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Your business really IS different. Here’s how to figure out what will work

Posted byIan Brodie on September 4th, 2016.

Good marketing is based on timeless principles that apply across all businesses.

Deep understanding of your ideal clients, a clear and compelling value proposition, giving value in advance, nurturing relationships. Doesn't matter what your business is, these will all work for you.

But you also need to adapt your marketing to the specifics of your business: the clients you target and the products and services you sell.

In next Sunday's email I'll talk about adapting your “voice” to fit your clients. This week though I want to talk about a simple technique for adapting content marketing to fit your business.

There's an awful lot written and talked about the importance of content marketing. Some of it very good. Some of it just tosh.

The problem is that very many writers on content or online marketing only really know the marketing business. They've never worked for real bricks and mortar businesses, or even non-marketing online businesses.

As a result, they're blinkered. They see techniques that work for marketing businesses and they assume they work for all businesses.

For example, I recently read an article saying how the bar has been raised and we need to create even more content these days, and it needs to be longer and more in depth than ever.

Now I'm a big fan of encyclopaedic content. In many fields it gets shared and linked to more than any other type of content. That's certainly the case in the world of marketing.

But I'm skeptical that every business needs to post as frequently and do such in-depth content as a marketing business.

Here's something you can do in your business to see what will really work for you when it comes to content marketing: reverse engineer what is already working for others.

Don't just take the word of the marketing experts at face value. Check what's really succeeding in your marketplace.

When it comes to content marketing, what's the purpose of your content?

Partly it's to build credibility and trust with potential clients. But it's also to attract them in the first place by getting found in the search engines and getting shared on social media.

And you can measure that.

Think of some of the keywords you'd like to be found for and search for them on Google. Then study what appears in the top 10 results (look for normal sites from your competitors or similar businesses to yours rather than things from Wikipedia, the BBC or Forbes magazine).

Look at the specific articles that appear in the results. Are they really long articles or short ones? Video or text or audio? Specific or general? Full of images or plain text? Are the articles simple lists of tips, case studies, in-depth analyses, personal stories?

Go over to Buzzsumo.com and look at the articles that are the most shared on social media for those keywords too and do the same analysis.

Then look wider at the sites they're from. How often are they posting new material? Are they very niche or do they cover a broad range of related topics?

All this will give you clues as to what type of content is working in your field to get shared and to get ranked on Google.

Then use that to guide the type of content to produce yourself.

Because if your audience is rewarding that type of content by sharing it and Google is rewarding it by showing it high on the search results, there's a good chance that's the sort of content that will work well for your business.

No guarantees, but a good chance.

And a far better chance than if you blindly follow what the marketing experts tell you “always works”.

Quick case in point: I googled “teambuilding techniques” and looked at the word count of the top 5 articles for that topic. Far from needing to write huge 2,000+ word articles as content marketing gurus would have you believe, not one of the top 5 articles was over 1,600 words and the average word count was just 873.

Try it for some of your keywords. You'll find that very often what it takes to succeed in your business is quite different to what the experts assume.

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Here’s to you

Posted byIan Brodie on August 21st, 2016.

I've been thinking today about what extraordinary lives we lead.

If you're reading this email than the chances are you don't live an ordinary “9 to 5” life.

You may well run your own business. Or be a professional dedicated to serving your clients. 

I'm also betting you've made some sacrifices. Given up plenty of time to get your business off the ground or go that extra mile to make sure your clients get what they need. Travel, long hours, tough, challenging work.

In fact, you probably make those sacrifices week in, week out. Working way harder than most everyone else you know. I've been there. I still am there really.

I don't have any magic tips for you this week.  I just want you to know how much I respect what you do.

I know business can be challenging at times. How sometimes the amount of stuff we need to do to succeed can seem overwhelming.

I hope my work helps you with that in some way. But always remember, your success is down to you.

So here's to you, and to every small victory on your path to success.

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Don’t be fooled by this otherwise good advice

Posted byIan Brodie on August 14th, 2016.

“If you're going to do something, you might as well do it right”.

I really like that saying and I try to apply it to everything I do. I'm rarely content with just being OK at things: I wan't to be really good or not do them at all.

By and large that philosophy has stood me in very good stead. But sometimes it can cause problems. Big ones.

If you're a bit like me, then whenever you want to do something in your business you want to do it really well.

But what if you're just starting out with something like email marketing? Or your website? Or doing sales meetings?

My preference would be to try to get the “perfect” website. To implement a really complex and high-performing email marketing funnel. To try to learn to handle every possibility in sales meetings so I get the best results possible.

It just doesn't work like that though.

You have to go through a learning curve.

Trying to implement an advanced email marketing system from scratch is like trying to learn to drive in a Formula 1 racing car. It's just far too difficult with far too much going on for a beginner.

It's the same with websites, sales meetings, doing presentations, pretty much any type of marketing.

You've got to learn the basics first and get good at them before you can progress to more advanced versions.

If you try to start at too advanced a level you'll struggle to make progress and often won't manage to get anything implemented at all.

Great though the idea is of “if you're going to do something, do it right”, don't be fooled into using it with your marketing. Start with the basics. get good results. Then work on improving.

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Perhaps the most powerful advice I ever got

Posted byIan Brodie on July 31st, 2016.

Back when I was consulting full time I was taught something that was hugely helpful in improving my effectiveness as a consultant. But something that's also stood me in good stead from a marketing and business development perspective too.

It's something I think comes from Mahan Khalsa's book “Let's Get Real Or Let's Not Play”.

It's: “If you feel it, find a way to say it”.

Sounds simple, but incredibly powerful to use as a guide to your interactions with clients.

Like many consultants, I'm quite a rational type. I'm not super comfortable with conflict or anger or other emotional issues that sometimes arise in any business relationship.

So when I picked up that my client might be concerned about something, or angry, or disappointed or whatever; I tended to keep quiet.

“Let's not open that can of worms” I'd think to myself as I swept the issue under the carpet and acted as if nothing was wrong.

And, of course, that's rarely the right thing to do. It usually comes back to haunt you. Bad feelings fester and grow out of proportion to their causes until they become much more destructive than if they'd been addressed early.

The “if you feel it, find a way to say it” principle ecourages you to speak out if you sense something is wrong.

“I get the sense you're not fully comfortable with this plan…”

“It feels like something else may be worrying you right now, is that right…”

Having the courage to say what you're feeling or sensing gives your client a chance to open up (if they feel OK to do so) and almost always defuses situations that could become out of hand if left unchecked.

It works in business development too.

Often we pick up that our potential clients might not be fully bought in to what we're proposing. Or they may have some objections to our solution. Or they might just not believe what we're saying.

Usually, we get a feeling that something's not right. But usually, we ignore it too, plough on through, get to the end of the meeting unscathed, submit the proposal, and then find out later we didn't win the project.

Far better to say what we're feeling. Give your potential client a chance to get any issues they might have out on the table so you can address them.

You're much more likely to win a sale as a result, rather than just bulldozing past their objections.

Try it. If you feel it, find a way to say it.