Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing ideas to help you grow your business

The secret to attracting regular referrals

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word of mouth, referrals

Cindy asked me a great question earlier. She wanted to know the best way to generate word of mouth referrals for her business. Here’s one of the tips I gave her, which you may find really useful.

The key to attracting word of mouth referrals, is to understand the following:

Word of mouth spreads between the people in your marketplace. It goes from person to person. NOT from you to them.

So don’t interrupt people.

Don’t pester people for referrals.

Because you don’t need to!

People love to talk. And they really love to share stories about their experiences. Either face-to-face or online. Your task as a business owner, is to give people a story about your business that’s worth sharing. For example, give them a customer service story, that’s so good they want to tell their friends. I list 9 more examples here. That should give you enough ideas to get you started.

Right now, you’re just 1 story away from having your marketplace buzzing with people talking about [recommending] your business. So, what are you waiting for?

Tip: For a world-class example of how it works, read this — Why storytelling is the cornerstone of successful marketing.

An incredibly easy way to turn time wasters into gold dust

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time wasters

How do you feel about people, who either ask you questions about your service or look around your products, then leave without buying?

Some business owners get angry. They perceive these people to be time wasters. In doing so, they miss out on a massively valuable opportunity. They leave a huge business asset on the table, untapped.

I’m referring to the feedback, which so-called time wasters can provide you with. Feedback, which can help you dramatically improve your marketing and sales results.

Allow me to explain.

You attract time wasters for a reason

If you’re attracting lots of the wrong type of enquiries, there’s a reason. It’s usually a sign that:

  • Your marketing message needs to be improved.
  • You are marketing to the wrong people.
  • Or both.

It’s extremely easy to learn which applies to your marketing, so long as you ask for feedback. Armed with this valuable information, you can then adapt and improve your marketing so you attract the right kind of enquiries.

Before they end the call or leave your premises, ask something like: What was it that prompted you to (visit or call) us today? This will give you some outstandingly valuable feedback to work with.

For example

  • If people often say they were looking for a low-priced whatever, (yet your prices are average or above average), you need to review your marketing message. Take a look and see if you are overstating how low your prices are.
  • If you are not overstating how low your prices are, then you could well be targeting your marketing message at people with too small a budget.

You get the idea.

The key is to get as much feedback as you can from those who fail to hire you or buy from you. It will help you improve your marketing message, improve your targeting and generate more business!

So, reframe how you think about time wasters. Speak with them. Listen. Learn from their feedback. Then, make the necessary improvements to your marketing. Don’t just assume that someone is a time waster and therefore of no value to your business. Their feedback could be commercial gold dust.

In fact, it usually is.

How to find winning ideas for your business AND put them into action

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marketing advice

In today’s post, I share a strategy with you that can help you have more, winning ideas than ever before.

Think about it: Behind every successful business are a series of ideas. Winning ideas, which open up new opportunities or set the business on a new path. The challenge with winning ideas is that they often look like average ideas, until after they become hugely successful. As a result, most great ideas never see the light of they. In fact, I bet you have a few tucked away right now, without even knowing it.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

Some experts thought laptops would never become popular

In 1985, The New York Times announced the death of laptop computers; “Whatever happened to the laptop computer?” They wondered why laptops never became popular (seriously).

“[…] I.B.M. never legitimized the market with its much rumored ”Clamshell,” probably because the company realized that laptops are a small niche market, not a mass market.”

And when the electric light bulb was invented, most people said it would never become a mass market product. It was thought that there was no affordable way to get electricity to enough homes.

Ideas that win

Business owners sometimes ask me what I think of an idea they have. The challenge here, is that it doesn’t matter what I think or what their friends think. Winning ideas are not anointed. If you want to know how good your idea is, you need to get it out there. If you do, you will find it’s almost impossible to fail.

It’s a win-win thing.

  • If it flies, you’ll have a success on your hands.
  • If it flops, you’ll learn something, which you can invest in the next idea and greatly increase your chances of success.

Ironically, the only way to guarantee an idea will fail, is to try and protect it from failure by locking it away.

It’s a lose-lose thing.

  • The idea you fail to ship can’t succeed.
  • The idea you fail to ship can’t teach you anything new.

This not only insulates you from success, it insulates you from learning and growing.

When I started out in business, I found it very hard to put my ideas into action. I knew it made sense. I knew I needed to do it. But it’s one of those pieces of advice, which is ‘easier said than done’.

Thankfully, I discovered a way forward, which I’m going to share with you.

Here’s the strategy that worked for me

I’ve shared this strategy with countless people over the years and the results have been amazing. It’s actually really, really simple.

My breakthrough came, when I figured out that the part of my mind responsible for putting ideas into action, was weak. It needed improving, conditioning, strengthening. I thought one way to do this, would be to treat it like a weak muscle. To make a weak muscle strong, you start off by working with very light weights. As the muscle grows, you slowly increase the weight you’re working with. Eventually, the muscle becomes strong.

I started, by acting on what I considered to be small ideas. Ideas that were unlikely to set the world on fire if they worked, but where there was relatively little downside if they failed.

Every time I acted on one of these small business ideas, I’d write it down in a journal, along with the results. With every new journal entry, my ‘idea muscles’ grew a little. I also noticed that even with these small ideas, my business was starting to see some very encouraging results. This further built my idea muscles. Pretty soon I was working with excitement on big ideas. Today, I actively look for them. I seek them out. And if they’re interesting, I put them into play.

As the frequency and size of the ideas you act on increases, so does the development of your business. And something else happens. Business in general becomes a lot more interesting. That’s because working on new ideas, even small ones, is extremely invigorating. It causes you to think differently, meet new people and explore new opportunities. Just remember to start with small ideas. Slowly build it up. And be sure to chronicle your results, so you can see the progress you’re making.

I hope you found this useful. If you did, please share it using one of the options below.

This is totally, utterly unreasonable

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marketing advice, marketing help

I’ve had an idea that could help your business in multiple ways. It’s an unreasonable idea. Yes, I know that sounds weird.

Allow me to explain.

If a product or service is only reasonably good, it’s nothing special. It’s just okay. It’s certainly not good enough to motivate people to buy from you, hire you or tell all their friends about you.

This got me thinking

The opposite of reasonable is unreasonable.

So… what if someone decided to embrace an unreasonable mindset to their business and the services they provide?

I believe it could lead to massive improvements, across their whole business. Here are just a few examples of what an unreasonable approach might look like.

The business owner could choose to:

  • Be unreasonably committed to customer service and the happiness of their clients.
  • Show unreasonable persistence, when it comes to keeping their promises.
  • Have an unreasonable attitude to life-long-learning.
  • Set the bar unreasonably high, on the quality of work they’re willing to ship. [This will help you get it right]
  • Have an unreasonable passion for helping others to succeed.

Any business operating from that kind of unreasonable mindset, is going to get noticed. They’re going to retain their clients for longer, too. And yes, they’re going to give their clients and their marketplace something to tell their friends about.

If being reasonable isn’t working for you, you now have an unreasonable alternative to consider.

The critical marketing problem, which no one talks about

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marketing advice, marketing help

I was in a coffee shop once, when a guy with a very obvious hairpiece came in. He had natural, thick brown hair around his ears, with a jet black wig on top. Of course, no one mentioned it to him. People just smirked when he wasn’t looking. Whether this chap needed the hairpiece for vanity or medical reasons, it’s entirely possible he has no idea that his wig is so poorly matched to his natural hair.

A very similar kind of silence happens regularly in business. And it can lose you a fortune.

Allow me to explain.

  • We go to a website to check out a potential service provider, find the site is amateurish and decide not to consider them. We don’t call them to let them know their site created such a bad impression. We silently move on.
  • We start reading a poorly-written piece of marketing and quickly discard it. We don’t email the company and tell them their content is losing them business. We silently move on.

So, faced with all this silence, how do you figure out if what you’re doing is working for you? Simple. You ‘listen’ to what your results are telling you.

For example.

  • Your website should be a 24-hour, business generating machine. If it isn’t, it’s telling you something. It’s telling you that it urgently needs to be improved.
  • Your content marketing should regularly attract sales, sales leads or new clients. If it isn’t, it’s telling you something. It’s telling you that you need to quickly improve your strategy.

So start listening

Don’t wait for someone to tell you your marketing sucks. Because they won’t; your friends don’t want to upset you and strangers don’t give a rat’s ass. Instead, listen to what your results are telling you.

This will help you get it right: Don’t Mistake Silence For Satisfaction.

How to build a subscriber list that builds your business

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content marketing

People often ask me for tips on how to build a bigger list. They want more subscribers; more readers, more listeners, more viewers, more followers, etc.

The short answer is simple. It’s this.

Do something useful, which is worthy of people’s attention and make it easy for them to subscribe.

If you do that, you’ll attract more people and because your “something” is useful, many of them will subscribe. Think about it. That’s the exact process, which motivated you to subscribe to every list you’re on. Something attracted you, you found it useful, you subscribed.

This begs the question – If the answer is so simple, why is it so darn hard to build a large and valuable list?

Here’s the answer.

The advice is simple. The process is tricky!

There’s some tricky stuff between you and that massively valuable list you want.

Finding something useful to share, on a regular basis, is tricky. Remember, if you just churn out the same stuff as others in your industry, you won’t attract subscribers or retain them. This means you’ll need to be willing to do some research. You’ll need to become a regular note-taker. A collector of ideas. It’s interesting work, but if you’re not already someone who studies and takes notes, it can be a tricky transition.

Finding the time to create content is also tricky. You’re already busy, right? Developing content around all that interesting material you have, takes time. That time is easy to justify when you have a huge list. It’s harder to justify, when your hard work is being consumed by just a small number of people. You’ll need to push through the tumbleweed and crickets of the early stages. And I know from personal experience, that can be a real challenge. [I explain why here].

Summoning the courage to publish your stuff is tricky. Why? Because if you do it right, you’ll attract critics. Someone once told me that we have a choice to make. We can either be criticized or be ignored. If we’re being ignored, we’re invisible. That’s not good for any business. The alternative is to not only expect criticism, but to welcome it as a positive sign that we’re no longer being ignored. Don’t set out to attract critics. Set out to be useful and worthy of attention. But see criticism as an inevitable part of becoming visible. Tip: Here’s why people criticize you and how to deal with it.

Once you know what’s involved, building a valuable list is pretty easy. And the rewards are huge.

Picture this: Just imagine what a difference it would make to your business, if you were in regular contact with thousands of prospective customers. Not via advertising, which is usually seen as an unwelcome interruption. But via a subscription to your content, which people proactively requested because they WANT to hear from you.

The opportunity is amazing. And it’s right in front of you. Right now.

Let’s grow your business!

I can help you build a more successful business, increase your sales, attract more clients and boost your profits.

Find out how