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This is easier than you think – and hugely important

Posted byIan Brodie on October 14th, 2018.

I mentioned last week that you should be pouring most of your brain power into activities that will have the biggest impact on your business.

And one of the very highest impact activities is to make sure you really understand your ideal clients.

Not surface level. Not “I did a survey a few years ago” level. But the kind of deep understanding that comes from regularly stepping back from the day to day work and asking them about their challenges and goals and longer-term ambitions.

Something it's very easy to forget when you're working with them on an urgent project. And even easier to skip if you've moved on and are now working with different clients.

But those regular check-ins keep you grounded in what really matters. And they build strong relationships too.

So even for those of us who'd prefer to sit down with a good book when we get a few minutes spare, reaching out and setting up a call with a client to chat about bigger issues is going to be a much better use of our time.

And it turns out that talking to clients about stuff they care about is a lot easier than you might think.

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Where is your brainpower going?

Posted byIan Brodie on October 7th, 2018.

I've read a few articles recently about how much of your time you should be spending on various marketing activities.

The problem with those types of articles is that inevitably, you're going to spend most of your time on tactics.

Tactics are what you do day in, day out. If you go to one networking event a week for example then over a year you're inevitably going to spend much more time networking than you spent on your marketing strategy. Even though the marketing strategy is by far the more important of the two activities.

So instead of focusing on the amount of time doing various activities, I've started focusing more on how much of my brain power is going into them.

Even though a networker will spend more time on networking than strategy, they should spend much more of their brain power on strategy.

A rough rule of thumb is that you should be spending about a third of your brain power on understanding your clients and what they want. About a third on strategy (ie deciding how to respond to what clients want: who to target, how to position your offers). And about a third on the tactics.

You'll spend way more time implementing the tactics. But your brainpower needs to focus on building deep understanding of what your potential clients really want, which of them you're going to focus on, what you're going to offer them, and what you're going to emphasise in your marketing.

So many people jump straight to the tactics. But if you get the strategy right the tactics become much more straightforward.

A simple example is Facebook Ads.

They have a ton of targeting options. But if you haven't put deep thought into who you're going to target and what they're focused on then you end up with the same generic targeting that everyone else in your field uses.

Which means you're all bidding for the same interests and your ads all look the same. Up go your ad costs and down go your conversions.

More thought up front lets you target more intelligently and have ads that really resonate. Down go your ad costs and up go your conversions.

Not because you're somehow a Facebook Ads master now. But because you've put your brainpower into strategy.

In fact, if your marketing is becoming a bit of a grind and losing its effectiveness then rather than jump to another tactic it's usually best to go back and examine your strategy. Revisit your understanding of client needs, your targeting and your offer.

It'll have a much bigger impact than just hopping on to a new shiny tactic.

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Why I write like I write

Posted byIan Brodie on September 30th, 2018.

Before you mentally check out thinking “I'm not a writer, this doesn't apply to me” – I'm really talking about creating marketing of any type here.

Could be written content like emails, blog posts or social media posts. But it could be video, audio, anything really.

Anyway, I have a particular “style” of writing emails.

I don't mean a style like a fiction writer would have. Nothing as fancy as that.

But I write emails with a certain frequency and a certain length. They're quite chatty.

And formatted a certain way.

But more importantly, they say something.

My goal in every email is to try to give you a new idea (or at the least, to remind you of an old idea you may have forgotten) that will help move you forward in your business.

It's to build credibility and trust too. So that at some point you might buy one of my products. But I only get to do that if I succeed in giving you something useful to move your business forward.

In my time I've tried lots of different styles of email. I'm sure you've seen them from other people who you've subscribed to too.

Some people email daily. Some do short emails. Others do long ones. Some tell stories. Some are funny. Some talk about themselves and their journey. Some talk about their clients and how well they're doing. Some people rant. Other people try to be nice to everyone.

I chose (actually, it's probably truer to say I evolved) my style of email simply because it was the style I preferred as a consumer.

I like to read emails that give me new ideas and make me think.

So over time, I came to write more and more emails aimed at giving you new ideas and making you think.

All the other stuff about frequency, length, stories or facts. They all became less important than my main goal.

So sometimes I'll do long emails, sometimes short. Sometimes I'll tell a story, often I won't. I'll go through periods of emailing frequently followed by periods of reverting to once a week.

All of those factors can have an impact on how often your emails are opened and read. But none of them are as important as having a clear goal for your emails.

What's your goal?

It's probably different to my goal.

A great start is to think about the emails (or blog posts or videos or whatever format you're thinking about) that you consume and why you value them.

Can you emulate that value in your own content?

You don't have to. But it's a lot easier to do something consistently if you enjoy it yourself and you believe in it.

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The upside down funnel

Posted byIan Brodie on September 23rd, 2018.

The dominant model of marketing over the last number of years has been the “marketing funnel”.

Drop some leads in one end of the funnel, take them through a bunch of steps, and out will pop paying clients.

Lovely analogy.

Except, well, it doesn't work like that.

As the folks at Marketing Experiments pointed out, marketing is more like an upside down funnel.

With a normal physical funnel if you pour liquid in at the top, gravity pulls it through. It's inescapable.

But when you drop leads into a marketing funnel, they don't automatically go through all those lovely steps you've defined for them. 

In fact, it's more likely that those leads will fall out of your funnel than drop through it. There's no natural gravity in a marketing funnel.

So you need to create your own gravity. Pull those leads through your funnel.

In my experience, Value is the force that most effectively pulls leads through your marketing funnel.

The value of a lead magnet gets them to take the first step of signing up and giving you permission to follow up.

The value in your emails or other ongoing communications gets them to look forward to and actively engage with your follow-up.

The value they get from a meeting with you is what motivates them to have one.

And finally, the value they see in working with you is what persuades them to hire you.

Think value at every stage and pull people through your marketing system. Don't expect them to drop through it automatically. 

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Hey you!

Posted byIan Brodie on September 16th, 2018.

90% of marketing – or at least 90% of marketing education – is about grabbing people's attention.

Elevator pitches, Facebook Ads, Linkedin profiles…all the advice is about how to grab the attention of your potential clients.

It's the marketing equivalent of shouting “hey you!” to someone across the street.

But what happens next?

After the person you've shouted at turns their head? After you've got their attention?

That's the important bit.

Although it often doesn't seem like it, getting someone's attention is relatively easy. What's difficult is keeping their attention.

You can't do that just by shouting or making a noise. You have to give something valuable. Something that engages them beyond a knee-jerk response to stimulus.

That's where value-added follow-up is so powerful in marketing.

Whether it's in-person, over the phone, via email marketing or the latest new-fangled messaging tool: follow-up that your potential clients find useful and interesting is the difference between a lifetime client and fleeting attention.

How are you following up? How are you making sure you get more than just that initial spark of attention but instead begin to build a real long-term relationship?

If you don't have a plan in place for how you do it, it's time you did.

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Just do this one thing every day

Posted byIan Brodie on September 9th, 2018.

When it comes to marketing, most of us are looking for “one big thing” that's going to have an amazing impact on our results.

Because if we can find that one thing, we won't have to worry about all the other stuff we're doing. We'll be able to get all the clients we need without working hard or worrying all the time.

In my experience that one big thing is an illusion.

Sure, some people (<0.01%) find something amazing that just happens to click for them. But it’s never reproducible.

So the search for the one big thing becomes a never-ending quest that wastes your time and saps your energy.

There is one thing that can make a big difference though.

Not one big thing. One little thing.

One little thing you repeat over and over and over.

That thing is follow-up. Keeping in touch. Nurturing.

Only a tiny fraction of your potential clients are ready to buy when you first meet them (or you generate a “lead” as the marketing pros love to call it).

They need to learn just how big an issue that problem you could help with really is.

And you need to build credibility and trust before they'd be willing to let you loose on their business or life.

All that comes with follow-up.

Not one follow-up. Not two. But usually dozens.

Follow-up can be the tiniest of things. Sending an article you think they might like. Grabbing a coffee every now and then to swap industry news. A card on their birthday (not a post on their Facebook wall).

Little things, done again and again. Compound interest.

Make it a habit to do something useful or nice for one of your contacts every day.

It's a fun habit to get into because it makes you feel good to do good.

And repeated again and again, it has such a powerful impact. 

Just one thing every day makes all the difference.

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How easy is it to recommend you?

Posted byIan Brodie on September 2nd, 2018.

Kathy and I ate at a new restaurant recently (well, new to us) and had such a good meal we can't wait to bring our friends to it.

It's easy to recommend a restaurant. You know which of your friends eat out regularly, so you're helping them with a “need” they have. And it's pretty low-risk for them to try the restaurant out. 

That's very different to most of our services.

Firstly, most of the stuff we do isn't needed by our clients all the time. Clients might revisit their strategy or start a new leadership development program or rework their marketing every 3-5 years.

So if you've had a good experience with a consultant or coach and you want to recommend them, your first problem is that most of the people you know just won't need them for the foreseeable future. And even if they are thinking of doing something, you probably wouldn't know about it.

Secondly, recommending a consultant or coach is risky.

If you recommend a restaurant and it turns out your friends don’t have such a good time as you, it's hardly the end of the world.

Recommend someone to hire for a six-figure sum to work on a key issue like strategy or leadership and if they mess up it's a huge deal.

That's why recommending people like us isn't a no-brainer like recommending a restaurant.

But you can make it a lot easier.

If you had something that potential clients would value most of the time and that was low risk, then it would be a lot easier for people who knew you to recommend it instead of having to recommend your full service.

That something could be a free report you have, a book you've written, a presentation you do on industry trends. Anything that builds your credibility and begins to establish a relationship with your potential client – but that's easy for them to say yes to and is something they'll value even if they're not quite ready to hire you yet.

Have something like that?

If not, create one.

If you do have one, make sure your current clients and contacts know about it, know how valuable it is, and know that they can recommend your “thing” to their contacts who will get a lot of value from it immediately.

It'll make a big difference to the number of times you get recommended.

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The very best words to use in your marketing

Posted byIan Brodie on August 26th, 2018.

I spend an age agonising over the right words to use whenever I'm updating my website or creating some new kind of marketing.

And I always, always seem to forget the very best words you can use in marketing:

The words of your clients.

Not just in testimonials (though that's a great use of their words, obviously).

But in headlines and subheads. In bullet points.

Whenever you describe what you do and the value it brings, the words your clients use are golden.

They ring true. They're in a language that clicks with other potential clients.

They're much better than even the costliest copywriter could create.

But you've got to gather them – and that's where most of us fall down

I can't tell you the number of wonderful things clients have emailed me where I've thought “I'll use that” – then I lose track of the email and can't remember who said it so I can't get permission to use it.

Do you systematically file away nice things your clients say or email? Have you got a system in place to automatically ask for feedback?

And it's not just the nice things clients say about you that you should be gathering. When clients describe their problems or goals to you, try to use those same words when describing how you can help and the kinds of problems you can solve.

Again, that means remembering to write down or save those vital morsels. Or perhaps running a quick survey for new subscribers or new customers to narrow down their main priorities.

Not only does it help you know which areas you can best help in, it also gives you great language you can use verbatim to show other potential clients and subscribers you understand the kind of issues they're facing.

The more you use your clients' language the more you feel like “one of them” and the more they feel you understand them.

All from systematically listening and writing things down :)

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The simple rule that will save you a ton of time

Posted byIan Brodie on August 20th, 2018.

Years ago I learned a simple (but sadly, easily forgotten) rule about what you should prioritise in your marketing.

Strangely enough, I heard it again from three different sources in the last week. So I'm going to take that as a hint that I should explain it.

It's the 40:40:20 rule. It was coined by Ed Meyer, CEO of the Grey Group (later acquired by WPP) and apparently the richest man in advertising in his day (he retired a decade ago).

The rule says that in marketing, 40% of your success is due to reaching the right audience. 40% is due to your offer. And 20% is due to all the other factors: your messaging, the marketing tactics you use, the presentation, etc.

Over the years I've found this formula to be pretty darned accurate.

We tend to obsess over the details: should I use Facebook or Linkedin? What images should I use in my ad? What should my email headline be? 

All of these are important. But they're exponentially less important than finding the right audience for your product or service, figuring out exactly what they want, and then creating an offer they find irresistible.

Put the right offer in front of the right people and you'll get decent sales even with so-so marketing. But even the greatest marketing genius won't be able to save a mediocre offer pitched at the wrong audience.

In practice, where do we spend most of our time?

In the 20% of course.

Now truthfully, we're always going to spend more time in the day-to-day tactics than in refining our audience and offer which we probably should only do every few years.

But even so, my experience has been that we don't spend anywhere near enough time on our audience and offer (me included).

We think we know them, but we don't really. I witnessed a correspondence recently where someone who was struggling to structure an offer kept insisting he knew exactly what his audience wanted – but he hadn't asked them and he couldn't put his finger on which structure they'd prefer.

We resist interacting with them to find out more about what they really want because we think that we'll look silly asking. Surely we should know by now? So we end up focusing on their surface needs on not on their deeper frustrations and desires.

And we think we know the best product or service to meet their needs because, well, we're offering the same as everyone else. It's hard work figuring out a completely new offer. Much easier just to look at what everyone else in the market is offering. 

So instead, we spend most of our time trying to learn how to do immensely complex marketing like Facebook Ads or multi-step funnels. Or we try and grind out results through endless networking events and “coffee meetings”.

And whenever we get rejected we resolve to work harder. To do more calls and meetings. To do even better ads. To write more blog posts and do more on social media.

But most of the time the problem isn't the tactics. It's that the people we're targeting simply don't want what we're offering them. No amount of brilliant marketing is going to change that. You need to change your audience or your offer.

Every minute you spend figuring out who the right clients for you are and building a deeper understanding of what they need will be paid back 100x or 1000x downstream. Every minute crafting an offer that really touches on their true wants and needs will save you hours and hours later.

Are you sure you have the right offer for the right people?

If you're not getting great results with your marketing and you're having to spend a ton of time working on it then that's the place I'd turn to first rather than trying to work harder, longer or learn more tactics.

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Meet them where they are

Posted byIan Brodie on August 19th, 2018.

If you want to meet someone in person, the easiest way to do it is to go to where they are.

So simple it almost goes without saying.

The same rule applies psychologically too. If you want to engage someone psychologically then you need to meet them where they are (psychologically).

For example, when people visit your website what kind of thing is going to be on their mind?

Are they likely to be thinking about a problem they have? Or are they likely to be exploring options for solving that problem? Or have they progressed as far as having decided on a solution and they're now trying to evaluate providers?

There's no single right answer for everyone.

I know from my website analytics and the searches that hit my site that most of my visitors are still thinking about problems or are trying to see what they can do to solve those problems.

That means I try to focus my site on having articles that explore my clients' main problems and give ideas on how they can solve those problems.

They're not interested (yet) in why my programs might be a better fit for them than their other options. We get to that later.

Your experience may be different though. If most of the people coming to your site have already decided what they want to do and are looking to evaluate suppliers then having lots of blog posts and how-to articles isn't going to interest them.

The same goes for almost any communication with clients. Meet them where they are. Start the conversation about topics that are on their mind and not about what you want to tell them or sell them.

A final hint: although I said there's no single right answer, 90% of the time your potential clients are focused on their problems or goals and are a long way off your solutions and products.