Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing ideas to help you grow your business

Marketing Tip: How to motivate your marketplace to take action

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marketing advice, marketing help

All successful marketing has one important thing in common. It motivates people to take action, now!

Here’s how it works. In 3 simple steps.

  1. Motivates: It gives them a compelling reason. A reason, which is powerful enough to grab their attention and generate desire.
  2. Take action: It makes a direct request. It asks them to call us, click here, proceed to checkout, visit us, read this, subscribe, etc.
  3. Now: It asks them, whilst their motivation is high, to take the action required. Right now. Straight away. That’s because even if they love what you said and are genuinely interested, their attention will soon jump onto the next thing. And you’ll lose them. They tell themselves “I’ll do it later” and later becomes never.

Almost all small business marketing is missing at least one of those essential steps. It’s either not motivating enough, lacks a direct call to action or lacks urgency.

A quick tip

Take a look at all your marketing messages and check you have those 3 steps fully covered. It’s hard to overstate what a massive, positive impact this will have on your marketing.

What a difference 20 minutes can make

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word of mouth, recommendations, referrals

A reader emailed me with some great news. He used the advice from one of my blog posts and it’s worked extremely well. There’s a powerful idea behind what he did, which I’m going to share with you. It can help you achieve similar (or even better) results.

Here’s what happened.

Danny is a partner in a medium-sized accountancy firm. After reading this, he decided to open for business 20 minutes earlier than his competitors. So, instead of 9:00am, he and around half the team are there from 8:40am. He then emailed all his clients to let them know.

The response was immediate.

He said, “I had replies back in minutes Jim. Clients loved that they could call us before their own businesses opened. They also said it was really useful, that they could pop in on their way to work. It created a wave of good feeling toward us. In the 3 months since we started, client recommendations have increased by 87% on the same period last year.”

Why it worked

Danny increased the value of his service, in a meaningful way.

Clients were immediately able to see the benefit. Most of his clients are in retail. They could now speak with an accountant, not a call-handling company, before the client’s own business opened its doors. It was a story worth sharing. So his clients told fellow retailers, knowing they’d find it useful too. Some of these retailers switched. Danny’s team bought into it too. They appreciated the flexibility of being able to start and finish work, 20 minutes earlier.

That’s an 87% increase. For the sake of 20 minutes. Think about that for a moment.

How to make it work for you

The real lesson from Danny’s story is NOT about opening 20 minutes earlier. That’s just a tactic.

No.

It’s about understanding the importance of constantly looking for opportunities to make your service remarkable. Remarkable enough to get people’s attention. Remarkable enough to talk about. Remarkable enough for your clients to truly value the extra something you provide.

The end result is massively more referrals, far better client retention and never having to sell based on your fee again.

Here’s the post, which gave Danny his idea.

Consider increasing your fees by at least 500%. Yes. Really!

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marketing advice, marketing help

Would you like to develop a new and extremely (I mean EXTREMELY) profitable service? If you would, here’s a great place to start.

I want to begin by asking you to imagine something. I want you to imagine that a new client comes along and they’re paying you between 500% and 1,000% more than your current fee.

  • What kind of additional customer service would you be able to give them?
  • How much more of your attention would you be able to give them?
  • What additional problems would you be able to solve for them?

Here’s a suggestion: Consider building a new, premium version of your service, which offers those amazing advantages. Then charge for it accordingly and market it correctly.

Why?

Because there’s an extremely profitable niche in every marketplace, who are very happy to pay a premium fee, for a premium service. Plus, value-focused clients are the best people to work with because (in a very literal sense), they truly value what you do.

And you deserve clients like that.

I have a confession to make

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marketing help, marketing advice

I have a confession to make: I haven’t sold my services to anyone in over 20 years!

Sure, people hire me. When a business owner needs what I do, they get in touch. Then, if it’s a good fit, if I can help them achieve their best results ever, I’ll work with them. It’s a zero-pressure approach to marketing that’s saved me massive amounts of time and money.

Did you know?

Did you know, that’s exactly how marketing should work for all service providers (including you)? Your marketing should be attracting a predictable flow of clients.

If it isn’t doing that, it isn’t marketing.

At best, it’s a kludge of stuff. Stuff the business owner copied from a competitor, saw on a website, heard on a podcast or endured on some webinar. This stuff is then stuck together with duct tape and wrongly labelled as marketing.

My point?

The first stage in solving a problem, is to correctly identify the problem. Once you’ve done that, you’re able to look for the correct solution. This can save you years of frustration, years of wasted opportunities and years of unnecessary stress.

1 Essential word your marketing needs. Plus 1 you MUST avoid

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content marketing

Here’s a quick tip, to improve the effectiveness of your marketing. It’s all about a word you use regularly, which is negatively impacting how people feel about your business.

That word is… change!

People are hard-wired to fear change.

We know that change, good or bad, is a source of stress. Even something as positive as the change that comes from getting married, buying a new home or setting off for a week in the sun, is a cause of stress.

Because of the negative way people feel when confronted with change, it makes sense to remove the word from your marketing. Don’t worry, I am going to give you a massively more powerful, motivating alternative!

Improve rather than change

Whenever possible, use the word improve, rather than change. Improve, is a positive word. It’s an attractive word too, because we are always looking for something better.

For example, look how the phrase below becomes far more powerful, when change is replaced with improve.

“This copywriting tip will change your marketing results.” (It could make them worse)

“This copywriting tip will improve your marketing results.” (It will make them better)

Your prospective clients or customers fear change, but want things to improve. So, stop offering them what they fear and give them what they want!

Tip: Here’s how to ensure your copywriting is super-effective.

The power of thinking big. Really BIG!

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There’s real power in thinking big. For a business owner, it looks something like this:

  • Thinking big leads to big plans.
  • Big, exciting plans are motivating. They motivate us to take action.
  • When we take action, we make things happen.
  • And because the things we make happen are big and exciting, we make truly meaningful progress.

If you’re not feeling motivated, if you’re not making big exciting plans, if you’re not seeing meaningful progress — Start thinking BIGGER.

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