Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

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.

Content Marketing: Use short sentences. Here’s why

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Content marketing, content tips

Here’s a quick copywriting tip, to help you improve your marketing results.

Your prospective clients prefer to read short sentences. This is especially true when explaining detailed information. For example, how your service works.

I’m not suggesting you use fewer words than required. Far from it! Use as many words per sentence as you need. Don’t remove a single, necessary word. Just don’t use more words than you need.

Why is that Jim? Because from a marketing perspective, long sentences lack impact and clarity. Those are essential components of effective marketing.

Tip: One way to shorten content, without losing anything important, is to remove extraneous words. Look at the 2 examples below.

  • People should exercise on a regular basis.
  • People should exercise regularly.
  • We have no news at this point in time.
  • We have no news currently.

A whole story in just 6 words!

It’s amazing what can be achieved using fewer words. Ernest Hemingway once wrote a story in just 6 words. It’s a powerful story, too.

“For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn”.

Inspired by Hemingway’s brevity, look for opportunities to keep your sentences as short as required. Aim for clarity. Remove the fluff. And keep sentences confined to one thought.

It’s not as simple as it sounds. But your prospective clients (and your business), will appreciate the additional effort.

The most successful business is seldom the best in its niche. Here’s why!

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Marketing ideas

The most successful service provider and the best service provider, are seldom the same service provider. In fact, it seldom happens.

That’s because being the best doesn’t automatically mean people will notice you, believe you or hire you.

Why is that?

Commercial success requires a critically important balance.

You need to balance the development of a great service, with the development of a strategy to earn the attention, trust and patronage of your marketplace.

Here’s why that balance is essential for your business.

  • If your prospective clients don’t know you exist, it doesn’t matter how exceptional your service (or product) is, because you’re not an option for them.
  • If your prospective clients have heard of you, but your marketing doesn’t inspire them to trust you, they won’t hire you or buy from you.
  • And if your prospective clients have heard of you, and they trust you… but your marketing doesn’t motivate them to take action, they won’t hire you or buy from you.

Without that balance in place, trying to grow your business is extremely frustrating, as less capable competitors grab your share of the marketplace. You may already know competitors in your space, who are nowhere near as good as you, yet they’re flying.

With that balance in place, you get all the rewards your hard work and dedication merits.

Thankfully, this is something directly under your control. All it takes is a decision. The decision to adjust the balance, so your business attracts the volume and quality of clients you deserve.

But here’s the challenge: It’s even easier to ‘keep on keeping on’ and hope things magically get better. Which is why this message will be ignored by most people who read it. It’s why there are business owners still whining about how unlucky they are and how unfair the marketplace is, a decade after they started their business.

Naturally, it’s their choice.

They’re perfectly at liberty to complain about their situation, yet stay the same.

But man… what a total and utter waste!

The key to getting your business noticed

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marketing leadership

I want you to imagine you’re in a huge stadium. There are 70,000 people there. And every single one of them is dressed in bright yellow clothing.

Then a guy walks in who’s dressed from head to foot in red. Immediately, everyone notices him.

  • He stands out, because he’s not like all the others.
  • He attracts attention, because he’s different.

Here’s why this matters to your business

If you want to get noticed, you need to be willing to stand out. To be visibly, measurably and meaningfully different from your competitors. That’s how you attract attention.

The typical small business unintentionally does the opposite.

They offer the same kind of services for the same kind of fees to the same kind of people. They have the same kind of website and the same kind of marketing messages. And all because they use the same kind of general marketing strategies as their competitors.

It just doesn’t work

Why?

Because every time you use a general marketing strategy or a general business development idea, you’re doing what the masses are doing.

So, you actually make your business less visible.

Less visible? How can marketing make you less visible?

Instead of helping you gain the attention of your marketplace, generic marketing acts as camouflage. You become like one of the 70,000 people in that stadium, dressed in yellow… wondering why you’re not getting noticed or attracting attention.

You need a more effective marketing strategy than that. You need marketing, which takes your business from the background and moves you to the foreground. You need marketing, which gets your business noticed by the right people and motivates them to buy from you or hire you.

Anything else will make your business less visible in 2021. Fortunately, it’s totally avoidable, so long as you shun generic marketing and embrace a meaningfully different approach.