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Cancel something

Posted byIan Brodie on December 9th, 2018.

In my last email I talked about how keeping top of mind with your best potential clients through regular communication is perhaps the most important thing you can do in your marketing.

But where on earth do you find the time for all that keeping in touch?

You cancel something.

If you go to 3 networking events a month, cancel one. Take the 3 or 4 hours you would have spent speaking to people you don't know and who are unlikely to ever become clients and spend it keeping in touch with much better prospects.

If you're addicted to webinars and haven't realised yet that they're largely teases with sales pitches: skip one a week and do follow-up instead.

Or instead of working by scrolling Facebook or Linkedin, spend the time contacting specific high potential clients to keep the conversation going with them.

There's always something you can cancel to make room for keeping in touch with your very best potential clients. 

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The real value of follow-up

Posted byIan Brodie on December 2nd, 2018.

I talk a lot about nurturing relationships.

Adding value and building credibility and trust over time.

(So do a lot of people).

But the truth, I believe, is that the main value you get from nurturing relationships is much simpler.

It's being top of mind.

Most clients only buy high-value services every now and then.  And when they do, the majority of the time it's from a small number of suppliers who they already have in mind.

Sometimes that's because they've worked with them before.

But often it's simply because the supplier kept in touch. They benefit from what the marketing scientists call “mental availability”.

When the time is right, they spring to mind.

Of course, building credibility and trust makes you more likely to win vs competitors.

But the most important factor is that your potential clients actually think of you when they have a problem you can solve. If that's missing it doesn't matter how much credibility or trust you have in theory – it's never called into play.

So in many ways, the role of all your nurturing activity – be that emails, phone calls, stuff you send through the post, social media posts – is simply to get you noticed.

Of course, if your content is dull or it has no value, your clients aren't going to pay attention to it. So it won't work to get you top of mind.

But it doesn't have to be a breakthrough or work of genius every time.

Just interesting enough. Valuable enough.

Don't kill yourself trying to create a work of genius every time.

It has to be interesting. It has to be useful. But most important: you have to actually get it out there!

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Secret PS power

Posted byIan Brodie on November 25th, 2018.

The hardest emails to write, I think, are emails that sell without seeming like sales pitches.

Every now and then it's fine to do a pure sales email.

But do too many and you'll lose your audience. A bit like if the ad breaks in TV shows were 20 minutes long.

So the majority of your emails need to focus on sharing valuable content.

The challenge is being able to sell in those emails without taking away from the content and without it feeling like the email is just a sales pitch.

There are some clever techniques you can use to build desire in your emails while still giving value.

But perhaps the simplest is to use a PS. And simple is good: it means it gets done.

You can write a specific PS that follows on from the content of the email and offers the next step. That could be an offer to your readers to contact you about helping them in that area or to go to a web page that offers a relevant product or service.

Or, like I often do, just have a standard PS you put on most emails that either promotes a product or service or offers something more for free which will then lead to a promotion.

It's easy to do. And it doesn't feel too salesy to either you or your readers.

Which means you can sell in almost every email without it feeling like you're selling at all. 

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Don’t take thing too far like this

Posted byIan Brodie on November 18th, 2018.

I have a sneaking suspicion that you're a bit like me.

You don't want to be a pushy salesperson type.

You'd much rather have people approach you asking to work with you than you would to approach them with an offer.

In fact, you might even feel like “pitching” is somehow unethical or an annoyance to your potential clients.

I kind of feel like that too.

But today I reflected on my experience with buying coffee.

I'm no coffee connoisseur. Kathy's the one who appreciates a proper cup.

But we do have a “bean to cup” machine that grinds and makes a rather decent brew.

And it's my job to buy the beans.

I use an online service that sends us a couple of packets of coffee beans every 2 weeks.

Always high quality. Always freshly roasted in the last couple of weeks. And from a wide variety of countries and growers.

It's a little adventure every fortnight to open the parcel to see what we've got this time.

As I said, I'm no connoisseur. But I'm enjoying learning about the different types of beans and roasts and the different flavours.

I look forward to each parcel arriving to try the new beans.

And in all honesty, I wish they sold to me a bit more.

The only emails I get from them are notices that my parcel has been dispatched. And there's never any promotional material in the parcel.

I'd quite like to be offered some kind of special new bean sometimes. Or the chance to learn more about the origins of the coffee. Or maybe some gadgets to go with my coffee machine.

I suspect the people who run the company are rather like you and me: they don't want to be pushy or salesy and risk damaging their relationship with me.

But I wish they were more salesy (in a nice way). I wish they made me more offers.

It would enhance my enjoyment of the coffee significantly.

I wonder if the same was true for you?

I wonder if you offered more things for your clients or contacts to buy whether they'd actually appreciate it rather than feel it was too pushy?

If someone loves what you do then like me with my coffee supplier, they probably want more from you and don't mind being offered more products at all (as long as it's not too much, too often).

Worth thinking about?

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Be more creative by being less creative

Posted byIan Brodie on November 11th, 2018.

My first ever job, back in the 80s, was in IT. Designing and programming self-maintenance systems for big computers.

Ironic given that now I can barely work my phone :)

But back then, I and everyone I worked with prided ourselves in how creative and innovative we were.

So when our firm introduced a new quality management philosophy full of processes and checklists and reusable code, we rebelled.

Big time.

We hated it. All these processes and standard ways of doing things would stifle our creativity. The very thing that made us special.

When, eventually, we were forced to use them, something very different happened.

Instead of spending our creativity reinventing the wheel on a task that had been done a hundred times before, forcing us to follow standard procedures freed up our creativity to focus on the key pieces of work that genuinely needed it.

We ended up being more creative at the things that mattered. By being less creative at the things that didn't.

And just as importantly, it freed up a lot of time to focus on those key creative tasks too.

One thing I've noticed with a lot of the professionals I work with (and with myself too) is we like to do something new every time.

We don't want to send out a standard follow-up message to people we meet at an event, we want to tailor a specific message just for them.

We don't want to use a proposal template. We want to create the perfect one every time.

All sounds great in theory. Unfortunately, we don't have the time or the mental energy to do it properly.

So we end up not following up at all. And we send in a completely unique but not very good proposal because we had to make all the boilerplate and standard stuff from scratch.

Next time you have a little bit of downtime between client work, think about creating some templates and standard processes for key tasks you have to do often. For example:

• A pre-recorded video that gets sent out to everyone who schedules a call with you to prepare them for the call while further building your credibility
• A pre-written series of follow-up emails you send in sequence to everyone who signs up for your lead magnet so they get the very best of your ideas without you needing to craft new emails all the time.
• A “pack” of personal follow-up items – articles or books to post, events to invite to, questions to ask – that can be used again and again with each new potential client you meet.
• A proposal template with the relevant sections and boilerplate in place so you don’t have to scrabble around when you have a short deadline for submission.
• Templated email responses for questions you often get asked or frequent requests for information.

Save your brainpower for the stuff that really does need to be creative and different every time.

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It’s almost never either/or

Posted byIan Brodie on November 11th, 2018.

Sadly, it seems we live in a world where the Dunning-Kruger effect is writ large.

Those with the least experience and knowledge, but who are supremely confident in their prognoses get all the airtime.

Those who think a bit deeper and see the shades of grey get pushed to the sidelines.

The good news is that you and I don't have to play by the same rules as the masses. We can play smart.

When it comes to marketing, if someone tells you with absolute certainty that their approach is the absolute best in all situations, run a mile.

(Especially if it's an amazing new online course or tool that just so happens to be on launch right now at a never to be repeated price).

You almost always find that a mix of approaches works best, not just one.

Research by Analytic Partners in 2016 showed that if you run a marketing campaign on two platforms instead of one (with a platform being something like TV, radio, paid search or online video) then the ROI of your campaign goes up by 19%. Add another platform and it goes up by another 4% etc.

And this is without increasing your budget. You just allocated it to 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 platforms instead of one.

Now us smaller businesses don't have the time or budget to master 5 marketing platforms of course. But the point is clear. There's no “one best” anything. Lots of different marketing tactics work and they often work synergistically.

You often see this in the eternal battle between online and offline marketing. 

And, of course, the defenders of traditional marketing and the new online pretenders both miss the point. 

They work best together.

Not one or the other.

There's nothing better than face to face approaches to build relationships fast. Especially for high-value clients.

But there's nothing better than online marketing to build a big pipeline of potential clients to nurture “on autopilot” until they're ready to engage personally.

Always try to have a mix of both types of marketing in your business.