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It doesn’t matter

Posted byIan Brodie on August 4th, 2019.

Last week I talked about establishing marketing habits. How making sure you do something marketing-related week-in-week out can make a huge difference to your success at winning clients.

So what kind of habits do you need?

Honestly, it doesn't really matter.

I'm sure that some habits are better than others. But 90% of results from habits come from just doing them, not the actual habits you have.

So if your marketing habit is emailing one ex-client every day, or posting one piece of content on Linkedin, of writing 500 words towards a big blog post – as long as it's non-trivial, it will work.

What's important isn't the specifics of what you do. It's that you do something every day.

You establish a marketing habit. 

Later on, you can refine it and focus it on ever more effective techniques and tactics.

But initially, by far the most important thing is simply that you establish a habit.  That you do something marketing-related every day.

What did you do today?

More importantly, what will you do tomorrow?

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Start small

Posted byIan Brodie on July 28th, 2019.

When I talk to people who are either starting out or revamping their marketing they often have a strong urge to start with “best practice”.

They've seen a webinar on some fancy automated funnel. Or they've seen how well someone is doing running Facebook ads.

The trouble is, these are advanced tactics.

If you try to do them on day 1 you'll struggle.

Partly it's because you're not ready. You don't hit a drive 250 yards on your first day playing golf. You need to learn how to hold the club, how to stand, how to swing.

All the skills needed for a great drive take time and practice.

And it's the same with advanced marketing tactics. We can't just “model the best” because we don't have their skills and experience (or support teams).

And partly it's because on day 1 you won't have your fundamentals in place.

All great marketing is built on a bedrock of targeting your very best clients, deeply understanding their problems and goals, and being able to articulate the value you'll bring to them in a compelling way.  

You have to be very lucky indeed to figure that our on day 1.

Instead, it takes feedback and iteration.

That's why it's unwise to build complex automated systems on day 1: they're difficult to change.

Much better to try things out on a small scale, work with potential clients personally, get their feedback directly and observe first hand the impact your marketing has on them.

Iron out the creases first by hand before you try to automate or add in more complex, inherently fragile systems.

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What really makes a difference to your marketing results

Posted byIan Brodie on July 21st, 2019.

Danish journalist Jacob Riis famously said

“Look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before”.

I've found the same to be true in marketing.

It's all too easy to look at other people's success and attribute it to the “last blow”. But the truth is their success came from the previous 100 times they struck the rock.

Massive success in marketing rarely comes from massive action. It comes from the accumulation of good things done over time.

Relationships are built over time. Skill is built over time. Reputations are built over time.

You wouldn't take up running and expect to run a marathon in under 4 hours in your first week. Or to lose 2 stone in your first week of dieting.

But in marketing we keep looking out for that magic technique that will double our sales overnight.

And, of course, there's no shortage of people willing to sell us that silver bullet.

It's far, far better to look at your marketing like anything else you want to succeed at. 

Recognise it's going to take time. And you're going to have to work at it every day, improving bit by bit.

Maybe you'll get lucky and have a breakthrough.

But don't expect it.

And don't give up if you don't get one.

Just keep getting better and better day by day.

And finally you'll make your 101st blow and see a big impact from all that work.

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Simple questions to figure out what marketing will work best for you

Posted byIan Brodie on July 14th, 2019.

Last week I said that pretty much any marketing technique that's “been around the block” a while can work. It's a matter of finding a technique that fits with you, your clients, your skills, and the kind of things you want to do.

Here's a simple question that will help narrow down your options.

Do you tend to work with a small number of very high-value clients? For example, a consultant working with 2 or 3 clients a year, some perhaps paying a six-figure sum or more per engagement. 

Or do you work with a larger number of clients each paying a smaller amount? For example, a coach working with a few dozen or so clients on an ongoing basis. Or like me, you might run a membership program with potentially hundreds of members.

If you're in the former situation it means two things:

1. Because each engagement is big, you'll have to build a really strong relationship with your prospective client to win it. Potentially talking to many people in the client organisation many times and maybe going through a formal procurement process.

2. Because each engagement is big, you can afford to spend more time winning each one because of the high ROI you get if you win.

So putting those together implies you need to really focus and target a small number of potential clients and put a lot of personal effort into winning each engagement. Spread yourself too thin and you won't win any of them.

That means that the sort of marketing that will work best for you will be very targeted. Things like referrals, working your personal network. Contacting high-value potential clients and offering to do a presentation for them on trends in their industry.

And your follow-up will often be quite manually-driven and personalised.

By contrast, if you work with a large number of clients every year, it means you need your marketing to reach much broader. And you can't afford to invest so much of your time per potential client on each opportunity.

That means we're talking much more automated or leveraged marketing – at least initially until an opportunity becomes likely to close.

That might mean doing presentations at industry conferences. Using online advertising leading people to a lead magnet and nurture emails. Or using content marketing or SEO to get people to that lead magnet.

And your follow-up is much more likely to be automated – email marketing being the usual suspect.

Quite a different strategy.

And all based on whether you work with a large number of clients each year (one-to-many) or a small number (one-to-few).

Worth thinking about. Because if you get it wrong you'll either spend way too much time and money personally nurturing a small number of potential clients when really you need a much bigger number.

Or you'll use mass-market techniques to try to win clients that need a personal touch and you won't get anywhere near enough to winning them.

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I can’t do this, can you?

Posted byIan Brodie on July 14th, 2019.

I find it quite weird when I hear people say “cold calling doesn't work”.

Or “email marketing doesn't work”. “Networking doesn't work”. “Advertising doesn't work”.

There are people making each of these marketing methods work every day.

Some might be less effective than they used to be. Or difficult to learn. Or costly.

But they all work.

What “nnn doesn't work” usually means is “I can't make it work”. Or more likely “I don't like it”.

And actually, that's OK. Instead of trying to convince ourselves that something doesn't work we should admit we just don't like doing it.

And in all honesty, there are plenty of marketing methods that I just don't like. And if I don't like something I just can't do it.

I've tried.

Honestly.

I've heard all hustle and grind speeches. About how if you want something bad enough you'll do what it takes. 

And that might well be true on a sporting pitch for 90 minutes.

But try to sustain doing something you don't enjoy week in, week out for any length of time and it just won't happen.

You'll find ways of procrastinating. Avoiding. Having other priorities.

And if the thing you don't like doing is supposed to be your primary source of new clients that spells trouble.

That's why I always count whether I enjoy doing something as one of my primary criteria when I'm trying to select marketing approaches. It's right up there with its effectiveness.

The good news is there are so many different marketing approaches these days that you're bound to be able to find one that you enjoy doing.

Ignore the “experts” who tell you their method is the one best way and you must do it or you're missing out. They have an obvious vested interest.

Kiss a few frogs and find out what works for you.

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So what marketing *will* work for me?

Posted byIan Brodie on July 7th, 2019.

o last week I talked about how experience teaches you that there's never just one way to do anything. Especially not in marketing.

So if you want to find good ways of marketing that work for you, where do you start? There are so many options out there.

I think one of the best ways to do it is to start with “who do you want to be?”

I don't mean in some grand philosophical sense. Just the practical sense of how you want your audience to see you. What you feel comfortable with.

I found out about this when getting coaching on magic years ago from Roberto Giobbi as part of my obsession with magic at the time.

Roberto asked me bluntly what I wanted my audience to experience and feel when I was performing.

Was I trying to fool them? Amuse them? Astound them? Make them laugh? Give them a once in a lifetime experience of sheer wonder?

And who was I trying to be? A suave entertainer, a clown, a skilful cardsharp?

Answering that question told me what kind of tricks and performing style would work best for me.

The same goes for marketing.

Once you answer the question of who you want to be – what you want your marketing audience to experience and feel when they hear from you – the right tactics to use become easy to choose.

Personally, I want my audience to see me as a nice guy with a lot of useful and practical experience to share. I want them (you) to see me as a giver – someone who genuinely wants to help rather than just make money. Because that's who I think I am and want to be.

For me, that means any marketing I do has to give value to potential clients and not be aggressive or intrusive.

That means I don't do cold calling. I don't do purely promotional outreach or adverts. I don't do “joint ventures” (that seem to me to be largely about using access to your audience as a bargaining chip to get access to someone else's audience, not because you think they'll benefit).

Now frankly, those are probably just my own unjustified biases. I'm sure other people see joint ventures or cold outreach differently.

But the important point is, it doesn't matter.

Since marketing tactics that have been around the block a while all work reasonably well, the important thing isn't to try to find some kind of mythical “best” tactic. 

It's to find a few I can make work for me.

That means they have to be tactics I feel comfortable with and that are aligned with who I want to be.

From there it's a matter of focusing on a small number of them and getting good at them.

It's much more important to choose something and get good at it than it is to go round in circles searching for the “best” and never build any competence.

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Knowing this one thing dissolves confusion

Posted byIan Brodie on June 30th, 2019.

One of the biggest enemies we face in our business is confusion and overwhelm.

Not knowing what the right thing to do is, and getting paralysed.

It's not surprising it happens with our marketing. We're being told day in and day out about new (or old) stuff that's the “best” way to get more clients. Which is it?

I've recently been diving deeper into Linkedin again and have been amused to see just how much disagreement there is amongst experts as to what the best way to get clients on Linkedin is.

Some will say you've got to be messaging prospects with links to valuable resources. Others will argue that no, you should be messaging to ask questions and start conversations. And another gang say that you shouldn't be messaging at all and instead you should be posting content on Linkedin for your connections to engage with if they're interested.

And they all spend half their time telling you why the other experts are completely wrong.

Who's actually right?

All of them.

One of the things that age and experience teaches you is that not everyone is the same.

Some potential clients will value being sent useful information. Others will value engaging in conversations. And some, like me, don't want to be disturbed at all – we'll seek you out if we want something.

This simple realisation that not everything is black and white is liberating.

You realise that any sensible approach to marketing will work for some potential clients, but not for others. Or it will work some of the time.

As long as it works for enough people enough of the time it can work for you.

You don't have to waste time going round in circles as the experts argue over why their method works and the others don't.

You can pick a sensible one that you feel comfortable with and focus on making it work for you.

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The surprising way restrictions set you free

Posted byIan Brodie on June 23rd, 2019.

Sometimes when you're trying to come up with ideas or solve a problem, the answer isn't to think big, it's to think small.

Or more accurately, to put restrictions on yourself.

For example, if I asked you to think of ten ways to increase your revenue you'd probably flounder.

The scope is too broad. There are so many options you end up with generic, wishy-washy ideas. “Get more clients' for example. Duh.

But if I asked you instead to think of ten ways of getting your existing clients to stay with you for a month longer you'd get much more concrete answers.

For example:

• Maybe I just make my default coaching contract last 8 months instead of 6?
• Maybe if I help them get results faster in the first month they'll want to stay longer?
• Maybe if I communicate personally a bit more frequently at the point where they usually leave, they'll either tell me if there's a problem or simply feel a bit friendlier to me and stay a bit longer?
• etc etc.

Those aren't earth-shattering ideas, but they're much more concrete and implementable than the ones you typically come up with if you start with a completely blank slate.

By restricting your options you get much more focused.

Next time you have a tricky problem, try adding come constraints and then coming up with ideas.

And, just for now – why not think through for yourself how you could get your clients to stay with you for just a month longer.  It's an 8.33% increase in revenue if you can. 

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3 ways this type of email works

Posted byIan Brodie on June 16th, 2019.

By “this” type of email, I really do mean this email.

List emails.

“3 reasons this type of email works”

“The top 3 reasons you're losing sales”

“7 simple strategies for winning more clients”

A bit old-fashioned, perhaps. Everyone's seen list emails time and time again.

But done right, they work.

Firstly, they're almost always focused on some kind of benefit or implied benefit like finding out why something failed.

And at the end of the day, the reason your readers signed up to your emails is to get value from them. Some kind of result. If your emails stop delivering benefits, your readers will eventually stop reading.

Second, the number in the subject line triggers curiosity.

It's like those “countdown” shows on TV. “The top 100 toys from the 80s”, “Britain's favourite rock band” or any one of million shows that counts down to the winner with the inevitable commentary from c-list celebs.

The reason there's a million of these shows is they work. We can't resist tuning in to find out what won the vote as the #1 toy of the 80s or whatever the category is.

Same with your emails.

That little bit of curiosity as to what the top 3 reasons for losing sales are, or the 7 simple strategies, or the 3 reasons this type of email works. It's enough to get more people reading than you might otherwise get.

The final reason is a very practical one: they're easy to write.

Everyone has at least half a dozen subjects where they could quickly rattle off a short list of best practices or problems or top tips.

And because they're easy to write – it means they get written.

No agonising over a blank screen for an hour, then eventually thinking “oh, I'll send an email next week instead, no one will notice”.

Tap, tap, tap, it's done.