Jim Connolly Marketing

Do you stand behind your work?

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As business owners, we face a challenge every day: To rise above the broken promises of those who went before us.

Allow me to explain

  • When we say we go the extra mile for our clients, the marketplace was promised that before, by someone who failed to deliver.
  • When we say we finish projects on time and on budget, the marketplace was promised that before, by someone who failed to deliver.
  • When we say our work creates great results, the marketplace was promised that before, by someone who failed to deliver.

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Promises, promises

Whenever we make any statement about the value of our services, the marketplace will have been promised it before, from someone who failed to deliver. As a result, these claims wash over prospective clients. They have nothing like the power that many business owners believe.

Unless… they are supported with undeniable evidence. This is tricky. Even some top websites have been busted, for getting their friends to endorse their products with fake testimonials. Review sites are also littered with fake, positive reviews. This means our legitimate testimonials and promises are viewed through a filter.

Thankfully, there is a super-effective alternative, which provides the essential proof our prospective clients or customers need.

Standing behind your own work

Another option is to make better promises. The kind of promises that are easy for people to believe. This is how I market my own business. It means building a solid, professional reputation and then standing behind your own work.

This approach takes time and requires proof. One of the finest ways to do this, is to create a business blog and show up regularly with useful information.

Why?

When someone arrives on your blog, they can see that you regularly share useful ideas on your topic. They get an insight into your abilities and commitment. For example, when people come to Jim’s Marketing Blog for the first time, they can see 5 years worth of work and thousands of ideas. Before they speak to me or email me, they can see that I know my subject and that I can be relied on to start something and stick with it.

I suggest you consider doing the same. Make 2013 the year you decide to take business blogging seriously. The rewards are huge. I can help you and show you exactly what you need to do. To find out more, click here!

Social networking and the never ending race

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The race is on. However, this race has no finishing line, is impossible to win and can damage your business.

I’m referring to the race for social networking followers, fans or contacts. It’s endless.

The challenge

The more time we put in, the bigger those numbers get. The challenge, is that we don’t have unlimited time to chase those unlimited numbers. As business owners, I believe we need to be more selective how we invest our time. We need to look at the return we want to achieve from our social networking investment, then focus on that definable objective. This gives us the clarity to concentrate on quality over quantity.

The starting point comes when we determine what we regard as quality, based on what we want to achieve. We can then set time aside each day or week, to invest in reaching that goal.

Making a noise or making a difference?

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If you take a look at any social network or visit any networking event, the people there can be placed into one of the following broad groups.

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  1. People who are making a noise. They are simply adding to the background chatter.
  2. People who are making a difference. They are being listened to. Their voices are the ones we tune into.

Which group am I in?

Most of us would like to be in that second group. The easiest way for us to determine if we are, is for us to ask ourselves the following question and then answer it as honestly as we can:

If I failed to show up, would people really miss me?

The people who struggle for attention usually focus on making noise. We don’t miss them when they’re not there. They send us DM spam on Twitter. They add us to their newsletter list without permission. They push their product or service at us on Facebook, Google+ and Linkedin. They pester us at networking events, pretending to be interested in us, just waiting to hit us with a sales pitch. Their thinking looks like this: If I can just pester enough people, someone will listen to me.

Rather than craft a more compelling story, they push a bland story harder and harder.

A more effective approach

A better approach, is to focus on making a difference. When your work or your ideas are making a difference, people talk about you. They ask you about your ideas. They speak with their friends about you when you are not there. They become engaged with you.

Yes, making a difference requires more creative thinking than pestering people, however, it’s a lot easier, it’s less stressful… and it works!

Discover the gold mine within your business

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Part of running a successful small business, is understanding and maximising your advantages. This post is all about one major advantage you have over large companies. I’m talking about your agility.

Agility is an asset

I want to start by giving a brief example of what I mean by agility.

As a small business owner, you have the agility to get an idea in the morning and put that idea into play by end of business that day. Large companies can take weeks or months to execute a new idea. I wrote an article about this for Microsoft, which lists 3 ways you can use agile thinking to grow your business.

The perfect scenario

The reason I am sharing this with you, is that marketing is changing. It now offers great opportunities to those of you who are agile. Marketing today moves extremely fast, especially social media marketing, which is real-time. This is the perfect scenario for those small businesses, who are prepared to use their agility. You can listen to what your marketplace is saying, identify an opportunity (or gap in the market) and then execute.

Of course, in order for you to benefit from your agility advantages, you need to embrace agile thinking and then get moving. The small business owner who gets the idea and fails to execute, has no advantage over the large company, who has the idea and can’t execute.

It looks like this:

Let’s work together and grow your business. To find out more click here!

9 Amazing free resources to help you grow your business and feed your mind

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Right now, you have access to an Aladdin’s Cave of freely available marketing, business development and professional development tools. In today’s post, I am going to share just 9 of them with you.

Free marketing and educational resources

Here are my 9 free resources. Remember to add yours at the end:

  1. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, will give you a blog for free and host it for free, too. Many of the world’s top blogs started off on this free platform and some have stayed with the free version of the service. I started this blog off using the free version of WordPress and today, around 60,000 people get updated when I publish each new post.
  2. The people at TED have made thousands of educational and inspirational videos available to you, for free.
  3. Microsoft offer you Skype for free, so you can easily collaborate with colleagues or clients via speech or video conferencing. So long as they have downloaded Skype, you can now work with people, with no geographic limitations and it won’t cost you a penny.
  4. Twitter, Google+ and Facebook welcome you to use their services for free and Linkedin offers a useful, free version of their service too. Years ago, you paid an organisation to attend physical networking events, and lost a huge chunk of your day travelling to the events, attending the events and getting back from the events. You were lucky if 100 people attended and even luckier if you made regular, meaningful contacts. Now you can network with thousands of people anywhere in the world, for nothing more than the time you’re prepared to invest.
  5. Seth Godin digs deep to come up with something useful to say, via his daily blog posts. These are essential reading.
  6. Christopher Penn and John Wall turn up on an almost weekly basis, to share ideas and opinions on the world of marketing, in their Marketing Over Coffee podcast. I reviewed it here.
  7. You can now give your online and offline marketing photos and images more impact, with free image editing software. I use picmonkey.
  8. It has never been easier to capture ideas than it is today. If you use a smartphone, Evernote provides an extremely useful free version of their service, which allows you to collect ideas, sounds, images, webpages and more – and then work with them.
  9. If you have a website or blog, you need to measure what’s happening on the site and by far the most popular tool for this, is Google Analytics. Google Analytics lets you track everything, from how many visitors your site receives and what your most popular pages are, to what words people use when looking for you on a search engine and what type of devices they use to access your site. This free package offers far too many features to mention here and is extremely useful, especially if you do not already have any analytics software.

How to show people your achievements and create a powerful impact!

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No one likes people who are boastful. Little wonder then, that so many small business owners feel uncomfortable when showcasing their achievements. However, unless we learn how to show the marketplace what we have accomplished and when we are capable of, we will place a very low ceiling on our success.

In my experience, the best way to overcome a tendency to sell ourselves short, is to focus on honesty, context and proof.

Honesty and context

By being honest about what you have done and explaining your achievements or accolades in context, you shift your focus from being boastful to being truthful.

Context is really important too. If you simply list a ton of achievements every time you connect with someone, you will look like an ass. However, if you list them in the right places, such as the about page of your website, people will actually be looking for them. You will simply be offering people the information they need. If they are reading your about page, they are checking you out – they want to know about you.

Where’s the proof?

Anyone can claim to have achieved anything. As a result, many people lie like crazy about their achievements. So, it’s understandable that our prospective clients or customers want some proof, to back up our claims.

For example:

  • If you tell people you have been a content marketer for 5 years, link to something that backs that up; such as some old blog posts. You can also do as Seth Godin does and have your archive on the sidebar of your blog. Seth’s shows he was blogging in 2002.
  • If you claim in your marketing material that you have a famous client, get permission from the person to use their name and if possible, get a photo of you together, too. Otherwise, don’t expect people to automatically believe you.
  • If you tell people your work was featured in a well known newspaper, provide a link to the article. If you mention it in your offline marketing, use a scan of the coverage.
  • If you tell people you won a prestigious award, provide a link back to the announcement on the award website.

In other words, if you want your achievements to be seen as truthful you should show some proof. Yes, I know you’re honest, you know you’re honest, but a prospective client who doesn’t know you yet, who’s reading your marketing material for the first time, would like some proof.

For instance:

  • On the about page of Jim’s Marketing Blog, I mention that I write for The Microsoft Small Business Blog. I then link to one of my articles, which is on the Microsoft blog and checkable.
  • I do the same with a link to The Guardian newspaper, when they wrote about my listing on The UK Blog Tree as the UK’s most influential marketing blogger and the 2nd most influential business blogger.

Getting the balance right

Those and other achievements are only on my about page, so they are in context. If I listed them everywhere, they would be out of context. Just mentioning them here as an example, will sound boastful to some. That’s how important context is and how careful we have to be, to get the balance right.