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Could you do this?

Posted byIan Brodie on November 20th, 2016.

Last Sunday I talked about earning your audience's attention by doing a research project to create valuable intellectual property they'd want to hear about.

Hard work. High ROI.

Typically it's something you invest time in creating, then it pays dividends.

Here's something that pays off as you go along: starting a regular “show”.

A show can be anything from a weekly video, to a podcast where you interview other experts in your field. Or an email newsletter. Obvs.

Basically, it's something where you show up on a regular basis and share valuable content.

The regular schedule forces you to come up with useful information for your audience on a consistent basis. Either self-generated or through interviews or research. It's a powerful discipline that makes you raise your game.

And the regular schedule means your audience gets into the rhythm of “tuning in”.

A show like this works in a similar way to a research project in that it gives you credibility and it builds relationships with your audience of potential clients. But rather than being one big hit after your research is done, this happens step by step over time.

The upside is you're building credibility and trust from day 1 when you start the show. You may not start with a big audience, but you're having impact. And that impact will grow as you show up every week.

It's a powerful and effective habit to get into.

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There’s more to life than sales

Posted byIan Brodie on November 16th, 2016.

I “shocked” someone on Facebook yesterday.

Not that they realised they were shocked. They just couldn't quite comprehend what I'd said.

I'll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that they'd made some comment about how someone's public statements were foolish because they'd lose sales because of it. To which I replied that “perhaps they think there's something more important than sales”.

It took 3 or 4 repeats of my reply in different forms before they actually got what I was trying to say. They essentially couldn't comprehend that there might be something more important for a business owner than maximising your sales or profits.

Sometimes it's easy to fall into that trap. Pretty much every piece of advice we read about marketing is all about how to use this technique or that to get more sales. 

And I know people who use advertising they feel uncomfortable with (messages that push the edges of hype and truthfulness for example) but justify it because they get more sales or more subscribers that way. 

Or they've been told it's their “duty” to sell as hard as possible so that people will benefit from what they have to offer. 

It's not.

Possibly now more than ever it's important to recognise that the end doesn't justify the means. Selling more is never justified if you have to sell your soul to do it. 

And here's the thing: we don't need to “maximise” our sales. We just need enough. 

I know that I could get more sales if I marketed in different ways. My emails and my webinars give too much information for free according to many “experts”. But I'm comfortable with that. I'd rather give more value to more people and lose some sales than maximise sales and give less value. I sell enough to keep me very comfortable :)

My friend Charlie Green once said something that I think is so important in business and life. He was commenting on our tendency to say things like “if you do the right thing it'll pay back in the end”.

He made the point that you should do the right thing because it's the right thing, not because it's going to pay back.

That's stuck with me ever since.

So if you ever feel uncomfortable about advice you've been given on how to market or sell, listen to your heart.

You might be wrong. You might be being over-sensitive. It might simply be fear of rejection kicking in.

But if you challenge yourself and think it through and it still doesn't feel right, don't do it, no matter how effective you're told it will be.

Do the right thing.

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Hard work…but pays huge dividends

Posted byIan Brodie on November 13th, 2016.

Last Sunday my email was about how the best way to get the attention of your target clients is to earn it by having something valuable and interesting to share with them.

Easy for me to say, of course. But interesting, valuable material doesn't grow on trees.

You have to create it.

The way most people create material – be that reports, videos, presentations, books – is they lock themselves in a room and reach inside for ideas that they hope people will find useful.

It can be really hard work. And if you've published a lot previously it can feel like the well has run dry.

Often a better way is to look outside. Do some research.

Not just a few google searches. Real research.

Think of a topic that's hot right now in your client base. Or one that's always important to them.

Then interview half a dozen or so typical clients or potential clients and ask them about that area. If you ask smart questions you'll get a ton of insight, and you'll be surprised how much people are willing to share.

Combine that with an online survey that you can promote via email or in a few Linkedin or Facebook groups where your clients hang out and boom – you've got yourself a whole bunch of unique, valuable content that your potential clients would love to hear about.

Of course, this takes work. It feels quicker and easier just to make a few calls or shoot off a few emails hoping to get meetings with potential clients.

But if you put the work in to your research project you'll get something that will make it 2x or 3x more likely that potential clients will want to meet with you. Because you've got something uniquely valuable and interesting to share.

And it'll give you lots of new material to use on your website or in presentations.

Hard work. Huge ROI.

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The secret of confident paid traffic

Posted byIan Brodie on November 10th, 2016.

On Tuesday I mentioned that paid advertising – particularly online advertising – is an effective way to break out of the hamster wheel of all your client winning being dependent on your personal activity.

But, of course, paid advertising feels very risky. That's cold, hard cash going out of your account.  

You may only have 24 hours in a day, but at least you get another 24 tomorrow! When your money runs out, it's all over. 

There are three common fears people have about advertising online.

The first is “does it work at all for my sort of business?”

That was a valid concern back when Google Adwords was the only game in town. Not everyone sells something that people actively search for.

But with highly targeted advertising options on Linkedin and Facebook you can reach pretty much anyone these days. 

The second fear is “will I mess it up and lose a fortune?”

That's a very real risk if you don't learn how to use the platforms properly, including making sure you have sensible caps on budgets. 

I've been there myself and paid for ads that send visitors to non-existent pages or pages that just didn't stand a hope of getting people to do what I wanted.

So you must make sure you learn how to use whatever platform you choose from a reliable source. 

And don't just rely on the training from Google, Linkedin or Facebook themselves. They'll show you the basics of using the platform, but not how to get the most from it. After all, they've got a vested interest in you spending more. Learn from someone who's successfully doing what you want to do (e.g. get leads for high-value services, get sales for online products, etc.)

The third fear is probably the biggest: “is it worth it?”

In other words, will the money I invest in advertising pay back?

Truth be told, this is a tough question to answer. It all depends, so you have to test.

It's relatively easy to test if your campaign will be profitable if you're selling low-priced products that sell quickly with little need to build credibility and trust. You can just run a small-scale campaign and within a few weeks count the sales and measure the return on investment.

If it's profitable you continue or ramp it up. If it's not, you try something else.

But when you sell high-value products or services with a long sales cycle it might take ages before you get a sale. And a small number of sales won't be statistically significant, you need many. 

Now one option is to reconfigure your business a bit so that you have a smaller, “easier to buy” way of starting to work with you. For example, a short analysis project to set the stage before embarking on a big transformation. Frankly, that's a sensible thing to do anyway. But it's not going to happen quickly.

So from the perspective of being able to confidently use paid advertising right now, the way to get a degree of confidence is to use rules of thumb and be very conservative.

One method is to look at the value of the leads you've generated historically. So if you've managed to get one new client worth on average $5,000 for every 200 online signups that means an online lead is worth roughly $25 to you.   

That means that in theory, you can afford to pay up to $25 per lead and still come out profitable.

But of course, that's theory. Just because a lead is worth that much historically doesn't mean your leads from paid advertising are going to be worth the same. They might be worth more or less. So it pays to be conservative.

So I might say to myself, “you know what, as long as I can get leads for $10 a pop I'm going to be safe”.

Then I can start a small ad campaign and if my cost per lead is over $10 I'm either going to stop the campaign or perform some serious surgery on it.

That gives me the confidence to start running ad campaigns knowing that I've got a big safety margin if they don't pay off as well as I'd hoped.

Of course, it might be that you're just starting up online and you haven't generated any significant number of leads and clients from online sources in the past.

In that case, I'd advise being even more conservative. Play around with some numbers and estimates for your typical client value and a conversion rate of leads to clients. Maybe you estimate that 1 in 100 leads is going to turn into an opportunity (e.g. a strategy call) and 1 in 3 of those is going to turn into a client. 

We're not trying to get exact figures here, just trying to get orders of magnitude.

If you find that your average lead value is in the $20+ range then the chances are you're going to be able to generate them for significantly less than that using advertising (my leads typically cost between $1-2 on Facebook, $4-6 for more qualified leads on Linkedin).

If your average lead value is only a few dollars, then it's probably not even worth thinking about online advertising until you can get that value up. Find ways of adding more value to clients so you convert more and they pay you more. Otherwise, advertising will never pay off for you.

Even if you never end up doing any online advertising it's worth doing this exercise. It'll give you a good feel for the “efficiency” of your lead generation. And if you replace the advertising costs with the cost of your time for activities like networking or getting referrals it'll help you see all your activities in terms of their return on investment.

Well worth doing.

More Clients Memorandum

Is this holding you back?

Posted byIan Brodie on November 8th, 2016.

When you first start up your business, money is usually pretty tight. But what you do have on your side is time.

If you invest that time in marketing activity: calling your old contacts and grabbing a coffee with them, networking, maybe doing some presentations, then you'll start to get clients.

Do more of it and you'll get more clients.

But the rub is, working with clients takes time. Eventually you reach a point where you can't invest any more time in getting new clients because you're busy working with the ones you've got.

You end up stuck on a hamster wheel running faster and faster just to stay in the same place. 

Very many businesses hit this barrier. They can't grow because their only way of getting new clients is through their own activity and the time they spend doing marketing.

To break through that barrier you need to switch from solely using activity to win clients to using “assets”. Just like the way in the industrial revolution businesses switched from using human activity to make things to using machinery.

What's an asset in the marketing sense?

It's anything you can create and then use that will win you clients without needing to keep spending your time on.

Your reputation or brand for example. For most of us that means our status as an authority in our field. 

It could be automation. The email marketing I do needs me to set up the system in the first place and write each email. But they can be used again and again for thousands of subscribers without any extra activity from me.

One of the most powerful but frequently avoided assets is advertising.

We don't often think of advertising as an asset, but if you have a profitable advertising campaign you can run it again and again without it needing your own activity. And since it's profitable, it pays for itself and you can reinvest the profits in more advertising to grow fast.

These days, with advertising options on Google, Facebook and Linkedin we can zero in on our ideal clients far more reliably than ever before, making advertising online much less risky.

Yet many smaller businesses are still shy of advertising, preferring to spend time on “free” approaches to marketing rather than spending money. But in the end, it's lack of time that will kill your business growth. 

Tomorrow I'll talk about how you can overcome that fear of spending money on advertising.

More Clients Memorandum

Why value always wins in the end

Posted byIan Brodie on November 6th, 2016.

As I get more experienced in marketing (or perhaps it's really as I get older) I've come to focus more and more on the basics.

On simple principles that work time and time again.

And perhaps the simplest and most powerful is the principle of giving value.

Marketing at its essence is a battle for attention. If you want someone to buy from you or you want to build a relationship with them, or pretty much anything significant, then you need their attention.

So does everyone else out there. And your potential clients only have so much attention to give.

If you want attention, there are three main ways to get it:

1. You can buy it. You can run ads interrupting their favourite TV show or appearing on their Facebook newsfeed for example.

2. You can steal it. Cold call them when they're not expecting it. Schmooze them at a networking event where it would be rude just to walk away.

3. Or, the best method: you can earn it. You can do something that makes them want to give you their attention.

For most of us, the best way to earn attention is to give value. To write insightful articles, share useful videos, introduce potential clients to people and events that could help them.

The more value you give, the more attention you get.

It feels better too :)

What value are you going to give this week?

More Clients Memorandum

When and where are you most productive?

Posted byIan Brodie on November 4th, 2016.

Hi – I had a rather productive week this week after my ups and downs of the week before.

I really powered through creating a new webinar and you should see me talking about the ideas more in the next few weeks.

One thing that worked well for me this week was being smarter about when and where I try to do my work.

Over the years I've noticed I have two times I'm most productive. First thing in the morning and late at night.

Now I'm not an early riser, so timewise “first thing in the morning” for me is late morning for most. But the point is that usually you're at your freshest about an hour or so after you first get up.

That's prime time for doing hard thinking work.

Instead, we usually burn our brain energy reading emails and checking social media. 

So this week I was strict with myself, avoided the emails/social early on and it paid off. I found that doing planning and analytical type activities first thing in the morning worked particularly well.

By the middle of the day my brain tends to be a bit worn out so I did things that weren't so cognitively taxing. Reading and replying to email, doing some research for data I needed for my webinar, general reading.

In the afternoons I found going for a walk, grabbing a coffee or spending some time chatting to Kathy was a great use of my time.

Then, as usual, I got a burst of energy in the late evenings. I found that sitting quietly by myself from about 8pm onwards I could make great progress on things that needed a bit of creativity: writing my content emails for example, or working on my webinar presentation.

Location made a big difference too.

I don't know about you, but sitting at my desk just doesn't work well for me when I'm trying to be creative.

By the way, I don't mean creative in the Michaelangelo sense. I just mean thinking up ideas for slides or coming up with the content for an article. The kind of thing most of us need to do on a regular basis and that's actually pretty important. The better our presentations, articles, videos, and emails, the more impact we make.

Creating content usually has two phases: coming up with the ideas and structuring them, and then getting them down in electronic ink.

Obviously, you have to do the latter on a computer. But for the former I find I make much faster progress with better quality outputs if I go and sit somewhere quiet. Usually either in our conservatory or I take myself off to a coffee shop and sit wearing headphones. 

Physically I find it better for creativity to sit relaxed in a comfy seat using pen and paper (or iPad and pencil) than being sat upright at a desk. Even when I had a “proper” job I would forever be popping out of the office to get work done :)

What works for you might be completely different to what works for me, of course. The important thing is to find out your own preferences and then use them to your advantage. 

When was the last time you consciously thought about your work environment and about changing it to optimise your productivity?

Maybe a background task for the weekend?

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The secret source of leads most people ignore

Posted byIan Brodie on November 2nd, 2016.

There's a “secret” source of leads that most people tend to ignore – especially online.

It's much cheaper and more effective than the usual sources of leads. But we tend to avoid it because we don't know how to approach it.

That source of leads? Your existing contacts.

Now that might sound like cheating a bit – surely they can't be leads if you already know them or have them on your email list.

But very often we let those contacts go cold.

They haven't bitten in the first few weeks since we first met or they signed up, so we kind of stop communicating with them. Or we're happy just to send our regular newsletter hoping one day they'll “wake up” and get more interested.

And we then trot off to spend a fortune (in time or money) trying to get new leads rather than making more from what we've got.

It's crazy really. So much effort on connecting with them in the first place and we just give up on them if they don't immediately bite.

Now I don't mean nagging or chasing or spamming.

In fact, I think it's our fear of being annoying that holds us back from making the most of our existing contacts. We're worried that since they didn't seem immediately interested; if we keep offering things to them we'll annoy them.

So here's a simple method you can use to reactivate your leads in a way that builds credibility and trust rather than hurts it.

I call it a Value Reactivation campaign. Well, truthfully, prior to this email I didn't have a good name for it. But from now on I'm calling it a Value Reactivation campaign :) 

It's based on the same principles as my Re-Ignite process – but has a little bit more techological intelligence built in. Here's what you do.  

The first step is to create a useful piece of content in an area where you have an offer. A comprehensive blog post or short video is ideal.

You then share that content with your email subscribers or personal contacts. The key here is tracking – you need to know who clicks through to read or watch the content. Most email marketing systems will let you do that, and for personal emails you can use a tool like Mixmax.

You can re-promote that content from a different angle to people who don't initially click through to it because the chances are they just didn't see the original email rather than they saw it and decided not to click.

At the end of the content, you make your offer. That might be a small product for sale which is a next step from the free content, or some kind of strategy call or high-value briefing which again takes them further in the area of the content.

For example, you might offer a free video with your best tips on improving your Linkedin profile, followed by an offer for your online training course on winning clients with Linkedin. Or a strategy call to help them with a roadmap for making the most of social media with the offer of your coaching support afterwards.

The key is that the offer you make should be of specific value to people who are interested in the free content. Don't offer your course on interpersonal selling skills after content on Linkedin for example. Offer something that takes them further, faster, in the area your free content focused on.

You can then follow-up on that offer via email to the people you know clicked through to the content.

The key here is that you're “preaching to the converted”. You're not sending an offer cold to someone. You're sending a reminder of a highly relevant offer to someone you know is interested in the area based on their behaviour – ie they clicked through to content in that area. And you've already built credibility and trust because of the quality of the content.

The end result is that you send something of value for free to your contacts, and only do a gentle “pitch” to people you already know will be receptive because their behaviour has demonstrated an interest.

Sounds like something even the most timid of us could do to re-active our contacts.

More Clients Memorandum

Fish in the right ponds for clients

Posted byIan Brodie on November 1st, 2016.

More on lead generation today, following on from my previous emails on the mindset shift that helps you get more leads and the vital importance of using a powerful lead magnet. 

One of the conundrums you're inevitably going to face when you're looking to get more leads is where to invest your time.

Should I be looking for referrals, doing presentations, going networking, paying for ads on Linkedin?

There really is no one-size-fits-all answer. But the following questions can help you:

Firstly, where do I know my ideal clients “hang out”?

Be honest with yourself. Last time you went to that comfortable regular networking meeting with the same friendly faces you go to every week, how many actual potential clients were there?

Yes, I know that you never know who the other people might know (though asking them might help). But there are plenty of places where you can meet potential clients along with potential introducers.

I've known consultants looking for large multinationals as clients spend endless hours in networking events with local plumbers and accountants just because, well, it's easier than trying to find a bigger, more expensive, more distant event that their potential clients actually go to.

And don't make assumptions either: test. To my eternal shame I was absolutely convinced that my clients would never be seen dead on Facebook and so I didn't even try advertising there because it would have been pointless.

Thank heavens for a prod I got from a friend: it's been my best source of new leads online for the last 2 years.

Secondly, can you actually reach your ideal clients via this method?

An event that you can't get an invite to doesn't help. And although pretty much everyone is on Facebook, sometimes it's difficult to find good criteria to target them by.

So don't be satisfied just knowing where your clients are, you have to be able to reach them there.

Finally, do they respond?

I've found I can reach my potential clients easily and accurately via Linkedin Advertising. But they don't respond as well as with Facebook Ads. I guess maybe it's because they have something in mind when they're on Linkedin and they're more casually browsing and so open to checking out new things (like my ad) on Facebook.

A lot of networking events are full of potential clients. The problem is they're all there to sell, not build relationships. So those events tend not to work well for lead generation.

Final tip: focus on a small number of ponds to fish in. Don't spread yourself too thinly or you'll have no impact. 

Pick two or three sources of leads – ideally with at least one offline and at least one online. Offline methods tend to work faster as you can build relationships quicker face to face. But they don't scale easily and they don't have the reach of online methods.

Stick with a small number of balanced sources of leads and you'll do well.

More Clients Memorandum

Please don’t do marketing like this

Posted byIan Brodie on October 30th, 2016.

Got handed a brochure recently where the text on the front cover began…

“In a time of hyper discontinuity, relying on old ways and patterns is dangerous”.

I must admit I can't help but read it like it was a promo for a hollywood blockbuster movie.

What on earth does it mean? Who knows.

I'm not even sure that “a time of hyper discontinuity” makes any sense. Obviously it must be more discontinuity than just a common or garden time of discontinuity. But perhaps not as much discontinuity as a time of mega discontinuity.

Sadly, the brochure was handed to me at a marketing conference too.

Why on earth do people write nonsense like this?

Well, I think it's for two reasons. 

Firstly they want to impress. To prompt you to take action. That makes sense.

But secondly, they've got lazy.

The brochure was actually from a bunch of lawyers who help businesses relocate to places where they pay lower rents, but get better access to talent.

(It took me about 10 minutes to figure that out by the way. The rest of the brochure was no clearer!)

Instead of generic puffery about “hyper discontinuity” they could have got their point across by using specifics.

They could have reported on the typical cost savings their customers could get. Or data on the education levels of the inhabitants of their locations to show how you could get access to the talent you needed. Or data on the number of businesses relocating.

Or frankly, no end of real information that proves to you that something big is changing rather than just claiming it with generic nonsense like “in a time of hyper discontinuity…”.

Now the purpose of me sharing this example isn't just to have a dig at these bad marketers. It's a reminder that this is an easy trap to fall into for all of us.

We all want to impress and to get our potential clients to take action.

And we're all busy people. So there's a big temptation to use whatever first springs to mind because it sounds good.

But if we're not careful we end up with our own version of this generic puffery. I've done it myself.

Instead, make sure you do the hard work to dig up the specifics that illustrate your case, rather than resorting to flowery language. It will be much, much more powerful.