Ian Brodie is the best-selling author of Email Persuasion and the creator of Unsnooze Your Inbox - *the* guide to crafting engaging emails and newsletters that captivate your audience, build authority and generate more sales.
Ian Brodie on June 23rd, 2021.
Delivering Value is, of course, vital to keeping the attention of your audience and ideal clients. And it's what makes them seek you out and voluntarily give you their attention. Which leads to credibility, trust and them becoming paying clients.
But in this episode of More Clients TV we're going look at something that I think you should perhaps put more focus on than delivering value itself.
Ian Brodie on June 20th, 2021.
I've spent most of today (Saturday as I write this) doing DIY. Assembling raised beds for the veg patch and putting together a couple of chairs and a table for the balcony.
It's been a while since I've done any DIY and I'd forgotten how therapeutic it can be.
I suppose therapeutic's not the right word actually. What I mean is that the activity engages your brain just enough that you can do a bit of thinking while you do it.
Gardening works the same for me. And I know many people get the same thing from walking or exercise.
The key is your brain is working, but you're doing something that prevents you from taking the easy route of stimulating it by checking emails or social media or browsing the web.
You have to actually think. Reflect. Listen to yourself instead of reacting to other people.
Two chairs in and I'd thought of a couple of good ideas for emails and decided what I wanted to do next with my course on building online courses.
I'd also realised I need to find more ways of being quiet and thinking and stop reaching for the phone whenever there's a dull moment. Or checking email whenever I'm stuck when I'm writing.
How do you make time for thinking and reflecting?
I'd genuinely like to know.
Shoot me an email back. There's a risk I'll get a bit flooded, but I'll do my best to reply :)
Ian Brodie on June 9th, 2021.
If you want to build credibility, build trust, build authority and get people to take action – you need a deeper level of attention.
This episode of More Clients TV shows you how to harness curiosity to get potential clients to start engaging with you.
Ian Brodie on June 2nd, 2021.
Job 1 if you want to build credibility and trust with potential clients and get them to buy from you is they have to actually notice you in the first place.
In this episode of More Clients TV we look at the science of attention and how to harness it to grab the attention of your audience.
Ian Brodie on May 30th, 2021.
Like a few hundred million others I watched the Champion's League final last night between Chelsea and Man City.
I always prefer it if the final is between teams from two different countries. But last night was a chance to see some real cat-and-mouse tactics from two teams who knew each other well.
Man City were the overwhelming favourites having absolutely dominated the Premier League this season. In fact their victory was seen as so certain that the main article in my newspaper in the morning was “Leonardo, Einstein…Pep? The Genius of Guardiola”.
Fate and Football didn't see it that way.
City barely threatened Chelsea with only one shot on target all game. In fact, it looked to all the world like Chelsea's new manager, Thomas Tuchel had thoroughly outfoxed Guardiola.
My feeling though was more that Guardiola had outfoxed himself.
Despite Man City's dominance in the league, Chelsea had beaten them the last two times they played and it seemed to weigh heavily on Guardiola. It seemed to me that rather than picking his best team and formation, his tactics were designed primarily to surprise and fool Tuchel.
They certainly surprised the pundits, the City fans, and apparently his players too.
In essence, he overthought the whole thing when a much simpler plan of playing his best team in their preferred formation would have worked much better.
(At least that's my view. In truth, my stature as a football coach is ant-like compared to Guardiola. But bear with me for the purposes of this analogy!)
Overthinking is a trap many of us fall into with marketing and something I know all too well myself.
You end up worrying so much about how people will react, going round in circles, procrastinating umming and ahhhing.
Then in the end, in order to try to cover all the different shades of grey you dreamt up, you create something either so complicated or so middle-of-the-road that it just doesn't have much impact at all.
I've realised over the years that I need to take a step back when something is taking me a long time. Take a look and if what I'm working on feels complicated it's probably not going to work.
Far better to go right back to first principles and do something simple.
Much more often than not it's the right approach.
Ian Brodie on May 26th, 2021.
There's no simple “one size fits all” step-by-step process for becoming seen as an authority. But there are things almost all authorities do that will massively increase your chances of becoming seen as one if you do them too.
In this episode of More Clients TV we look at what really lies behind becoming seen as an authority and what I've found is the most important thing you can do to get there.
Ian Brodie on May 23rd, 2021.
On our recent More Clients TV video I mentioned that brand-building marketing (or building a reputation and authority in our cases) has the very highest ROI when done right.
That's because it creates long-standing changes in perception that trigger future actions.
I saw that play out this week.
My wife Kathy's annual Early Years Summitstarts soon and we've been running Facebook ads to get signups.
As I'm sure you know, Facebook ads can be very expensive these days. And negative comments on ads can be a real problem that drives up that cost.
On Tuesday we got a comment on our biggest ad that said “this event isn't free, it's just free registration”. The kind of inaccurate comment that could kill signups.
So I set off typing a reply to explain it absolutely was free and you could watch any or all of the interviews completely free during the week of the summit.
But it turns out my reply wasn't necessary.
By the time I'd typed it, three complete strangers had also replied explaining it was indeed completely free, buying the recordings was optional (but worth it), and that they'd been to the previous year's summit and how brilliant it was.
Those replies were much more powerful than me saying it was free.
In fact they were so enthusiastic and real I'm sure the whole conversation will have increased conversions on the ad as they answered the “is it really free?” objection that many people will have no doubt been thinking.
And that enthusiasm is a direct result of the reputation and brand Kathy has built over the years for the summit.
Now I tell you this not to show off…
(Actually, it is to show off a bit – I'm so proud of the amazing work Kathy's done with her summit).
But mainly it's to show one of the unexpected but important ways that building your reputation can help you.
In this case, “long term” marketing boosted our “short term” ad campaign.
But it can work the other way too. “Short term” investments in marketing to win clients right now can also build your reputation and brand for the long term – if you do them right.
Ian Brodie on May 19th, 2021.
Should you be focused on short-term “sales activation” marketing to get more leads and sales from people already looking to buy?
Or should you focus on building your reputation, authority and brand?
In this episode of More Clients TV we look at what the research says, what the best ratio is, and how to vary it based on your situation.
Ian Brodie on May 16th, 2021.
It's super hectic right now Chez Brodie.
Kathy's annual online summit kicks off in 2 weeks time so we've been “all hands to the pumps” preparing for it.
For obvious reasons, the job of marketing the summit falls to me. And it's actually very valuable for me to keep my hand in marketing a business that's quite a bit different to my own.
Over the years there have been two valuable lessons I've learnt and relearnt from the summit.
The first is the power of having something immensely valuable to offer for free.
In the case of Kathy's summit she usually has about 20-30 interviews with leading experts from around the world on whatever topic in early childhood education she's focusing on that year.
And by leading experts I mean really leading experts. From internationally known authors to professors revealing their latest research to practitioners sharing their innovative practices.
The kind of people you'd normally have to pay hundreds of pounds to see speak, all gathered together and free for a week.
For many of Kathy's audience it's the highlight of their year. And they share details of the summit like crazy whenever it's announced.
We had 34,000 people sign up last year and the vast majority came from online word of mouth and sharing.
And what drove it wasn't incentives or tricks. It was simply that the summit is such an amazing event they wanted to share it.
The second big lesson is about listening to your data and not making assumptions.
When we ran the first summit we didn't really know what marketing would work best. So we tried quite a wide variety and monitored where our signups were coming from.
We assumed that the most effective social media would be Twitter because Kathy had quite a big following there, whereas she barely used Facebook or Linkedin.
But in fact it became very clear early on that the place people were sharing and talking about the summit was Facebook.
So we quickly shifted our focus to posting there and running Facebook ads. A strategy that's worked really well ever since.
No matter how much of an expert you are (or think you are), the real world has a habit of throwing regular surprises at you. So it pays to try different things every now and then, monitor your results and adjust if needed.
If nothing else, it keeps life interesting!
Ian Brodie on May 12th, 2021.
Most of us – and I include myself in this – are just far too anonymous.
We can do amazing things for clients. We've got brilliant ideas. We can really help them.
But just not enough of them know who we are, what we do and how we can help.
In this episode of More Clients TV I look at why that is, the two big reasons that cause it, and what you can do about it.