Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

Are you excited about your business? You should be. Here’s why!

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marketing, excitement

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How excited are you about your business?

Here’s why I’m asking. It matters. It really, really matters. That’s because people notice. They notice when you’re enthusiastic and just as importantly, they notice when you’re going through the motions.

The thing about enthusiasm

Enthusiasm is highly contagious: When someone talks to us with enthusiasm, we feed off their excitement. We lean forward and pay attention. We feel more confident about them. It’s a positive experience, which leaves a powerful impression on us.

However…

A lack of enthusiasm is equally contagious: When someone talks to us about their business with too little enthusiasm, we feed off their lack of interest. We politely nod. Our interest drops. There’s no energy. We soon forget them and whatever they said.

We can’t expect our customers, contacts or the marketplace in general to be enthusiastic about our business, if we’re not. It starts with us. So, don’t hide your excitement. Don’t keep it a secret. Let it shine through everything you do.

Steve Jobs, money and success

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marketing success

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It’s an interesting fact that very few of the world’s most successful businesspeople, set out with money or success as their primary target.

  • They aimed to be valuable.
  • They aimed to make the world or the marketplace a better place.
  • They aimed to make a difference.

However, money or success was not their primary focus.

Here’s how they did it!

Steve Jobs famously said:

“I was worth over $1,000,000 when I was 23, and over $10,000,000 when I was 24, and over $100,000,000 when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money”.

If Jobs was focused primarily on the money or success, he’d have been able to cash in when he was in his 20’s… super rich and exceptionally successful.

When Einstein said, “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value”, he showed where his focus was. Again, it was about the value. Einstein carried on working until his death, even though he could have quit decades earlier with his reputation set in history forever.

To understand how the most successful and wealthy business owners achieved their success, we need to look at why most business owners struggle.

In it just for the money

You can usually tell pretty fast, when you encounter someone who is primarily in it for the money. That’s because it’s both obvious and extremely unattractive. And this makes it very hard for them to succeed.

Here are some examples we see all the time, which you will recognise instantly:

  • They are the salespeople, whose eyes light up like a wolf when they spot a potential sales victim.
  • They are the ill-informed marketing gurus, who STILL say the money is in the list, because they haven’t figured out the value is in the community.
  • They are the affiliate marketers, who leave spammy links and comments on blogs and Facebook.
  • They are the pests, who send us unwanted spam email.
  • They are the pushy business owners, who corner us at events. The ones who pretend they want to know about us, when we know it’s just an old, cringe-worthy networking tactic.
  • They are the struggling restaurant owners, who use slightly lower quality ingredients and hire slightly lower quality chefs, and end up with a low quality restaurant that no one recommends.

They are the kind of business owners you thought of, as you were reading those examples!

The way forward for smart business owners

Focus on value. Create products or services that are meaningfully different from the competition. Solve better problems. Create work you are proud of. Offer remarkable service and outstanding quality. And delight your customers at every opportunity.

Persistently create value and use marketing to make it visible. People are extremely attracted to value and they pay a premium for it too. Just ask the owner of any high priced Apple product, the owner of a luxury car or the client of any leading service provider.

Get this right my friend, and the money and success will surely follow.

Are you a Closer?

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marketing open

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When I started out, it was all about closing the sale.

Good salespeople were often referred to as good closers.

Decades later, I still see sales recruiters asking for candidates who have a proven record of closing.

Here’s why we need to be extremely careful before adopting the closing mindset, or any of the countless closing tricks and techniques.

The closing mindset

The challenge with the closing mindset, is that it positions the prospective customer as little more than a barrier. A hurdle between you and the sale. An obstacle to be overcome. Little wonder so many closing techniques are based on psychological tricks.

The use of long, extremely uncomfortable silences at key points in the sales process, for example, is used to put pressure on the prospective client. So is refusing to accept a “no” from them, by asking what they need additional clarity on, each time they want out.

In a nutshell: The focus is on outmanoeuvring your opponent. It’s them against you.

Here’s a very different approach, along with why I strongly recommend you use it.

Opening relationships

I built my reputation in sales by adopting the polar opposite approach. Instead of focusing on closing, I focused on opening.

Opening relationships, to be exact.

I found (and still find) the idea of closing to be self-defeating. I discovered that you can achieve a great deal more, by opening relationships with people. This means taking time to listen to them. And then learning about their challenges and what they want / need. If our marketing is targeted correctly, we’re automatically only speaking with people who are our ideal profile of client.

When handled correctly, and preceded with effective marketing, this means there’s no need to close anything (or close on anyone).

The whole process becomes a naturally-flowing conversation, where we seek to help people overcome a challenge, with the products or services we provide.

It also means refusing to sell anything to anyone, if we believe it’s not what they need.

Too passive?

This approach may sound passive, but consider your friends. Consider the people you like. The people you trust. The people you love to have around you. Are they aggressive towards you? No! That’s because we prefer those who respect us and are open and honest with us.

We like people who are open and honest.

We buy from people who are open and honest.

We trust people who are open and honest.

We recommend people who are open and honest.

In short, the more open we are, the more opportunities we’re open to.

Email marketing doesn’t work

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marketing

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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. 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, not professionally written.
  • 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 great email, sent to the right people, with the wrong subject line, won’t work. No one will open it.

You get the idea. In short, before you reject any form of marketing as being ineffective, make sure you’re using it correctly.

I’ve had some ideas. And now they’re yours. You’re welcome

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I shared a few ideas with business owners this week, which they found useful. So, I thought I’d share them with you.

Here they are in no particular order.

Become a proactive collector of ideas

When you get an idea, stop what you’re doing and capture it. Then set a little time aside at the end of each day to focus on what you’ve captured.

I usually grab ideas using the voice recorder on my phone. Especially if they come to me whilst out walking, which is where most of my best ideas come from. Later, I get them down in writing. This allows me to dig a little deeper. If an idea still seems like it could be useful, I keep it. By the way, this post is the result of an idea I had yesterday.

Invest in something your business needs

Invest in something today, which you know your business needs. Succeeding in business it challenging enough, when we give our business everything it needs. If we choose to starve our business of these resources, it’s impossible to survive… let alone thrive.

Make a tricky decision

Find a decision you have been avoiding and take action on it. Indecisiveness destroys progress. It’s also a major source of stress and unhappiness. It’s no coincidence that the most successful business owners are all proactive decision makers.

We need to remember that the decision to avoid a decision (to do nothing) is also a decision. By proactively making decisions, we regain control.

Share something useful

Publish something today, which will be useful to your marketplace and showcase your expertise. This might be a blog post, vlog, newsletter, social media update… whichever you prefer. The key is to make sure that what you’re sharing is useful (to them) and not just a sales pitch.

Useful, knowledgeable people are always in demand. Think about that for a moment.

Start a new book

Start reading a book today, which will educate you or inspire you. The internet is useful for lots of things, but nothing quite beats a book, for delivering the written word with the focus and detail required.

This need not be a business book.

None (literally not one) of the most useful things I have learned from a book, came from a business book. They came from books on; faith, art, design, psychology, comedy, sport, music, history and lots more.

I’m not saying business books have no value. Just that the big lessons tend to come from outside the narrow business arena.

For example, a business owner who’s starting with very little money, will probably learn more from a book about the amazing success of Andy Warhol, than a business book. Plus, it’s extremely hard to get noticed, if you feed your mind on the same ideas from the same business gurus as your competitors.

I hope you found at least one of these ideas and suggestions useful, my friend. If you did, the next step is to put it into action and measure the results.

It’s a trap! The race to the bottom

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race to the bottom

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Without knowing it, many small business owners are engaged in a dangerous race to the bottom. In today’s post, I explain what’s meant by marketing professionals when we say race to the bottom, and why it’s almost always a terrible strategy for small businesses.

Race to the bottom: What does it mean?

In marketing, we tend to use the term to refer to making sales or winning new clients, based on being the cheapest option. This is most common among commodity businesses. The ‘winner’ of the race to the bottom is the business that’s the cheapest / lowest priced at that time.

Some large businesses use their financial muscle to work successfully with small profit margins. They have deals available to them, which smaller businesses can’t access. This allows larger businesses to compete in your marketplace, profitably, with extremely low prices (or fees).

However, small business owners tend to just lower their prices, as a way to make more sales or attract more clients. They then find competitors do the same, as you’ll see in a moment, and the race to the bottom begins.

This small business scenario, along with a better alternative, is what today’s post is all about.

The race to the bottom prize?

The winner gets, wait for it… the privilege of building a business on a foundation of customers or clients, who will leave them the moment a cheaper provider comes along.

It’s a high risk, low return strategy. It requires you to constantly look for ways to lower your overhead, cut corners and speed things up. All this, in an effort to attract the least loyal profile of customers in the world: Those who switch from provider to provider, looking for the lowest prices.

Why is such a high risk, low return strategy so popular with small business owners?

Simple.

They see it as an easy way to attract more customers or make more sales. However, a look at the medium and longer-term picture shows how this can go horribly wrong.

Here’s what I’ve seen small business owners do over and over again.

Bob’s race to the bottom

Let’s take Bob the business owner as an example.

  • Bob decides to lower his prices by 10%. He soon notices a slightly better sales conversion rate.
  • So, he lowers prices by another 5%. And it improves sales even more.
  • Some of Bob’s competitors decide to do the same.
  • The race to the bottom is on!
  • Bob now needs to lower his prices by another (whatever)%, because his competitors are charging the same kind of prices as him. Bob’s prices are now rock bottom or very close to rock bottom.
  • Bob continues to make some sales, BUT with very little profit.
  • THEN… if a well-funded competitor decides to sell at a loss for 6 months (to gain market share), Bob has to try and survive on fewer and fewer sales, relying on income from hardly profitable customers.
  • Alternatively, if Bob’s overhead increases and he has to start increasing his prices, all those price sensitive customers he raced to win, will start looking for the new, cheapest provider.

It’s very easy to attract customers by reducing your prices. However, it’s unsustainable. So, if this is something you are considering, please think again my friend. Consider the medium and longer-term consequences of winning the race to the bottom.

Relax. Here’s a better approach. One that works extremely well. (You’re welcome).

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