Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

Your marketing begins with the service you provide

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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!

Everything your business does, is marketing

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marketing tips, marketing ideas, marketing advice

Everything your business does, is marketing. It gives people an experience… an insight into what you and your business stand for.

That experience is what creates your story: Either a story your clients love and want to share or a predictable story, which they soon forget. A story your prospective clients will be attracted to, or one they will ignore. A story that’s working for you or against you.

So, let’s look at your story

Look at your business from the ground up. What story are you crafting for your marketplace? This brief list will help you build a useful picture. It’s just some of the areas of your business, which combine to tell your marketplace, your story:

  • Your customer service.
  • Your approach to paying your suppliers. (Suppliers talk about late payers).
  • The way you handle inbound calls and emails.
  • The design of your website.
  • The kind of suppliers you use — cheap, average or high quality.
  • The clients or customers you choose to work with.
  • Your opening hours.
  • Your use of social networks.
  • The promises or guarantees you offer.
  • Your pricing, compared to your competitors.
  • Your returns policy.
  • The quality of your end product.
  • The people or brands you associate with.
  • The experience, knowledge and attitude of your team.
  • Your ability to meet deadlines.

If you believe there’s room for improvement in your business, rewrite your story. You do this my looking across the whole of your business, and making sure that everything you do is creating trust and value.

Just don’t make the mistake of thinking you can rewrite your story with slick marketing. You can’t!

Attract more clients or customers with these 5 simple steps!

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Here’s a quick marketing tip, which can help you improve your marketing results extremely quickly.

  1. Think of the last 5 purchases you made, which cost you approximately the same as you charge for your own products or services.
  2. Name the people or companies you made those purchases from.
  3. How did you find those providers? (Word of mouth, search engines, advertising etc.)
  4. What made you decide to spend your money with them, rather than someone else?
  5. Write your answers down!

This simple exercise gives you a useful glimpse into how other people or companies are successfully making sales, in your price range.

Pay particular attention to anything those 5 vendors did that was common to 2 or more of them, but which you don’t currently do.  This brief exercise can help you spot elements missing from your own marketing, which were powerful enough to convert you into a customer / client.

Plus, as those 5 examples will probably have been from outside your own industry, if you do spot an opportunity, it’s very possible your competitors won’t be doing it, making it massively more powerful for you.

It’s only useful, if you use it!

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It’s a fact: The best marketing ideas in the world will not work, unless you use them.

Over the years, I have discovered that small business owners can be divided into 2 groups, when it comes to marketing.

Group 1: Those who find marketing interesting, but just dabble and seldom work with the ideas they find.

These people love reading about marketing and they enjoy the social elements of marketing such as networking, social media etc, but they seldom actually take time to develop a marketing plan and work the plan.  In many cases, they have businesses that are struggling financially and they knowledge to turn it around – If only they put some of their marketing ideas to work.

Ideas are GREAT, but they need to act on them if you want to achieve anything.

Group 2: Those who understand that marketing is an essential part of their business, so they put the best marketing ideas they find into action.

These business owners see things very differently from the previous, much larger group.  They have discovered that if they find a marketing idea interesting, then use it, amazing things can happen.  They are not afraid to fail, because they know that marketing is all about testing and measuring.  If they try something and it doesn’t work the way they want, they will review the feedback and try again with a new refinement.  They will then measure the feedback and make further adjustments, until they get the results they want.

Ultimately, our commercial success will be determined by our level of intelligent activity; not by how much useful knowledge we have acquired.  Why not take the best marketing idea you have right now, and use it!

Marketing: Your past does not equal your future.

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I spoke with someone earlier, who told me that she was “no good at marketing.”  She went on to say that she would never be any good when it came to marketing.  This lady is bright and she has lots to say, that’s worth listening to.  However, she has failed to learn one of the most basic lessons in life:

“Our past results do not equal our future results.”

Just because we used an approach last week, last month or last year that didn’t work, does not mean we have to repeat that same error.  We can learn from that lesson and move forward.  As soon as we use a better strategy, we get better results.

How do you improve?

You have 2 main options if you want better marketing results:

  1. You can spend time studying marketing and start to develop increasingly effective marketing strategies.  This can be very time consuming, but if you are starting to see some progress with your marketing efforts, it may be worth investing some more of your time.  This is likely to be most appropriate for those who already have a good marketing foundation, and those who are not looking for fast results.  There are lots of free marketing resources on this blog that will help you if you want to go it alone.  Take a look at this post as a way to get started – It’s my top 10 marketing tips. Then, I strongly recommend you read my FREE 5 step Marketing Make-Over! You can also use the search box on the right, to find marketing posts on many different subjects – There are hundreds of posts there covering thousands of marketing answers and ideas – just waiting for you and all are 100% free!
  2. You can hire someone who already knows exactly what you need to do.

The bottom line is that you need to improve your marketing strategy and actions, if you want to improve your sales results.  There’s absolutely no need to settle for under-performing marketing, so long as you are willing to take ownership of the challenge ahead of you and do something productive about it.

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

Good luck!

Surviving information overload!

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Following on from yesterday’s post, about the need to be a student and not a sheep, today I would like to focus briefly on the importance of improving our comprehension in the era of information overload.  It’s one thing for us to read something of value, but if we fail to comprehend what we have just consumed, we will learn nothing.

I deliberately tend to write shorter posts than many bloggers, because like every professional writer worth their salt, I know the importance of brevity.  A well written, short piece of information rich copy should be easy for the reader to absorb.  So, that’s what I aim for.  However, when you look at the comments on longer blog posts, it shows that many people comment, with very little understanding of what they just read.  I get it here occasionally myself.  I have had people arguing with me, via comments here, simply because they never took the time to read everything, before commenting.  They were arguing with me, even though they were in 100% agreement with what I wrote.

Information overload

The challenge for all of us today, is that there is just so much content out there.  I did a search on Google a moment ago, for the phrase marketing blogs and found mine (on page 1!) with over 90 MILLION other results.

Just 15 years ago, if we wanted to keep abreast of what was happening in business, we had the business section of our preferred daily newspaper and maybe a few industry magazines, which were published monthly.  That was it!

Today, there is an almost limitless supply of business information; some good, some not so good, but all vying for our attention.  Our senses are assaulted with a seemingly endless supply of must click links via social media too.  It’s little wonder people are skimming over content rather than reading and comprehending it.   So, what we see right now are people who tend to skim over 50 or 100 articles or blog posts in a day, rather than actually read and think about 5 or 10 of them.

In our desire not to miss anything important, we risk missing everything!

It’s a little like those networkers, who flit from person to person after 30 seconds, because they want to meet everyone at an event.  They meet 150 people and yet they connect with  no one.  Another person at the same event, studies the attendee list and decides to selectively speak with a dozen people.  He or she connects with all 12 people and potentially makes some really useful contacts.

For me, one of the best ways to improve comprehension, is to read more selectively.  Look for the best sources of information in your niche, read their work and then take time to think about what you have just read and how you can use it.  Birds of a feather flock together, so you should find that by sticking with your most valued writers, they will introduce you to new, great writers too.  Give yourself a hard limit, by setting your bar high and only read from writers, who regularly deliver the goods.

Replace those who are under delivering, so your list stays fluid, but always focused on what YOU find most valuable.