Navigation

CategoryMarketing

Featured

Marketing

How To Make A Podcast

Posted by

Ian Brodie on February 22nd, 2012.

Podcasts can be a great marketing approach.

They help you engage with your audience (hearing your voice is that bit more personal than reading your blog). They're often more intimate (people listen while jogging or in their car so you get more of their attention than if they're speed-surfing). They help you reach a wider audience via iTunes who might not have found your material. And they help you build your authority and perception of you as an expert in your field.

But many people hold back from doing them because it all seems quite technical and tricky.

I've been asked by a few people recently how I make my podcasts – so I've made a short video taking you step by step through everything you need to do. From creating and formatting the audio to getting it on your website, to getting it onto iTunes.

Just click on the video below to watch.

And get podcasting…

(Update: since I made the podcast iTunes have updated the requirements for cover images – they now need to be 1400×1400 pixels)

Featured

Marketing

What Jeremy Clarkson Taught Me About Marketing

Posted by

Ian Brodie on February 17th, 2012.

Just in case you're not familiar with Top Gear, the BBC's flagship programme for “petrolheads”, Clarkson is the outspoken front-man – you can find out more by clicking here:

Jeremy Clarkson Bio

So what can a middle-aged, over-tight-trouser-wearing, prone-to-put-his-foot-in-it “grumpy old man” teach us about marketing?

Well, the truth is that Clarkson is something of a phenomenon. His fans essentially hang on his every word and he's certainly the most influential motoring journalist in the UK, if not globally.

Yet at the same time, he inspires equally strong passions in his detractors. His views on the environmental movement, Barack Obama, and the residents of Mexico, Argentina and Norfolk have (perhaps deliberately) inflamed opinions and triggered numerous “we hate Clarkson” campaigns.

And it's that polarisation we can learn from.

Clarkson's fans will “buy” whatever he has to offer. And he doesn't much care what his detractors think or do.

Yet most of us are inordinately concerned with not upsetting people. With trying to please everyone. As a result, we end up with everyone thinking we're “nice”.

But nice is not enough.

Nobody buys nice. We buy what we love.

Now, of course, if you're a big multinational with half the world as your clients, you can't afford to upset large sections of them. You have to try to please everyone.

But most of us aren't in that position. We work for small organisations or ourselves.

And that gives us a big advantage.

We don't need huge numbers of clients. A handful of hugely loyal raving fans can keep us well fed for a lifetime.

And nowadays thanks to the increased visibility of the internet, we can find those potentially raving fans and they can find us. As long as we're not bland. As long as we have the guts to focus ourselves on being the perfect match for that small group and ignore the rest.

And Clarkson goes further than that. He doesn't just appeal to dedicated motoring fans – he champions them. He stands up for them. He says what they wish they could say. He takes on their enemies. He's become the person they want to be (if they only dared).

As a result, they're fiercely loyal. Not the “I can't be bothered to switch away from you it's too much hassle” kind of loyalty most businesses have. It's “follow you to the ends of the earth” loyalty.

That's the kind of loyalty that brings huge, dazzling success.

So if you want huge, dazzling success, ask yourself these questions:

Who do you stand for? Who are you the champion of? Who looks up to you and wishes they could be like you?

Answer these questions as well as Clarkson can and you're on your way.

* Update * Since I wrote this blog post Clarkson has again courted controversy by allegedly throwing a punch at his producer when he didn't get the food he wanted after they arrived late at a hotel. After being suspended by the BBC around half a million people signed an online petition to reinstate him. That really shows the power of aligning yourself with your audience.

Personally I believe it's possible to build loyalty without the arrogance, ill-nature and disrespect for others that Clarkson shows. But setting that aside, it's a clear lesson in the power of polarisation.

Featured

Marketing

Linkedin Tips: The Real Secrets of Linkedin

Posted by

Ian Brodie on February 17th, 2012.

I ran a webinar yesterday for members of Momentum Club focusing on practical strategies for winning clients with Linkedin.

If you'd like to get access to the recording (and all the other resources in Momentum Club), you can get hold of it by taking a $1 trial by clicking here.

Here's a summary of the Linkedin Tips we covered:

Strategy 1. Get Yourself a Client Focused Profile

Although I don't believe many clients actively search on Linkedin for potential service providers – they will almost always check you out on there before speaking to you or meeting with you if you connect in other ways.

So having a good linkedin profile is pretty vital.

The mistake most people make is that they treat Linkedin like an online CV. They focus on their jobs, their achievements, the responsibilities they've had over the years.

While that may be the sort of thing that interests prospective employers – it's of no value to potential clients.

My best linkedin profile tip is simple: make your profile client focused.

A client focused profile will highlight who you work with and how you help them. It should be more like the way you introduce yourself at a networking event than a resume.

You want a potential senior client to read it and think “this guy could help us – and I think we could work with him”.

So focus on what your clients get from working with you – and potentially include some testimonial type quotes from them too.

2. Connect Broadly, but with Purpose

When I first started on Linkedin I followed the advice to only connect with people I already knew well.

With hindsight, that was a mistake.

Linkedin can be a good way of starting new relationships – not just maintaining them with people you already know.

Now I'm not saying connect with everyone. But if you get the opportunity to connect with people who may know potential clients for you – then take it. Use it as a chance to start building a relationship with them. Send them a message after you connect and get a conversation going.

After all, if you went to a face to face networking event you wouldn't spend the whole time talking to people you already knew.

3. Use Linkedin to Turbo-Charge Your Referrals

Of all the Linkedin Tips I've given over the years – this one is without doubt the most powerful for getting new clients.

Referrals are pretty much the most powerful strategy you can harness to get more clients. The trouble is, we usually don't know who the people we know are connected to. So we end up making vague requests for referrals to “any small business” or “senior executives” that rarely come to fruition.

But imagine how powerful our requests for referrals would be if we knew who our contacts knew and were able to ask for referrals specifically to the ones that would be great clients for us.

Well, with Linkedin that's exactly what you can do.

You can either start by looking at the connections of people you know well. People you feel confident would give you a strong recommendation.

If you spot someone you'd like an introduction to then give your contact a call or an email (but preferably a call) and gently ask them to introduce you.

Or you can start by doing an “Advanced Search” on Linkedin to look for people in the ideal industry sector for you, with the right sort of job titles, and in the right geography. Or with a premium Linkedin subscription, working in the right sort of business with the right level of seniority.

When the search function returns the list of people meeting these criteria, choose to view 2nd order connections only (i.e. the connections of your direct contacts) and the list will tell you the name of the person who connects you.

If you know them well enough you can proceed as before. Give them a call and gently ask for an introduction or referral.

This strategy, more than any other, is the one that people who are having the most success using Linkedin to win clients are using. But you need to make sure you're connected to all the people you know who themselves are likely to be connected to your potential clients.

4. Use Groups (and Your Lead Magnet) to Turn Cold Contacts into Warm

One little known strategy that is incredibly effective is to harness the feature of Linkedin that allows you to send direct messages to people you're in the same group as even if you're not connected.

That means that if you join groups that your potential clients have joined (even if they're not active in dicussions) you can send them a message.

Now you have to be careful with this. An unsolicited message trying to sell yourself or your services to them is spam. And on Linkedin it feels even worse because it's such an intimate medium with mesages being primarily between people who have agreed to connect with each other.

But if you use the message to offer them something of value (your lead magnet), then it turns a cold contact into a communication the recipient will appeciate.

I recently ran a test campaign using this strategy and over 20% of the people I sent messages to offering a copy of my Pain Free Marketing Blueprint either went off and downloaded it directly, or sent me a message back to thank me and request a copy.

If you know about response rates in direct mail and email marketing you'll know that 20% is an order of magnitude higher than you normally get.

But it only works if you have something of value to offer, not a sales pitch.

Put These Linkedin Tips Into Action

These are the simple and direct strategies I've found to work the best to connect with high potential clients via Linkedin.

If you'd like more details on them and on other high performing client-winning strategies, then you might like to consider the $1 trial of Momentum Club. You'll get immediate access to the Linkedin webinar recording along with all my Core Marketing training on the best ways of getting clients.

Click here for more details.

Featured

Marketing

Content Marketing Case Study: How Dave Gorman Discovered a Brilliant Technique for Coming Up With Interesting Ideas

Posted by

Ian Brodie on January 24th, 2012.

Like many other people, my primary marketing strategy is to produce valuable content to showcase my expertise and build relationships with potential clients long before we ever meet.

And whether it's blog posts, longer articles, podcasts or videos – the core challenge for anyone following such a content strategy is coming up with interesting stuff to “write about”.

In fact, the number one reason I hear from people who want to get into blogging or content marketing but have struggled to do so is that they just can't imagine producing enough interesting material. Or they've tried and then run out of steam.

Well, let me introduce you to Dave Gorman.

Dave's a comedian based here in the UK. He started his career fairly gently by writing for established acts, and his first show at the Edinburgh Fringe “Reasons to be Cheerful” was based on an analysis of whether the items mentioned in the Ian Dury song “Reasons to be Cheerful #3” actually were reasons to be cheerful.

So far, all pretty standard.

But then Gorman hit on a brilliant idea which would propel him towards 4 bestselling books, sellout live shows and his own TV series.

And it's one we can all use ourselves.

The simple idea was that instead of trying to think of interesting things to write about for his act, he would do interesting things – and then write about those.

It turns out that people are far more interested in the weird or exciting things you've done that in the weird or exciting things you've just thought about.

So Gorman's 1999 Fringe show was called “Dave Gorman's Better World” and was created by him writing thousands of anonymous letters to local newspapers asking for suggestions from the public on how to create a better world – and testing them out to see if they worked.

His next wheeze was triggered by spotting that an assistant manager at small Scottish football team East Fife had the same name as him. So he drove 450 miles to meet him and photograph the event. He then set about meeting another 53 Dave Gormans across the world (one for every card in a pack of cards plus the jokers apparently). He chronicled his adventures meeting these Dave Gormans in the book and TV show “Are You Dave Gorman?”.

Next, he resolved to live his life according to a literal interpretation of his horoscope each day. Turned out pretty well when he bet everything he had on rank outsider Ian Woosnam (who he shared a birthday with) winning the Dubai Classic golf tournament (which, of course, he travelled to see) and won.

After that, he started his “Googlewhack Adventure” when he became obsessed by finding google search phrases with only one result – and then travelling the world to find the person behind that single result. The result for him was another bestselling book and TV show.

More recently, he travelled America avoiding all corporate outlets and using only family owned hotels, restaurants and petrol (gas) stations. “America Unchained” was again a bestseller.

Then he challenged the public to take him on at any game of their choice – from poker to darts to Khett to Cluedo to Kubb. And of course, he travelled to play them and chronicled his adventures in yet another besteller.

So how can we harness this approach for ourselves?

The key is that people are more interested in what you've done than what you think.

What I mean by that is that it's great to have new ideas, theories about your field, predictions for the future.

But what really gets people hooked is hearing about practical experiences.

You can cull those from your own personal experience. Or you can interview others or create case studies.

Or you can do what Dave Gorman did: go out and do something interesting.

You recommend a particular approach to leadership, for example? Use it yourself. Get your clients to use it and record the outcomes. Video interview them afterwards. Get them to chronicle their experiences.

You show people how to get more traffic to their website? Create a live case study from scratch. Build a website, put some content on it, follow your traffic strategies and record the results.

In my case, I test out the marketing strategies I recommend myself. A lot of what you see on my blog is a result of my own experiments (particularly with online marketing) to see what works and what doesn't.

You can do the same.

You want inspiration? Need something interesting to write about?

Then do something interesting.

———-

For a whole bunch more sources of inspiration for blog posts, emails and other content, check out my articles on 21 Sources of Inspiration for Blog Posts and Emails.

Featured

Marketing

The Truth About Email

Posted by

Ian Brodie on November 23rd, 2011.

“Email is dead”

“Everyone's using social media. No one reads emails these days”

“People are sick and tired of more and more email. They're overwhelmed”

Have you heard comments like this recently? Me too.

It's tempting to believe them and focus more on other ways of communicating.

Except for my business, email seems to be working just as well as ever.

Just me? Apparently not according to a bunch of market research that's been done in the last few months.

Is email being wiped out by social media?

According to research by Merkle (View from the Digital Inbox 2011) – text messaging is the preferred method of personal communication amongst 18-29 year olds and the phone is the preferred method for other age groups: email comes in a strong second, being preferred by well over double the number who prefer social media.

And when it comes to commercial communications – email sweeps the board as the preferred method with 65-78% of people preferring it. A pitiful 0-4% of people prefer social media for commercial communications.

So while many people are beginning to use social media (and especially text messaging amongst younger people) instead of email for personal communications. When it comes down to business – email is still king.

But surely no one opens emails any more?

It's true – average – open rates have dropped from 14% to 11.4% in the last 3 years according to MailerMailer's Email Marketing Metrics Report.

But that's largely due to more (bad) email being sent (and not opened). If your emails are still as valuable as they were 3 years ago with subject lines just as interesting – they'll still get opened.

In fact, click rates (rather more important than open rates) are as good now as they were three years ago (and better than they have been in the intervening years).

But no one wants to be “bombarded” with email

It's funny, whenever I speak to people worried about emailing too frequently and “bombarding” their customers and prospects with emails and I ask them how frequently they're currently emailing – it's usually monthly or at most weekly.

Is one email a week “bombarding”? Only if the emails have little of value in them.

In fact, I spoke to a marketing consultant earlier this week who switched to emailing his subscribers daily nearly two months ago. That's right: daily.

The results?

His open rates have remained the same. His unsubscribes have dwindled to virtually zero. And most importantly, the number of enquiries he's getting for his services from email subscribers has shot up.

I'm not saying you should email daily. But the chances are you can email more frequently and get better results. The people who object and unsubscribe when you send that one extra email a week? They were never going to become your clients anyway.

But I can't do those fancy graphical emails

You don't need to.

I got a bit cross recently when a (very) famous sales guru put up a video saying you needed to use highly graphical emails to get the attention of your prospects. (As it turns out, the guy was selling – you guessed it – a system to make graphical emails).

The facts on this are pretty clear. The best research I've seen is from MarketingExperiments a couple of years ago. They discovered that:

Emails that use lots of graphics and formatting got 34% fewer clicks than plain text emails.

Emails that had a little bit of formatting: the occasional underline or bold text and highlighted links got 55% more clicks than plain text.

Why is that?

Lightly formatted emails look like the emails we get from people we know and trust. Friends and business colleagues.

Graphics heavy emails look like advertisements.

So stick to neat, lightly formatted emails.

Make sure they can be read on mobile devices too. According to Knotice, 13.6% of all emails are opened on a mobile device.

Fancy graphics play havoc with mobile devices. At best, they make the text appear tiny. At worst, the email is unreadable.

So you're saying I should use email as one of my key marketing channels then?

Yup. Without a doubt.

According to the Direct Marketing Association's 2011 Report “The Power of Direct”, Email brings in $40.56 for every dollar spent on it, compared to catalogs' ROI of $7.30, search's return of $22.24, Internet display advertising's return of $19.72 and mobile advertising's return of $10.51.

Difficult to argue (too much) with those figures.

PS If you'd like more in-depth tips on email marketing – completely free – you can sign up for my series of Email Marketing Power Tips here:

Email Marketing Power Tips >>.

Featured

Marketing

Do You Face These Barriers To Pain Free Marketing

Posted by

Ian Brodie on November 18th, 2011.

I've talked a lot on this blog about “Value In Advance” marketing: building credibility and trust with potential clients by giving them some way of sampling what it is you do.

When I switched from more traditional forms of marketing (telling people how great I am) to Value In Advance marketing (demonstrating it instead) I saw a huge turnaround in the number of qualified, high quality leads I was generating.

And when I discuss this strategy with professionals they can all see how effective it can be – in theory.

But they often highlight a number of barriers that they think will prevent them from adopting the strategy.

Perhaps you're thinking of these too.

The first is that they don't know what to create as a “lead magnet” to share with potential clients.

The second is that they don't think they have the expertise: they're good at what they do but don't consider themselves thought leaders.

The third is that they don't have the time to create their lead magnet (or they're just not good at writing).

What to create as a Lead Magnet.

In summary, the key is to brainstorm the typical challenges your clients have (that you can help with) and identify what I call the “first speedbump” in their journey to solving them.

So if you're a leadership coach, for example, you might decide that the first thing your clients need to do is build their own confidence before working on specific leadership skills.

Focus your lead magnet on this first speedbump – it'll be the most pressing issue on the minds of the biggest number of your potential clients.

But I'm not a Thought Leader.

Putting aside the fact that “thought leader” is such a misused phrase these days it's become meaningless – the truth is that you don't need to be the world's leading expert on a topic to produce something of genuine value to your potential clients.

You do need to know your stuff. You can't just make it up or be “one week ahead” of your clients.

But almost every professional I speak to has significant knowledge of great value to their potential clients.

Most of out clients don't need or want to know the latest leading edge theories in your field.

They want simple, practical ideas that will get them results.

That's what you should focus your lead magnet on.

I'm not good at writing and I just don't have the time.

Although a written report is the most common format for a lead magnet – it's far from the only one – or even the most effective one.

And there are far less time-consuming ways of developing a lead magnet.

A series of short bullet point tips can be hugely useful to clients, for example.

If you do work that's visual or online, you can record a “screen cast” of you at work (for example, creating a sales letter if you're a copywriter) and commenting on what and why you're doing it.

If you do design work, do a critique of 5 good and 5 bad designs in your field (e.g. websites) and write that up (or again, make a screen recording of you doing it online).

Make an audio or video recording of your thoughts on a speciic topic. It doesn't have to be word perfect – as long as the content is solid.

So please, don't let these barriers stand in the way of implementing this hugely powerful marketing approach.

Featured

Marketing

How Much Should I Give Away?

Posted by

Ian Brodie on November 10th, 2011.

Bob Monkhouse I ran a private webinar over the weekend for my email subscribers where I answered questions on Pain Free Marketing.

One of the very best questions was “how much information should I give away in advance of someone working with me to entice them to sign up?”

This is one of the questions I hear most often from professionals – worried they'll “give away the store” in their attempts to follow my “Value In Advance” strategy.

I was going to do a long blog post covering all aspects of this question.

But tonight, at a pro-manchester event, over a few beers, Paul Aspden of Clock Creative summed it up far better than I ever could.

In Paul's words:

“You remember when Bob Monkhouse lost his jokebooks?” (for those of you not based in the UK, Monkhouse was an old-school stand up comic known for his huge repertoire of jokes who had a bit of a renaissance in the 90s).

“Well, the guy who found those jokebooks didn't become a famous stand-up comic, did he?”.

Paul's absolutely right.

It turns out that what made Monkhouse successful wasn't his jokes – the information he knew. It was his personality, his delivery, his relationship with his audience. Even though he was famous for his repertoire of jokes.

It's the same for all of us.

We worry about giving away too much information. Maybe our clients could do it all without us if we give too much “value in advance”.

But that's almost never the case.

Hardly any professionals sell pure information. We sell results.

And the results we deliver come partially from our knowledge – but also from our experience (knowing what knowedge applies in what situations), our skills (our ability to apply our knowledge – there's a world of difference between knowing what makes a good sales letter and being able to write one, for example) and our contact base (who we know).

The truth is, that if a blog post or an article or a PDF lead magnet you give away can reveal all your “secrets” so that clients don't need you – then you don't really know very much.

Come on, think about it. The sum total of your expertise. All the value you could deliver to clients. Can you really give that away in a simple article or report?

Only if you don't really have that much to offer.

If you really have deep expertise and experience, there's no way you can give that away in a short report.

And the sort of clients who'll take a short report and try to implement it themselves rather than hiring you?

They weren't going to hire you anyway. Don't kid yourself.

They're the cheapskates. The barrel scrapers. The freebie seekers. If you didn't offer your free stuff, they'd have found someone else who did. They wouldn't have come looking to hire you instead.

But there are plenty of people who will hire you after being impressed by your free stuff who wouldn't have if they hadn't seen it.

So please – don't get paranoid about giving away too much useful information. It really is almost impossible for professional service firms.

Featured

Marketing

Balancing Your Business Development

Posted by

Ian Brodie on November 5th, 2011.

Balance I read a great article recently by my friend Ford Harding and Robert Buday on getting the balance right between “pull marketing” (in particular using thought leadership to attract clients) and “push marketing” (direct outreach strategies like telesales or direct mail).

You can read the article here:

Push Me Pull You >>

I actually worked at one of the firms mentioned in the articles and watched the rise and fall they mention first hand.

Their point is that you need avoid becoming over-reliant on either push or pull strategies. If everything is pure push – you can be overwhelmed by a competitor who catches the zeitgeist with a compelling new piece of thought leadership (re-engineering, for example in the 90s).

If you focus only on pull strategies via thought leadership, you can end up in trouble if the ideas run dry, or don't hit a hot button with enough potential clients.

So balancing push and pull makes sense.

The other area I find it's important to balance is breadth and depth.

High breadth marketing approaches like doing large scale presentations, sending direct mail our advertising are great in that they expose you to a large new audience.

But they don't make a lot of impact on each individual.

High depth marketing approaches like referrals or small seminars make a high impact on each individual you contact because you're interacting face to face.

But you don't hit many of them. And they tend to be better at converting existing contacts rather than bringing new people into your contact base.

So I typically advise using a balance of high breadth and high depth approaches.

Use direct mail, webinars, your website to make initial contact with new potential clients and make a good first impression (preferably with a “value in advance strategy”).

Use referrals and small scale seminars to make a big impression on people who've already entered your contact base – or who you're connected to via someone they trust.

That way you're constantly refreshing your contact base with the high breadth methods – while pushing people you're already close to towards becoming clients with the high depth approaches.

Like many things in life, balance is the key.

———-
Image by winnifredxoxo

Featured

Marketing

How My Painful Sales Nightmare Led To A Marketing Breakthrough…

Posted by

Ian Brodie on October 25th, 2011.

We all have horror stories to tell from our experiences. One of my worst was my first official business development role when the big consulting firm I worked for put me in charge of one of our largest UK accounts.

I'd been a very successful consultant – and had learned to sell effectively in that consulting role.

But as an account manager I was hopeless.

Like many professionals, I was great once I was in a face to face meeting with potential clients.

I just couldn't get enough of those meetings.

I really hated phoning or even emailing my contacts, trying to set up meetings to “explore how we might work together for mutual benefit” (= pitch our services). It felt incredibly uncomfortable: pushy and salesy.

So I hardly made any calls. And I hardly got any sales.

I was in real trouble for a while. But then – pretty much by accident – I noticed something a little bit weird. Something that gave me the confidence to call potential clients and which made them enthusiastic to take my calls – and even to start calling me.

You can grab a copy of the Pain Free Marketing Blueprint where I explain what I did to turn things round here:

Pain Free Marketing Blueprint »

Featured

Marketing

A Surefire Marketing Strategy that Almost No One Ever Does

Posted by

Ian Brodie on October 5th, 2011.

Painful though a recession is, it does have its upsides.

One of those is change.

In a period of stability, established firms have the advantage. Stability means that what worked yesterday will work today. And so potential clients primarily look to firms with long track records and client references.

When turbulence hits, everything changes. What worked yesterday no longer works today. The long track records, testimonials and references count for less.

Clients want to know “what's working now?”, “what works in a recession?”. Yesterday's answers no longer seem so relevant or valuable.

In this environment a new firm with fresh ideas can thrive.

But they can't be unproven ideas.

When clients ask “what's working now?” they don't want to hear untested concepts or thoughts on what might work. They want someone to tell them what's working right now for other businesses (or individuals).

How can you tell them that?

You have to do some work. Some research. Find out what really is working right now. Analyse or interview successful businesses in your niche. Figure out what they've done that made the difference. Extract the common themes and package them into recommendations.

Seems like hard work? Good.

Because it's hard work, almost no one does it.

You can get a tremendous edge by being the one advisor in your niche who does that hard work. Who has the facts and the data to share.

If I was a local business coach, for example, what I'd do is identify 10 local businesses who were growing fast despite the recession. I'd interview the 10 business owners for 30-60 minutes – maybe face to face, maybe over the phone. I'd develop a little model of what works for these local “recession busters” and a presentation about it.

Then I'd market the hell out of it.

I'd run seminars on it. Write a report and use that as a lead magnet for the web, direct mail and telemarketing.

I'd record an audio and give it away at networking events. I'd get myself on the radio and in the local press talking about it.

I'd position myself as an authority on recession busting strategies for small businesses locally. I'd overtake the established firms.

And I'd stand out on my own.

Because almost no one does this.

No one goes that extra mile to create this kind of intellectual capital.

Everyone says they'll do anything to get more clients. But few stretch to doing the hard intellectual work of creating something valuable like this.

Are you going to do it?

You can download my free guide to doing a research project here.

Older Posts Newer Posts