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How to engineer differentiation

Posted byIan Brodie on May 20th, 2018.

In last week's email, we looked at how to analyse your competitors' marketing by looking at major elements like their primary promise, additional benefits, key features, primary marketing approach and espoused differences.

So right now you should have sitting in front of you a chart with each of these elements for your top 3-5 competitors (if you don't, I suggest you refer back to last week's email and create one).

Your next step is to review each element looking for common themes. Do all your major competitors make the same basic promise to their clients? Or perhaps each solution has the same basic features (e.g. everyone does training but no-one does coaching)?

When I looked at my marketing for Momentum Club recently I noticed that all the major competing marketing programs either had a simple promise of “get more clients” or claimed to help their buyers “get more clients without being pushy”.

In other words they were either going for a general appeal, or for people who felt uncomfortable with marketing and sales.

What I noticed was that many of my clients were talking about how they struggled to find the time for marketing and how useful it was to have bite-sized lessons they could fit into a busy schedule.

And yet no one else seemed to mention this vital aspect in their marketing. Either because their programs couldn't help, or they just didn't realise how important it was.

So I started adjusting my marketing to stress the time-saving side of Momentum Club.

It doesn't take precedence over the core promise of winning more clients, but it's something that makes my program that much more attractive to the many people for whom time is an issue.

You can do the same for each of the elements in your analysis. There's almost always something you can say about your products and services that your competitors can't or don't say.

Don't change everything. Just highlighting your difference in one or two key areas is enough to set you apart and give potential clients a solid reason for choosing you.

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The right way to spy on your competitors

Posted byIan Brodie on May 13th, 2018.

One of the best uses of competitive intelligence (aka spying on your competitors) is to learn what not to do.

I don't mean that in the sense that they must be doing something wrong (though often they are).

I mean it in the sense that you need to stand out and do something different, even if what they're doing works for them.

I went through this exercise myself a while back, here's a quick and effective way of doing it.

Firstly, list the people you think compete directly with you. That means the people your potential clients would consider as an alternative to you even if they don't do precisely the same thing as you.

For example, if you do leadership coaching, maybe your client would consider training or a mentoring program or online learning as an alternative.

Be realistic: as a leadership coach you're unlikely to be competing head to head with Marshall Goldsmith, for example. Pick the people who end up on the same shortlists as you.

Then look at their marketing: their websites and any other promotional activities they do.

For each of your main competitors look at their main service or product offering and make a list of:

• What their primary promise is. What's a one-sentence summary of the main thing they say clients will get if they hire them?
• The additional benefits that clients will also get from hiring them. For example, the primary promise of a business coach might be to double your sales. Additional benefits might be to give you more free time, improve the capabilities of your staff, etc.
• The main features of their service or product. If they're a coach, do they meet face to face with clients? Over the phone? Is it weekly or monthly? Etc. If it's a product, is it online? Is it a one-off or ongoing membership? Are there live-calls? Etc.
• Their primary go-to-market strategy. Do they win clients through networking? Do they do seminars? Are they running online ads? Do they have a defined “funnel”?
• Finally (and most importantly) what do they say about how they're different? More experienced? A different way of doing things?   

I'm going to show you how to analyse this information next week, but for this week your task is to do this analysis for your top 3-5 direct competitors.

See you next week!

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Trashy comedy marketing

Posted byIan Brodie on April 8th, 2018.

I'm writing this email sitting in our lounge on a Saturday evening with a trashy comedy playing in the background. One of Owen Wilson's less successful exploits.

And as I racked my brains trying to think of a subject to write about, I realised there just might be a lesson in that trashy comedy.

It's not a classic by any stretch of the imagination. Nothing I would have paid to see. But it's kept me amused for an hour or so. And I'm glad I watched it.

And you know what? Sometimes our marketing can be like that too.

Not every blog post we write or email we send has to be a work of genius. Not every conversation needs to be sparkling. Not every follow-up needs to inspire your client to start working with you right away.

Sometimes a bit of light entertainment or a heartfelt message or just a call to say hi is just what the doctor ordered.

So don't beat yourself up if not everything you do is the epitome of insight and knowledge in your field. You need those super high-value pieces too, of course. Just not all the time.

And in fact, your audience doesn't want to have to put on their thinking cap every time they get something from you. Like me tonight, sometimes they want something a bit lighter.

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Don’t reply – do this instead

Posted byIan Brodie on April 1st, 2018.

I don't know about you, but every now and then something I see in an email or posted on a website or on social media will get me really riled up.

Usually, it's when the author is just plain wrong. Like today when I read an email talking about how all marketing is becoming content marketing because of something Starbucks said (and missing the point that Starbucks were using the word content to mean traditional adverts, not what most people call content marketing).

Or the blog post that looked at the data on the best time to send emails and wrote off the fact that the highest opens and clicks were at weekends because “fewer emails get sent then” (yes – and that's exactly why you should send at weekends).

Sometimes I'll even reply to those emails or blog and social media posts to “correct them”. I can write a veritable essay in response to someone when I'm worked up!

And that's such a waste of time.

If you want to be seen as a leader in your field it should be you doing the publishing and having people respond to you – not you doing the responding.

In fact, if I took all the energy I've spent responding to other people's content I'm sure I could have written a couple of books by now. 

But for some reason, it's easier to respond than it is to initiate.

I'm getting better these days. I sometimes catch myself about to start writing a minor masterpiece in response to someone and think “hang on, maybe this would be better as an email I send out or a post of my own”.

I'm going to suggest you do the same. Rather than responding to things, initiate them. Use your energy in ways that are going to make you more prominent, not ones that are going to draw attention to others. 

(Even if it means you don't reply to my emails ;) )

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What’s the point of marketing?

Posted byIan Brodie on March 28th, 2018.

I've been a little quiet recently.

Partly because I'm in contemplative mood at the moment, pondering the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

And partly because Kathy's got me working behind the scenes on marketing for her latest Early Years Summit.

Watching Kathy's summit progress is fascinating. It's commercially successful, but it's much more than that.

For her audience (early years practitioners and educators) it's one of the few chances they get to experience free high-quality training from leading experts in their field. So when we run ads promoting the summit instead of the normal muted or sceptical response we get people enthusiastically sharing the ad with their friends or commenting on how much they're looking forward to it and how brilliant the last one was.

And when we post up screenshots of the day's videos and ask people what they learnt, the #1 message that comes through is how inspired people feel as a result of the summit.

Inspiring 10,000 or so people every six months is a pretty neat thing to do I think.

Which brings me back to the question “what's the point of marketing?”

If I look in my inbox at the emails from the dozens and dozens of marketing people I follow, a huge number of them just focus on the bottom line like it was the only thing that mattered.

Subject lines today include thing like “How I went from struggling to 2.5 million in sales”, “How to break through $1 million in organic sales” and all sorts.

And when I read their emails the central tenet seems to be that it's your job to do whatever it takes to “get the money”. And that if a ton of money is rolling in, you must be doing the right thing.

Now I'm not going to get all soppy here and say that money isn't important. Without money, most of us simply wouldn't be able to do what we wanted to do.

But sometimes it seems we lose track of what we really want and end up doing what others tell us is best.

I see coaches who love working with people 1-1 waste months of their lives and tons of money trying to create online products because some guru has told them they “shouldn't be exchanging time for money”.

I've seen great consultants switch from helping people to setting up Amazon businesses and trying to succeed in the cutthroat world of e-commerce because the guru they followed decided that selling courses on Amazon was more lucrative for him than selling courses on how to become seen as an expert.

I often look at all these emails in my inbox and all the amazing courses out there and think “wow – if I just did that…”. If I just did a big high-end event I could make millions. If I just did a little tripwire funnel I could make millions. If I just…

Yet whenever I've done what seemed the easiest or the most lucrative I've done OK – but have always ended up switching back because it just didn't meet a real need inside me. And it just “wasn't me”.

I love my membership program. I don't like working 1-1 so much. I love writing emails and making videos. I don't like reaching out to new people or anything with the word “cold” pre-appended to it. 

We all have preferences and things we're good at. And things we want to achieve that are more than just money. Maybe yours is to inspire thousands like Kathy's summit. Or to make a difference to a few important people. Or just to have a bit of fun.

The point of marketing is to ensure you're able to achieve your goals in ways you enjoy. So make sure you use marketing that lets you do that, rather than marketing that's worked for someone else with different goals and different preferences.

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Every client engagement should have one of these

Posted byIan Brodie on March 25th, 2018.

Do you do “post-project reviews”?

Not necessarily anything fancy, just giving some time for free to your clients after your work with them has finished to come back and review how that work went.

Done right, they can be both a great source of feedback and also a brilliant source of new work.

“Done right” means that you don't just focus on the work you did. That's important and feedback on it will be useful to you.

But far more useful to your client is to discuss what they need to do next.

What did they learn from your work together that they should apply to new projects?

What are the key barriers they're currently facing to continuing to make progress?

What's their vision for what comes next?

Not only are the answers to these questions helpful to your client, they also “tee up” the opportunity for you to talk about working together again.

What could be more natural after they've just talked about the barriers they face and their vision for the future than to talk about how you might be able to help them with that.

It's often difficult to get into a sales discussion without it feeling stilted. But in this case it's the most natural thing in the world.

So make sure you take advantage of it and get those meetings scheduled for every piece fo work you do.

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Why advanced marketing hurts your sales

Posted byIan Brodie on March 4th, 2018.

Everything seems to be “advanced” these days, doesn't it?

Normal stuff just doesn't cut the mustard any more. Everything has to be advanced, killer, controversial, surprising, hidden or game-changing somehow.

And it's understandable that people want to badge their stuff that way. After all, who wants to be seen buying the basic beginner's version of something?

We all like to think we're advanced, not beginners. Or more importantly, we all like other people to think we're advanced, not beginners.

The problem is that for most of us, the advanced level of most things we do won't help us. In fact, it'll hurt us.

I've seen many people trying to run before they can walk with their marketing. And I've done it myself too.

Trying a major product launch before you do a simple pilot with your existing customers.

Making a fancy video lead magnet instead of a text document.

Building complex “funnels” instead of simple email sequences.

In theory, more advanced marketing should get you better results. But it rarely does.

Firstly, it takes too much time for most of us to get advanced marketing up and running. Time we just don't have. So it doesn't get done or gets done very slowly.

Secondly, advanced marketing tends to be “set in stone” and difficult to change. If your audience doesn't react well to your free ebook you can quickly edit, tweak and try again. But it's a huge job to reshoot a video.

If you have simple email sequences then changing a few emails doesn't affect the sequence much. If you have a complex funnel you have to worry about which path each subscriber goes down, what emails they see, how to get them on the right path with the right emails, etc. A small change to a sequence in one place can have knock-on effects in completely different places in your funnel.

Finally, advanced marketing is simply too difficult for most of us to master. It tends to require a lot of knowledge and experience and detailed planning to get to work. Much better to be great at the basics that try something clever and fail.

Many times I've tried to implement complex marketing funnels to find they only performed a little better than the simple way I was doing things previously. All that increased effort simply wasn’t worth it.

Of course, if you're a big business with lots of people to work on your advanced marketing then go for it.

Or if you’ve already mastered the basics and are getting good results it could be time to upgrade your marketing.

But for most of us, simple is the best.

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A little used method for breakthrough ideas

Posted byIan Brodie on February 25th, 2018.

Last week I mentioned that the key to great content that gets you clients isn't the volume of information you share, it's your ability to create “lightbulb moments” for your potential clients with that content.

It's these breakthrough ideas that show them you're a real expert and can offer something different to everything they've tried before.

But, of course, real breakthroughs aren't easy to come by.

Here's a technique I've been using for years that works well for me and I think could work for you too. It's got three simple steps.

The first step is to identify conventional wisdom in your field. What is it that everyone believes to be true? For example in sales, conventional wisdom says that you shouldn't reveal the price of your product or service until you've had a chance to establish its value. That's because most customers don't initially realise the size of their problem, so telling them the price of the solution when they don't realise they have a big problem will scare them off.

The second step is to turn that conventional wisdom on its head.

In our example that would be to say that you should tell people the price of your product or service up front before anything else.

Now, of course, just saying the opposite of what everyone else in your field says may set you apart. But if it's not correct then it's not really a great idea to share with your clients.

And typically, if you simply reverse conventional wisdom then it will be wrong. After all, conventional wisdom is conventional wisdom because it's usually right.

That's where step 3 comes in.

You see, conventional wisdom is right most of the time, but not all of the time. There are exceptions to every rule.

If you can find the exceptions where your reversed idea is correct, then you're on to a winner.

So in which circumstances would telling people the price of your product or service before you established its value be the right thing to do?

Well, if everyone already knew the value for one. That's unlikely to be the case. But there will definitely be some people who already know the value.

So what if you had so many potential clients that you can afford to scare off the majority and focus only on the ones who already know the value of your solution?

That would make sense. You can avoid wasting time and focus your efforts on the people it's going to be easiest to sell to.

So for the situation where you have a lot of leads, it can actually be best to narrow them down by telling them your price up front.

Do you see what we've done there?

We've taken something that's the opposite of conventional wisdom and found a situation where it's true (I'm sure there will be other situations too).

So now we have an idea (tell people your price up front) that runs counter to what all our competitors are saying – yet is true for a specific group of people (those with many leads).

If we focus on those people as potential clients we have a real breakthrough idea that's valuable to them and is different to what everyone else is telling them.

All from a few minutes thinking.

I'm sure you can do it for your business too.

Just start with conventional wisdom in your field.

Turn it on its head.

And then find the circumstances or group of people where it's actually true (because conventional wisdom may be true the majority of the time, but is never true all the time).

Good luck!