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Why you must “keep the ball” in marketing

Posted by

Ian Brodie on June 19th, 2022.

Oh no…the football analogies continue…

Last week I talked about how your sales are more dependent on how often you manage to build the trust and credibility needed for people to be ready to buy than on how good you are at the final step of selling.

(Like the way a football team's goals are more dependent on how often and how well they get the ball into danger zones on the pitch than they are on their shooting ability).

There's another related football analogy that's important here too.

I can't source the quote exactly (I had in my mind that it was Johan Cruyff from his groundbreaking work at Barcelona but it seems not) but you may well have heard some variation of:

“If we've got the ball, it means the opponent can't score”.

It's real back to basics, but it's true. None of that fancy stuff about getting into danger zones means anything if you haven't got the ball.

In marketing, keeping the ball means keeping the attention of your audience.

You can't build credibility and trust and get people ready to buy if you've lost their attention. If they're no longer listening to you.

I don't just mean people actively disconnecting – unsubscribing from your emails for example. Far more common is people staying subscribed but just not opening or reading any more.

In fact, your main issue isn't upsetting people so they unsubscribe, it's boring them so they drift off without unsubscribing.

It's particularly vital if you sell something big with a long sales cycle. You need people to keep paying attention over a long period of time so you're there and front of mind when they're ready to buy.

And unlike football, if you lose attention, it's rare you get it back.

It would be fantastic if there were marketing equivalents of ball-wining midfielders and hard-tackling defenders to get attention back once you'd lost it. But that's rarely the case.

Instead your best option is to make sure every email or piece of marketing you send is valuable or interesting – ideally both.

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The “build up play” you need to win clients

Posted by

Ian Brodie on June 12th, 2022.

Apologies to those of you who aren't football (soccer) fans, but I'm going to overuse an analogy that's been front of mind for me all week.

When most people talk about marketing, they tend to focus on the very last step.

The sexy bits. The sales page that gets people to buy. The email they click on to go to the checkout. The social media post that leads to a sale.

But I think that focus is a bit misplaced.

In football we're (usually) a bit more sophisticated. We know the objective at any point in time is to score a goal. And we know we can only score if we take a shot.

But that doesn't mean we should shoot every time we get the ball. Far from it.

Instead, we know we have to get the ball up the pitch and into a danger zone where a shot is much more likely to result in a goal. And that's where coaches put most of their attention.

Get the ball into a dangerous position in the opponents' penalty area often enough and you will score. Even if you don't have the greatest strikers in the world.

I believe the same thing applies in marketing. In other words, rather than focusing only on the final step that leads to a sale, we should focus primarily on the steps beforehand that get your clients ready to buy.

Nurture your relationships so that clients understand their problems and impact. Show you understand them and have a unique solution that will work for them. Give them confidence they will succeed with you.

Do that often enough and you will win clients, even if you're not the greatest marketer in the world or your sales pages and emails are a bit basic.

Winning clients is 80% about the build-up play.

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3 things I (re-)learned this week

Posted by

Ian Brodie on June 5th, 2022.

I've started my Maven Course Accelerator program this week alongside a bunch of talented and very interesting people. From startup founders to singing coaches.

3 things I learned (or in some cases, I'd forgotten and re-learned) you might find useful:

Having an external drumbeat to push you to make progress is really helpful – always more so than you realise

Of course, I know this to be true from experience and from running my own programs. But yet again I was surprised by it :)

There were steps I took this week to progress my cohort course, exercises I did and things I thought about that I could easily have done myself weeks ago – but didn't.

The drumbeat of a program with a fixed schedule where we're expected to complete tasks on time made it happen.
No matter how different people seem on a course there's always a lot to learn from them

I had a brilliant idea in one of the working sessions that only I could possibly have thought of. 3 other people had the same idea :)

More importantly, I got 2 other good ideas I wouldn't have thought of myself just by listening and paying attention to what others were doing.
Restrictions set you free

I'm the kind of person who takes pride in having the absolute best version of everything: landing pages, email formats, the right font size for readability, everything…

As a result, I'll spend way too much time researching and tweaking things that make very little difference in the grand scheme of things.

Maven is very templated. You just don't get those options. In this early beta version you can't even change the font.

And while in some ways that drives me crazy, it also saves me a ton of time. Time I can focus on more important things that have a bigger impact.

Trying something new and pushing yourself a little bit (in my case with the pace of doing this while I have so much other stuff on) always results in learning.

I don't do it often enough, but just reflecting on that learning every week helps to consolidate it and make sure you take action on it.

What have you learned this week?

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Story prompts to speed up content

Posted by

Ian Brodie on May 31st, 2022.

One of the biggest killers of productivity in marketing, for me at least, is struggling for ideas.

It's difficult to be prolific if most of your time is spent staring at a blank screen.

I've mentioned before I started using the “zettelkasten” method of note-taking to make sure I always have a good base of ideas to write about. But sometimes I get stuck knowing how to illustrate those ideas in a non-boring way.

In other words, what story am I going to use?

Here's where story-prompts come in helpful. Little triggers to stimulate your creativity.

The ones that work best for me are often time based. I've used similar ones when I've run “writing challenges” for Momentum club members.

All I do is ask myself about an interesting thing that happened at various times in my life.

For example, a story my parents told about me as a very young child (with a lesson for today).

Or something painful/fun/weird that happened to me as a teenager (with a lesson for today).

Or when I hit a problem early on in my career and what I learned from it.

Or when I was riding high later in my career but found out I wasn't brilliant at everything.

Or a piece of wisdom I've learned through the benefit of age and experience.

Or something that happened yesterday that made me angry/happy/confused.

Or something that's just happened right now.

For example, a very good friend of mine told me that yesterday he'd just written an article for marketing purposes when the tool he was using blew up and lost it.

Undaunted he got his head down and wrote an article about how his system had blown up and lost his work – and how a stoic mindset helped him get refocused quickly rather than wallowing in anger and self-pity.

Your long term past and your immediate experiences are rich seams for mining stories. You can go through the list of timeframes I've just shared almost like a checklist and use it to trigger ideas for stories to illustrate a business point.

Or if you've got a particular topic in mind (e.g. that you've been exploring in your Zettelkasten) then you can run through them thinking “is there a story from my early work years that illustrates this topic? etc”

It doesn't work 100% of the time. Nothing does.

But I'd say at least 80% of the time it triggers ideas for a good, interesting piece of content. Often more than one, so you can “bank” the idea to use later.

It gets you productive fast rather than being stuck staring at that white screen of frustration.

– Ian

PS as you can probably guess, today's post was inspired by the last of the timeframes. Me being short of ideas and thinking “what can I say about what's happening to me right now?”

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Thanks for Helping With the Survey

Posted by

Ian Brodie on May 25th, 2022.

Thanks for helping with the survey!

Thanks so much for telling me your preference for the potential workshop and program on effective email writing. Whichever way you voted it'll help me make the right decision.

I'll take a look at the votes over the next few days and then get back to you depending on what the plans are.

I think both the workshop and 30-day program could really help you get a powerful series of emails up and running to help your business. But...only you know whether that's something worth investing your time and money in.

As I say, I'll get back to you soon with the plan. In the meantime if you want to message me or send me more thoughts on the potential workshop and program please do use the Contact Me link on the menu for live chat or email me at ian@ianbrodie.com.

Thanks again!

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Marketing you hate just doesn’t work

Posted by

Ian Brodie on May 22nd, 2022.

One of the things I really enjoy doing is exploring research and ideas that are a little outside mainstream marketing – and then seeing if they can be applied back in my world.

It was through that exploration I bumped into the work of Michelle Segar – a researcher into sustainable behaviour change in the areas of health and exercise.

Segar's contention – backed by a ton of research and experience over the last 30 years – is that trying to motivate people to lose weight and exercise to improve their health just doesn't work.

It's too focused on a potential future benefit rather than immediate gratification. And too often it gives people yet another thing to try to cram into their busy lives.

It sounds a lot like trying to motivate people to do regular marketing like writing emails or following up with contacts.

The benefit of more clients happens in the future, and is far from certain. And it's yet another thing that you have to cram into a busy workday.

Segar's work has shown that it's better to get people to focus on the immediate gratification they'll get from exercise – for example feeling better and less stressed – rather than the long-term gains.

And if you can show them how exercise gives them more energy which makes all the other things they've got to do much easier, you're on to a winner.

But I think most importantly when it comes to marketing, Segar's research showed that it's much better to allow people to do the imperfect exercise they enjoy rather than the perfect one they hate. And to allow them to find that exercise they enjoy themselves.

In marketing (and business generally) there's way too much “this is the best way to do things” advice.

Often it's done with the best of intentions. Sometimes it's done to sell you a shiny new toy or course.

But none of it is done with the realisation that the only marketing that works is marketing you actually do, and do regularly.

So if you enjoy the third best or the seventh best or second worst way of marketing and you'll keep at it – that could well be the “best” marketing for you.

At least for now.

Segar's research has also shown that starting with a small good habit you can do often leads to taking on something bigger and enjoying that too.

And if you don't enjoy any marketing?

Keep trying different approaches until you find one you do. Or think creatively about how to make something you do enjoy work from a marketing perspective.

Remember at the start I said “One of the things I really enjoy doing is exploring research and ideas that are a little outside mainstream marketing”?

Emails like this and similar content I create are my way of turning that thing I enjoy doing into something that works from a marketing perspective for me.

There will be something you can find for you too.

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Online Courses

A great way to pick your course topic

Posted by

Ian Brodie on May 20th, 2022.

I just finished a great interview with productivity and time-management expert Alexis Haselberger for Course Builders TV.

We were talking about how to pick the best topic for your online course and Alexis made one of those points that seems so obviously right in hindsight that you wish you'd come up with it yourself!

Most advice on picking your topic is a variation on the theme of picking a big problem your clients typically have. Ideally an urgent one with significant financial impact they'd be willing to pay to get rid of.

But what Alexis pointed out was that for an online course, the problem also has to be one they can fix themselves.

If you think about the work you do with clients there are some problems where, once they know what the issue is, you can just say “go do this”. Those sorts of problems are good topics for online courses.

But there are other problems where you need to delve deeper with a client to diagnose things. Or give them regular feedback to help them course-correct. Or where they may need lots of personal support and motivation.

Those aren't such good areas for online courses.

Now obviously some online courses include an element of group coaching too, or the occasional one-to-one call. So the rule isn't a hard and fast one.

But generally speaking it's a very good criteria to use. Just ask yourself “if I told my client what to do in this area, would they be able to just get on with it and get great results by themselves?”.

If so you may be on to a winner.

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Wow your audience with pinpoint precision

Posted by

Ian Brodie on May 18th, 2022.

A final way of getting a “wow” from your audience for your course is pinpoint precision.

In other words if they see your course as the absolute perfect fit for their very specific problem. The final piece in the jigsaw.

Here's the thing though. Every would-be marketing guru will repeat the standard advice that you need an ultra-specific niche. “An inch wide and a mile deep” is the mantra.

You want to be the perfect solution for someone, not the second best for everyone. But your common sense also tells you if you go too narrow you shrink your market.

In the real world you need to do both. You have to maximise the benefits of narrowing down but avoid reaching the point where you stop benefitting from it.

How do you find that point? Ask yourself 3 questions:

By focusing on this specific area, will customers feel the course will be better for them? Are there specific problems and challenges they face in this area that the course can focus on?

For example, my guess is that lawyers would feel that because of their client relationships and legal restrictions, a marketing course for lawyers will be more useful to them than a more general one. On the other hand they probably wouldn't see any particular value in a course on Excel skills for lawyers.
By focusing on this specific area, will it reduce the amount of work you have to do creating or marketing the course?

For example, a course on marketing for corporate lawyers could focus on relationship building with senior executives rather than on more general broad brush marketing and advertising – giving a major reduction in the amount of training material needed. And by marketing the course only to law firms with significant corporate law practices you can use more direct, high value approaches and avoid wasting time and money on more general marketing.
Do the increased attractiveness of the course and decreased amount of work needed to create it outweigh any reduction in market size?

You have to think realistically here. If, for example, you do hybrid courses with a significant live component then you'll have limited capacity. So a decrease in potential market size from a million to half a million won't make any difference to you as both are exponentially bigger than you need. On the other hand, if you do low-cost self service courses then a big reduction in market size for a small increase in the attractiveness of the course might not be worth it.

At the end of the day, it's a judgement call and relies on your knowledge of your customers and course. But asking yourself those three questions means you'll be making an informed decision, not just picking a focus for your course because you hope everyone will buy it or just following generic advice to narrow down.

And the thought process you go through to make that decision will also help you make a better course.

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Online Courses

Wow your audience with a brand new promise

Posted by

Ian Brodie on May 11th, 2022.

The second way of getting a “wow” from your audience when you announce your course is to make a brand new promise.

And obviously, it needs to be incredibly attractive promise to them to get that “wow”.

Now the reality is that today, all the big promises have been made.

Get rich, lose weight, meet your ideal partner, get more clients.

No one is going to go “wow” if you just repeat one of these old, worn-out promises unless they've been living under a rock for the last few decades.

So there needs to be a (truthful) twist on the promise.

One way to do that is with a “without clause”.

That's where you enhance the promise by removing something they don't want that normally comes with it.

Lose weight without diets. More clients without endless posting on social media.

It has to be true of course. You have to be able to deliver on that promise.

But if you can it can be very powerful…

…provided they've not heard the exact same promise before.

In some markets a simple “without clause” will sound brand new. In others – like marketing for example – it's probably already been done countless times.

Getting more clients even if you hate marketing, if you have no time, if you're an introvert…all done many times before.

So it's trickier in mature markets. But not impossible.

I've been around the block more than a few times, but Jon Buchan's big promise of teaching you to write cold emails so engaging and charming that people would enjoy and appreciate getting them was new to me. And I did indeed go “wow” and buy the course.

Another way of getting a wow from your promise is to pick a smaller but highly unusual promise.

I bought a course a while back on being 10x more productive with my writing.

That's not a big end-result promise like more clients. But in a mature market where there are lots of people who know that being 10x more productive with their writing will bring them big results, it works.

Another course I bought recently was on running mini-workshops. The promise was to teach you how to set up and sell a lot of places on low-cost live online workshops which would eventually lead to more high value clients.

It was an unusual offer I'd not seen before and to convince me to buy they needed to convince me that mini workshops would be easier to sell than something high ticket…but could lead fairly quickly to those mini workshop attendees buying something bigger.

They did.

That's the trick with a smaller but highly unusual promise. By definition it's something no one else is offering. But to get a wow you need to show people how it can give them something big in terms of end results.

That sudden “hang on, I've never considered this before but blimey, this could absolutely get me what I want” realisation is amazingly powerful and a big driver of sales.

It needs you to think through “what can I promise that's different, but that leads to a big result (and that I can prove leads to that result)”.

It needs a bit of creativity. But it can really pay off.

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The drumbeat of productivity

Posted by

Ian Brodie on May 8th, 2022.

One of the things I learnt when managing big engagements back when I worked in corporate consulting was the importance of establishing a “drumbeat” for the project.

A weekly progress meeting with each of my teams. A 5-minute daily “standup” to get focused and motivated for the day. A monthly or quarterly offsite to look at bigger issues and make sure everyone was headed in the same direction.

It's the same now I'm working on my own. I think everyone needs that sense of momentum and rhythm.

Personally, I do all my big plans in quarters. Building a new course. Trying out a new marketing method.

You can get a lot done in a quarter if you focus on it. Give yourself a year and you tend to put it off. Give yourself just a month and it's difficult to get anything big done.

A quarter is just right. For me at least.

Weekly is where the action really happens. Taking the big priorities for the quarter and planning what I'm actually going to get done this week. Then allocating out big tasks per day.

It's also where I reflect on what happened last week. Did I get all the big tasks done? Did I manage to exercise every weekday? Did I manage to learn something and create something every day?

I covered daily planning last week and how I use it to keep my big priorities front of mind to ward off distractions.

It's the weekly planning that makes sure I have those priorities right and everything is headed towards achieving the overall plans.

I suppose that all sounds very logical and structured. In practice it's not quite so organised.

I'm a late riser and a night owl, so “morning planning” tends to happen at some random time after 10am.

And some days I'll wake up with something big on my mind and start on that straight away rather than starting with planning the day. Not surprisingly on those days I tend to get less done overall.

That urge to “jump in” and do something straight away is sometimes overwhelming even though I know I'll be less productive overall.

But the important thing is I manage to keep on track 80% of the time. And not only does that mean I tend to be quite productive, it also makes me feel good too.

There's a real sense of forward momentum towards big achievements rather than just having “done some stuff” each day.

And that sense of progress makes it even more likely that the next day I'll make progress too. Then the next.

Sometimes that psychological side is the most important part of being productive.

– Ian

PS did you know that Top Cat was called Boss Cat when they showed it on the BBC in the 60s and 70s because we had a brand of cat food over here called Top Cat?

Only the title changed though – he was still TC in the show itself.

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