I’m not suggesting you argue with your clients. That’s a terrible idea and extremely unprofessional.

I am suggesting you need to guide your clients.

As a professional, it’s your job to help clients make the right decisions, so they get the very best results. That means providing the client with your informed, expert guidance. It means steering them away from mistakes. It means responding with advice and ideas, which lead to a successful project and a delighted client.

In short, your clients deserve your very best work. Agreeing with a client, when you know they are making damaging mistakes, doesn’t help them and it doesn’t help you. So give your clients your very best. That’s what they pay you for. That’s what they deserve.

And you cannot, on any level, afford to give them anything less.