Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

Make your marketing count

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One of the marketing challenges that all businesses face, is how to leverage their time and money for the best possible return on investment (or ROI).  There are so many things we all could be doing, yet these are not of equal value to us.

For example, there’s an interesting debate along these lines over at my ideas blog. It’s about whether people ought to spend more of their ‘social media time’ providing content for their blogs and less of that time providing content for social media sites like; Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc.

Marketing puzzle

Part of developing the best marketing mix for your business, is to build a marketing strategy that focuses all your efforts in the most profitable way possible.  This is why it’s so important to monitor and measure your marketing feedback.  This will show you where your time and money is best invested, as well as any areas where you are not seeing a worthwhile return.

Why not take a moment to review your marketing activities. Look at what you are doing and what each activity is costing you in both time and money.  Then, measure your marketing return for each of these activities.  The results are often illuminating and extremely valuable.

6 words to transform your results!

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“Start with the end in mind.”

Those 6 words contain a piece of business advice, which is of more commercial value than many entire books on business success.  The information in that simple, short sentence, could have saved many businesses from going broke and transformed many struggling businesses into super-star success stories.

By focusing with clarity on your desired end result, before starting something new, you massively increase your chances of success. However, many businesses will, for example, start a new marketing campaign, introduce a new service or maybe start a new blog / website – with only a vague idea of what they actually want to achieve.

With only a fuzzy picture of what they want to achieve, it’s very hard to know if they are even on target or not.  It’s like setting off on a journey “up north” for the first time, without the address of the destination.  You might know that you need to head north, but that’s not enough information – You need an address if you ever want to find the place.

Social media can be low leverage

I am seeing this more and more with businesses deciding to invest huge amounts of time and effort on social networking / social media, with no clear idea why.  They will start blogging, using LinkedIn, FaceBook or Twitter – simply because they think they should. However, without a clear goal for all that effort, you can waste a LOT of time and effort!  Social media can be a very low leverage activity and can eat into a vast amount of your time, unless you start with the end in mind.

In the past few weeks, several people with massive social networks have called or emailed me, asking what I think they should do “to monetize” their following. One guy, with over 40,000 followers on Twitter has told me that he is investing an amazing 4 hours a day, 6 days a week, building his Twitter network and has almost forgotten why he even started!  Here’s what he told me;

To be honest Jim, I started off without a clear idea of what I wanted to achieve, so I just decided to get as many followers as possible.  Now, I have all these followers, but 99% of them are not even in the market for my services; which is pretty niche.

Twitter focus

I started off using Twitter, in order to offer another channel of communication for the community of people who read my blog and my newsletter. Because of the number of readers I have, I soon gained a massive following.

Initially, I followed them all back and then quickly realised that I was following over 20,000 people, which was too time consuming. Because I had a clear picture of what I wanted to achieve from Twitter, I was able to literally reset my Twitter account (and delete the 23,500 “follows” I had too,) knowing with 100% certainty that I had made the right decision.

Before you start off with a new project, make sure you have a crystal clear idea of what you want to achieve from it.

You can only remain on target, if you know what your target is.

Quick Marketing Tip – Strategic marketing

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One of the common factors behind all successful businesses, is that they use a strategic approach to their marketing rather than a tactical approach. So, what’s the difference?

Strategic marketing

marketing tactic strategyIn short, businesses that take a strategic approach to their marketing, think ahead and plan ahead.  They ‘compound’ many marketing activities together to leverage the best possible sales results.

Tactical marketing

Businesses that take a tactical approach, tend not to plan their marketing in advance. As a result, each individual marketing activity is done in isolation and therefore, lacks momentum. Tactical marketing decisions are usually made either on a whim or (most commonly), in reaction to a sales problem.

For example, a business owner will wait until sales are down – and then decide to ‘do something’ about it.  They then do one single thing in isolation, (often a mailing, advertisement or an email blast) and typically get a very poor response.  Often, I see a business with a single marketing letter or advertisement, which they use whenever ‘business is bad’ – rather than using a series of letters or advertisements, which build upon each other strategically, to create a compound leverage effect!

What is compound leverage & why do you need it?

Compound leverage is when you do a series of marketing activities, which compound to create a result that’s greater than the sum of the individual parts.

For example:
If you have a marketing email and you send that same marketing email, to the same list of people 6 times – you will see your results drop after each mailing.

However, if you decide to do a series of 6 different marketing emails; with each email building upon the previous one, you will see the power of the 6th email massively leveraged, because of the foundation created by the initial email and all the curiosity / desire created by the 2nd-5th emails.

By switching from a tactical approach to a strategic approach, you can massively improve the success of your marketing without having to invest a penny extra.  In fact, many people see far better results AND are able to cut their marketing budget at the same time!

The switch from a tactical approach to a strategic one, requires a shift from having a short-term focus (tactical) to having a medium or long term focus (strategic.) Every successful business I have worked with or studied, thinks and plans ahead with a long term focus.

If you want your business to not only survive but thrive during 2009, don’t wait until 1st January to do something – make a plan today! Put a strategy together, which consists of a series of marketing activities that compound to provide you with the kind of forward momentum you and your business will need in 2009!

Here’s a list of things to consider adding to your marketing strategy – from the most popular page on the blog!

The value of your network

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If you are one of those dedicated people, who invests a lot of their time developing a network of contacts, I have a question for you:

“How valuable to your business, (in financial terms), is your network of contacts?”

I ask this because in my experience, many small businesses focus almost exclusively on developing networks of people, with little influence in their marketplace!

networking events groups leverageA VERY low leverage activity!

You can end up wasting thousands of pounds worth of your time and money on local networking events and joining networking groups; whilst simultaneously limiting the time you have to actually RUN YOUR BUSINESS! A lose-lose situation.

Although a local Accountant or Bank Manager can be an excellent source of credible referred business; not everyone in your local business community has credible access to your target market.

Without credibility, a lead or referral is worthless!

This is because when a person who lacks credibility recommends your business to someone, you become associated in their mind with that ‘non-credible’ person.  I wrote recently about a Lawyer whose law firm has suffered terribly; after he joined a networking group and had his good name associated with some hard-sell tactics, used by a few of his fellow networkers to generate leads!

Of course, one of the most effective ways to network today is from your desk! Millions of people have totally ditched traditional, time-consuming networking, for free online networks.  I use one myself called Twitter which is excellent!

There are also more formal online networking groups like ecademy and linkedin that you might like to explore – neither of which I use or endorse! In any case, the costs will be massively lower than traditional networking.  So will the demands on your time – essential for people like us who run small businesses!

To make it in sales – fish for whales!

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When I started my first sales job, over 20 years ago, my boss gave me a piece of sales and marketing advice that has helped me generate millions of pounds worth of sales – and I am going to share it with you right now!

“To make it in sales, fish for whales!”

I asked my former boss what his comment about fishing for whales actually meant.  He explained:

“Jim, if you go fishing and you catch 10 goldfish, you won’t even fill a cup – but if you catch 10 whales, you will fill half the beach!”

Sales leverage

With that simple explanation, he taught me how the amount of time and effort required to win a £50,000 sale, was not a great deal more than it took to win a sale of £5,000.  This simple idea totally blew my mind!  It was my introduction to what I know today as leverage.

I immediately realised that if I wanted to succeed in sales, I needed to prioritise my sales efforts and focus on where I could deliver most value as a salesperson – because that’s where all those whales are!

If you want to dramatically improve your sales figures, make sure your time and energy is invested wisely – fishing for whales and not goldfish!

How to test and measure your marketing

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As any marketing professional worth their salt will confirm, successful marketing is based around a process, where you ‘test, measure, test measure’ everything you do, until it’s as effective as you can get it.

Here’s how testing & measuring works!

You test (or try) a new idea and then you measure the results you get. If your business uses mail shots, test a new headline and measure what feedback you get.

If, for example, your new headline generates a 10% increase in enquiries or sales – keep the new headline and dump the previous one.  Then, test a different offer or guarantee in the mailing.  If the new offer or guarantee increases your response rate by 20%, keep it.  If it reduces the number of positive responses you get, dump it and test another offer or guarantee.

Over a relatively small number of mailings, you can dramatically improve your results.

This constant tweaking, based on testing and measuring, is how you improve your marketing results. However, you never start off with perfect marketing.

Your aim is to leverage your marketing, so you get the best possible return you can. This means it is always a work-in-progress – never perfect!

Paralysis by analysis

I spoke with the owner of a small business last week, who had some really exciting ideas for marketing her services.  The problem is, she has had these great ideas for over a year and still done nothing with them!  When I asked her what was causing the delay, she replied; “I’m a perfectionist.  Everything has to be just right before I begin.”

Ironically, the perfect way to begin your marketing is to decide what you what to do and then JUST START! Once you know you have a good idea or you see a good marketing opportunity, get to work immediately!  One of the reasons many small businesses fail to achieve the sales success they want, is that they suffer from ‘paralysis by analysis.’ 

By  examining everything in too much detail and then waiting for every condition to be just perfect, they either do nothing at all or take so long that the opportunity has gone!

Only change one thing at a time

When you use the test / measure approach in your marketing, it’s really important that you only ever test one thing at a time.  If you change more than one element, it’s impossible to see what caused the change in your feedback.

So, if you currently run an advertisement in a magazine or website, only change one component of that advertisement then measure the difference in the response you get.  If you change the size of an advertisement and also the wording or design, you will not know what created the increase or decrease in your results.

Measure everything!

It’s extremely important to measure your feedback accurately and fully.  This means you need to measure the negative response as well as the positive.  An email marketing exercise that generates 10 replies, from people who do not become clients, is NOT a zero response rate!  It is proof that 10 people read your email and were motivated enough to call or email you.

If you sent that email to 5000 people, it’s also proof that 4990 people DIDN’T feel motivated enough to call or email you – and that’s just as valuable!

What they say in their response to your marketing is also really important. For example, if they say that they expected your fee or price to be lower than you quoted – they are telling you clearly that you need to pump more value into your marketing message! Measure everything and then, when you test the next time, use that feedback to improve your results.

Start now – Look at your existing marketing for an opportunity to test and measure.