marketing blogs Archives - Jim's Marketing Blog

Ignore the uninterested. Target the unhappy. Here’s why!

By Jim Connolly | March 25, 2023

If your marketing is not attracting enough paying clients or customers, I have an idea to share with you. It’s based on a strategy I use with my clients and the results are amazing.

It starts with a foundational truth of marketing.

You can make a fortune if you market to the right kind of people. However, you will waste time and money, if you market to the wrong kind of people.

So, who should you be marketing to? And why?

Allow me to explain.

Ignore the uninterested

No matter how great your service is, people who are delighted with their current provider are highly unlikely to switch to you. That’s because they’re not looking for a new provider. They’re simply not interested in dumping a service, which they trust and are extremely happy with.

We call the people who are not in the market for your services, the uninterested. Whilst it is possible to sell to those with no interest, it’s an extremely low leverage activity.

It’s also totally unnecessary.

Focus on the unhappy

It makes a great deal more sense to focus on those who are eagerly looking for a new provider. We call these people the unhappy. They are actively in the market for what you’re offering. They’re ready to make a purchasing decision. They are the exact type of motivated buyers your business needs. I wrote this post about how to get your prospects’ urgent attention and immediate action, which you might find helpful.

Certainly, build an awareness of how great your service is. Make it easy for people to find you, when their relationship with their current provider sours. That goes without saying. However, if you want to quickly connect with people who will give you their full attention AND who are ready to hire you or buy from you now, create a marketing strategy that focuses on attracting the unhappy.

This is a specialist area of marketing and not suitable for dabbling with. But when you acquire the correct strategy, it’s hugely more financially rewarding than the typical, let’s see who responds to our marketing, approach.

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

By Jim Connolly | August 15, 2020

Here’s a very quick tip, to help you improve the sales 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. In short, change is a trigger word, which places the prospective client or customer in a suboptimal state.

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.

Your marketing begins with the service you provide

By Jim Connolly | January 25, 2016

In this post, I’m going to share the answer to one of the biggest and most important problems facing business owners.

A fundamental truth

When we encounter outstanding value, we take action. We make a purchase. We tell our friends, so they don’t miss out.

At no point do we need to be pestered to make a purchase.
At no point do we need to be pestered to spread the word.

The outstanding value captures our attention and then motivates us to take positive action.

Your prospective clients are just the same

If your prospective clients encounter outstanding value, it will capture their attention. It will motivate them to hire you, buy from you and / or spread the word about you. If you offer outstanding value, once a handful of people know what you do and how you do it, the word will spread like a virus. [That’s why we call effective marketing Viral Marketing].

There should be no need whatsoever to keep pestering the same people again and again with your marketing.

However…

If you’re telling people about your service, yet they don’t hire you or tell their friends about you, you must take heed.
If your clients are not a very regular source of new clients, you must take heed.

You need to listen to the silence. It’s telling you something. It’s telling you that your service isn’t interesting enough to capture people’s attention and not valuable enough to motivate them to take action.

Confronted with this feedback, the typical small business owner does the exact opposite of what they need to do. Instead of pumping massively more value into their service or product, they look for magical ways to market an unattractive service, which no one is talking about.

Marketing begins with the service or product you provide

When I work with a new client, we start by making their service irresistible. I show them, often simple ways, to make their service vastly more attractive to their prospective clients. It’s only after this, that we dazzle their marketplace with the powerful mix of their newly-irresistible service and highly effective marketing.

Get those 2 elements right and the sky is the limit!

Want to massively improve your marketing? Then get specific!

By Jim Connolly | February 10, 2010

There’s a big difference between learning something and learning something of value. When I speak with people about my services, I often say;

“Some coaches teach so others can learn – That’s not me!
Some coaches teach so others can accomplish – That IS me!”

This is because not all information is the same. I meet with businesspeople all the time, who tell me how much they enjoyed a certain book or how interesting they found a seminar or workshop they attended – BUT that they still have the same problems or challenges. They were educated, but with the wrong information for their unique situation.

What are your specific marketing challenges?

I’m guessing that every person reading that question, will have similar answers. They may want to:

Make more sales.
Make the same number of sales, but make those sales higher quality.
Boost their profits.
Find new markets for their products / services.
All the above

Here’s where the challenge begins for most small businesses. You see, although they generally want to achieve one or more of the above outcomes, their situations are unique. For example, they have differing skills, time resources, finances and unique likes and dislikes. So, if they apply a ‘general’ marketing idea that they pick up from a; book, seminar, website or newsletter, it’s usually pretty ineffective.

Another month / year’s worth of business progress is lost. (Ouch!)

When I put a marketing strategy together for one of my clients, I always match what they want to achieve, with their unique resources. For those of you intent on going it alone with your marketing, I strongly suggest you try and do the same.

Here’s just a handful of things you need to ask yourself, before you use marketing ideas you find in a book, seminar, website etc:

Does it fit in with your time resources? Do you have the time available to start it off and to see it through to the end?
Does it fit in with your finances? Can you afford to implement it correctly in the short, medium and long-term?
Will it provide the results you need quickly enough? When do you need to see a bankable return (MONEY) from it? Do you believe it will get you where you need to be in time?
Is it consistent with your personality and your reputation? If you put (whatever) marketing in place, will it be consistent with your commercial image?
Can you clearly see the direct benefit it will bring? Is it going to generate; readers, follows, retweets, Facebook friends OR is it going to generate the bankable results you need?
How might it impact your relationship with your existing clients and customers? For instance, if you are thinking of offering a super deal for new clients, how might this make your existing clients feel – knowing they are getting a worse deal?
Is the end result likely to generate the profile of client or customer you want? Are you sure that doing (whatever) marketing, is going to deliver the type of new business you want?

The point of this post is to highlight that your unique situation will only improve, when you start using strategies that compliment it correctly.

Whatever do you, don’t waste another year doing the wrong things really well!

Easy access to the marketing answers you need!

By Jim Connolly | February 4, 2010

I had one of those moments earlier, where something suddenly clicks into place. I figured out that Jims Marketing Blog is not actually a blog.

Yes, it’s built using blog software, but it’s not a true blog. A blog (short for web log) was originally supposed to be an online journal. That’s why everything’s presented in date order; with the latest ‘news’ at the top. This format works brilliantly for news blogs or those offering time-sensitive information.

However, this blog (like most other business blogs) doesn’t typically offer time sensitive information. For example, yesterday’s post about managing your reputation, could have been written next month or 2 years ago. If you need to know how to write a great marketing letter, who cares if it was posted in February or April?

The typical posts I offer here, are far more like marketing articles or short marketing guides, than chronological, blog updates. And herein lies the challenge for content providers using blogs to publish their content.

Like most blogs, if someone shows up here today for the first time, they will see this post and below it, excerpts of another dozen or so posts in date order. The thing is, there are hundreds of marketing articles here, covering thousands of ideas.

Yes, people can use the “search” box on the right to look for specific marketing information, but most people don’t! They start reading the current post and then follow links within the post or maybe one of the related posts at the bottom of the post. This really isn’t an ideal format and it means a lot of people miss the key marketing answers they need.

I’ve seen other bloggers try workarounds, like having a “the best of” section – but the READER decides what’s the best post – Based on what THEY are looking for help on, not the blogger! These “best of” sections simply make popular posts more popular. Great for increasing the blogger’s page views, but lousy for the reader!

A possible solution?

I’m working on a way around this, which will be based on developing a small number of dedicated sections, each themed on a core area of marketing. This will be similar to the way categories work on a blog, but hopefully easier for people to find and navigate around. Those who like the current format will notice no real difference, but those who want to be able to find targeted information more quickly will.

Email marketing and blog marketing – A quick tip!

By Jim Connolly | February 1, 2010

If you use email or blogging to market your services, I believe you will find the following information really useful.

It’s all about the importance of avoiding certain words or phrases in your emails and blog posts, which could get them blocked from reaching your readers.

Whilst there are many different things that can lead to an email getting trapped in someone’s junk mail or spam filters, I’m going to focus on just one of them; the words you use in your blog titles and your email subject lines.

What does blog marketing have to do with email filters?

Many people subscribe to blogs via email. For instance, around 40% of this blog’s RSS subscribers read it via email. So, if the title of one of my posts contains words or phrases that email filters are looking out for, there’s a good chance the post will get trapped in either the readers junk mail folder or it may never reach them at all.

I wrote a post last Friday, which had a title that was essentially a “toxic” phrase. The title was “REVEALED: The fast rack to wealth.” You can see the post here. It also had the opening word written in caps, which is another, lesser, junk mail trigger.

I was curious to see how many people opened it, compared to an average post. There was a drop of around 25%, pretty much what I had expected.

So, whilst it’s a great idea to use blog titles that will capture people’s attention – you need to also ensure that your titles are email friendly (if you offer the option for people to subscribe via email, which I believe you should.)

Email marketing and filters

Titles are also a key element in getting your marketing emails and newsletters past filters and in front of your readers. On my marketing newsletter, I opt for a very simple title: The Jim Connolly Newsletter. Keeping this very basic title format does 2 clever things.

Because it’s familiar, it immediately alerts my readers that the newsletter has arrived. If I used different titles every time, it would be harder for my newsletter to get noticed for what it is.
It contains nothing that’s likely to get trapped in a junk mail filter.

As I said earlier, there are a number of things, which can lead to your marketing email’s getting trapped in filters. Here’s a simple email marketing tip, from one of my first blog posts.

Giving oxygen to your marketing

By Jim Connolly | January 28, 2010

One of the secrets of great communication, is to pick the correct delivery method, to get the maximum, targeted exposure for your message. We refer to this as “giving oxygen” to your marketing.

Marketing oxygen

Some of you will have noticed that when I made my BIG announcement here yesterday, I closed the comments section for that post. The reason for this, was to take the conversation about the announcement away from this blog and onto different communication platforms, so a totally new group of people would be able to see it.

As a result, instead of people talking about my “new” blog here, in the comments section, they were having that debate on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc.

The next time you make an announcement and you want it to reach the largest possible, targeted audience, I suggest you consider doing something similar. Why? Because yesterday’s post created a 30% increase in readers to this blog and almost 400% more unique visitors to my new blog.

What do you think? Have you used a similar approach before? Do you find yourself struggling to get your marketing messages in front of new, prospective clients / customers? Whatever your experiences or questions, take a moment to share them with your fellow readers and myself, with a comment.

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

The marketing power of perception

By Jim Connolly | January 22, 2010

This post is all about the marketing impact of perception, and how the way people feel has a massive influence, on whether or not they buy from or recommend certain brands.

The marketplace’s perception of a brand or industry is extremely important, which is why big brands work so hard to ensure that the general perception surrounding them and their industry is as positive as possible.

As a result, companies like Gillette, will pay David Beckham to ‘model’ their products. By aligning the way people feel about Beckham, with the Gillette brand, Gillette can improve the perception of their brand or reinforce what’s already positive about it.

As well as the perception of our businesses, we ALSO need to be mindful regarding the marketplace’s perception of our industry!

What’s the typical perception of your industry?

When people talk about your industry in general, what is the typical perception?

For example, many accountants or CPA’s find themselves selling their services based on their fees – because the common (incorrect) perception is that all qualified accountants provide a service of equal value.

To market effectively, accountants need to break this inaccurate perception and THEN set themselves apart as being of greater value than their competitors.

Negative perceptions of social media experts

As you have probably noticed, there has been a huge negative perception shift, regarding the social media industry and especially those who work in it.

One particularly negative article appeared in BusinessWeek, called Beware: Social Media Snake Oil. The article names both Chris Brogan and Gary Veynerchuk, before saying:

“The problem, according to a growing chorus of critics, is that many would-be guides are leading clients astray. Consultants often use buzz as their dominant currency, and success is defined more often by numbers of Twitter followers, blog mentions, or YouTube hits than by traditional measures, such as return on investment.”

I believe much (not all) of the article was inaccurate. However, if stories like that either reflect the current perception of social media experts or negatively damage it, it’s going to create a real marketing challenge for them.

Positive perceptions of Apple Inc

Thanks to the Apps Store, an entire industry has sprung-up around the Apple brand. Moreover, it seems that right now, everything Apple Inc does is automatically heralded as great – often before it’s even announced. The perception of Apple in their marketplace is something that as a marketing coach, I am constantly amazed by. It’s incredible!

For example, there have been millions of dollars of free publicity gifted to Apple in recent weeks, for a product that as I write this, still does not officially exist and has not even been announced – the Apple tablet.

In closing

Feelings play an essential role in both the sales and the marketing process. The more positive those feelings are, the easier you will find it to make sales.

This is why it’s so very important for you to understand the marketplace’s perception of your industry. If it’s a good / positive perception, then you need to build on it.

If it’s a poor or negative perception, then you need to break it! Your marketing messages, your quality control, customer service and everything else, should be designed to absolutely shatter any negative perceptions about your industry.

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

How to understand your marketplace like never before!

By Jim Connolly | January 19, 2010

This quick marketing tip, will help you communicate with more people in your marketplace than ever before.

If you have studied marketing, you will know how important it is to be able to communicate your message effectively. That makes sense. It’s no good having something great to say, if you can’t get your point across.

However, a less talked about element of marketing communications, is the importance of being able to understand what your marketplace is saying to you. This has never been more important, now that marketing communications are all about “the conversation” and forming a 2-way dialogue with the marketplace.

The challenge many of us face is that as we become adults, we tend to get set in our ways. We consume the radio, TV, newspapers and websites, which are most aligned to how WE think. This is understandable, but it dramatically limits the richness of our experience. In other words, it narrows our view of the world and what millions of other people are saying and thinking.

Communications tip

If you want to be able to communicate effectively, with a larger percentage of your marketplace, I suggest you try this.

Each day, either listen to, read or watch information that you would normally ignore. Just invest 20 or 30 minutes a day. For example, listen to radio stations, which are directed at people in a different age group to you or read some sites / blogs, written for people with different views to your own. Listen to what they are saying and how they say it. It’s a fascinating experience.

This simple (and enjoyable) exercise also enables you to understand what’s important to other people; their hopes and their fears. I promise you that over time, this simple activity will allow you to communicate more effectively, with more people, from more backgrounds than ever before.