Jim Connolly Marketing

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

A new year or the same old year over again?

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For most businesses, the first week in January is not the start of a New Year – It’s simply the chance to live the same old year over and over and over again!

They carry on investing their time and money in all the wrong places and thus, they get the same kind of results.  Such businesses reach a plateau after a few years and tend to stay there.  Like a truck that’s stuck in the mud, the harder they try the deeper they seem to get trapped.

The owners of these businesses complain about their lack of results, but fail to make the changes required for success. This fear of change is what psychologists refer to as The Homoeostatic impulse.  It’s best demonstrated in the human desire for things to “be the same – but better.” However, as we all know, improvement can only come as the result of change.  Things don’t “just magically get better” – we have to make them better.

If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you have always got!

So, as we enter the first full working week of 2009, let’s embrace the opportunity to learn from what we did in 2008.

Marketing in a recession

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Last month, I interviewed some business owners, who not only survived the last recession but actually grew their businesses; whilst those around them saw their businesses shrink or go broke.

I wanted to know what their secret was, so I could share it with you!

It became apparent very quickly that there was a single, common thread, which was shared by each of the successful businesspeople from the last recession.

Here’s what they told me

The successful businesspeople continued to invest in the key areas of their business, whilst their competitors stopped investing in those same, key areas!

Marketing lessons from past recessions

During the last recession, many of the businesses that went backwards or went broke, decided to invest as little as possible in anything.  They chose to hunker-down and wait for the recession to finish. As a result, they cut back on things like service contracts for their cars, office equipment etc.  They also stopped most or all of their marketing.

Even in a good economy, a business with creaking infrastructure and no marketing is really going to struggle. In a recession, that approach is going to make it almost impossible to survive!

Recession marketing

During the recession, your prospective clients / customers are looking for the best value for money possible.  This requires super-effective marketing, as you will need YOUR message to stand out and then convince people, more powerfully than your competitors, that YOURS is the best value for their money!

Your existing clients / customers will be hurting financially too.  They will be looking for better deals and for ways to reduce their outgoings.  You need to make sure they don’t go to a competitor or simply drop your service, thinking it will save them money.

This is clearly not the time to forget about your marketing.

Marketing opportunities

I believe 2009 will present some amazing opportunities.  The months ahead will be a time of great change and those with the vision and courage to adapt to these changes, will get the rewards.

Use the challenges of the year ahead to position yourself in your marketplace as a provider of answers. During times of flux, people want answers and we are attracted to those who we believe have the answers we need.

Listen to what your marketplace is saying to you.  Keep in regular dialogue with your clients / customers and also your prospective clients / customers.

Find ways to match the benefits of your products or services to their changing needs and ensure that you and your business are an essential resource for them!

Movement or progress?

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As we move into a brand new year, I would like to share one of the simplest, yet most valuable pieces of advice I know with you.

Don’t mistake movement for progress!

Progress is not the result of hard work. If hard work were the secret to success, our grandparents would have been millionaires!Progress only comes when we work hard doing the right things. However, if we keep rowing that boat in the wrong direction, no matter how hard we row; we will never get where we want to be.

Before you invest your time or money on any marketing activities in 2009, make sure you are doing the right kind of marketing for your business – before you worry about doing it correctly.  For example; you ‘might’ be doing a mail shot correctly – yet by using email marketing instead of paper-based mailings, you can see better, faster results for a fraction of the cost and time of a traditional mail shot.

You might be doing that mail shot correctly, but it may not be the right form of marketing for what you want to achieve – your outcome!

Making progress

I suggest you look at all the marketing activities you currently engage in and then, one by one, find out if there isn’t a better, higher-leverage alternative for you to use in 2009.  There’s a list of marketing ideas here, which are extremely effective, just to get you started.

Over to you

What have you found to be the most effective forms of marketing for your business over the past year? Share your experiences and leave a comment below.

Blog marketing tip

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If you want to achieve great results with your online marketing, I believe you need to become a really good observer.  This means developing the ability to see what other people miss; to observe what someone is doing in order to get a result.

For example, I received an email recently from someone who made the links on his blog ‘do-follow’.  He said he did this, after seeing me offer these ‘special links’ here and the huge response it got.  He wanted to know why it hadn’t generated any extra traffic or comments to his blog when he added it there.

The bigger picture

marketing vision bigger pictureA good observer would have seen the bigger picture.  For example, he would have checked jimsmarketingblog.com out on alexa.com or compete.com and seen that it already had a large readership. The readership of my blog did not just grow magically overnight, after that single post.

Secondly, a good observer would have seen that I have a great online network of people around me; via my newsletter subscribers, readers of my website and the 14,000 people I network with on twitter.  This means there was an existing marketplace for these special do-follow links before I decided to add them to jimsmarketingblog.com.

The point?

You can learn a lot more about how to market your blog or website, by observing what marketing professionals do; as well as reading what we write.  If you just read the posts, you are missing half the picture!

Your marketing map!

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In this post, I am going to show you a very simple way to make your marketing massively more powerful.

Most small business owners / entrepreneurs have only a vague idea of what they want from their business.  They tend to be highly-motivated and launch themselves like a rocket into their work.  However, with a little more forward planning, it’s possible to totally transform your sales results!

marketing planImagine setting off on a journey; from where you live to an unknown destination 300 miles away.  How would you prepare for that trip? You would probably check the route on a map, so you knew where you were going and how to get there.

You might also check the weather and traffic conditions and ensure you had enough fuel.  With all this in place, you stand a 99.9% chance of getting where you want to be!

If that journey had been ‘planned’ ahead the way most small businesses plan ahead, it would have been very different!

There wouldn’t be a clear destination, so it would have been impossible for them to plan a route.  In other words, they wouldn’t even know if they are heading in the right direction or not! With no idea of where they’re going and no route to follow, they could end up anywhere.

Marketing and planning

If you study any successful business, you will see that they deliberately plan what they want in advance.  As a result, they can spot immediately if they are on target or heading in the wrong direction.  They are also able to anticipate potential hazards and even identify the people; whose help they will need in order to succeed.  Because they know where they are going, every step takes them closer and they can plan ahead with far, far more confidence than the average business.

How to smash your sales targets with a little planning!

Here’s a quick way to find exactly what you need to do, in order to reach your annual sales target. It also gives a quick insight into the power of using firm figures.

List your desired turnover & profit figures

You need to know what you are aiming for in real terms. This means writing down what you want to ‘get’ from your business financially.

List the number of sales needed in order to hit those figures

Once you know how much money you want to earn, you need to identify how many sales you must make in order to reach that figure.  This then becomes your annual sales target.

List the number of enquiries needed to generate 1 sale

How many meetings, calls, emails, letters from prospective clients / customers do you need on average, to generate a sale? If you need 100 sales to hit your sales target and each sale requires 3 enquiries, your initial focus should be on generating those 300 enquiries as inexpensively and quickly as possible!

Divide the number of enquiries needed by 12

In the above example, you would need to generate 25 enquiries a month in order to hit your annual sales targets.  This means you would now have a very clear picture of the kind of marketing activity you need to invest your time / money in, if you want to succeed.

What next?

Now that you have a good idea of ‘the numbers’ required for you to hit your sales targets, you need to start generating those sales / enquiries! To help you, here’s a list of 10 of the most effective forms of marketing for small and medium-sized businesses that I know.

Over to you!

What forms of marketing have you found to be most and least effective for your business? Please share your experiences with us and leave a comment below!

Twitter photo shock from PhotoShop

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We have all heard those stories, where someone has used PhotoShop to make themselves look younger, more handsome or thinner – right?

Well, what I am about to share with you here is what I call photo-shock!

It’s the shock someone experiences when they meet someone for the first time, who they have previously only seen very heavily PhotoShopped pictures of.

A twitter connection

I spoke with a friend last week, who told me about her shock at meeting a man for the first time; whom she had only previously communicated with via twitter.

They agreed to meet in person; as this guy is a designer and my friend had some design work, which he wanted the chance to quote for.  So, they decided it was best to meet in a public place and chose Starbucks. My friend arrived a little early, grabbed a coffee and waited.

Noticing her twitter friend was about 20 minutes late, she decided to give him a quick call, just to make sure he was OK. The weather was extremely bad and she was concerned he may have had an accident.

Imagine her surprise, when he answered the phone and told her he was already there; sitting upstairs enjoying a coffee!  Now, my friend had sat downstairs, close to the door and she watched each person come in. She told me:

“At this point Jim, I just assumed he must have arrived before I did; because I watched the door like a hawk, so that I could welcome him and ‘break the ice’.”

Even after being told where he was sitting, she STILL couldn’t spot him – until he called over to her!  Suddenly she figured out what had happened!

The picture used by her twitter friend had been so heavily PhotoShopped that it was basically a different person! As a professional designer and an expert with PhotoShop, he was able to create an amazing set of pictures of himself for his website and twitter profile; which look great – but are nothing whatsoever like he really looks.  She was genuinely shocked!

Most noticeably, the man she met seemed to be around her age (she’s 52), yet the pictures he uses online look to be closer to someone in their late twenties. He had doctored the images to change his age by around 25 years.  As she told me;

it’s one thing to pick pictures of yourself that show you in your best light or to remove the odd zit / spot; but this guy looked like the father of the guy I was expecting to meet. It instantly destroyed any trust I previously had in him.

Although this might sound like a funny story, there’s an important issue here.

What about trust?

Before someone will do business with us, they have to trust us.  They need to believe we will deliver on the service we promise or that the product we supply really will do whatever we claim it will.  If someone starts off a business relationship, behind a heavily doctored picture of them self, is it REALLY going to impress a prospective client when they learn it’s a fake?

Over to you!

If you met someone for the first time and saw that they had been using heavily doctored images of themselves online – would it create a ‘trust issue’ for you?

Do you believe, as my friend does, that this is a form of dishonesty or is it OK to use software to make yourself look as good as possible? Is there a limit, beyond which it’s unacceptable, if so, where’s that limit in your opinion?

Let us know what you think!