Ian Brodie on March 29th, 2013.
You've been given the advice a million times before: “You need to build relationships with senior executives if you want to succeed at business development”.
But how?
Ian Brodie on March 18th, 2013.
AKA Getting more people to subscribe to your emails
Project 10K is my goal to get to 10,000 engaged email subscribers by the end of the year. In my previous P10K blog post I reviewed my website traffic and identified how I was going to increase the right sort of traffic to get more subscribers.
In this post I'm going to look at how to get more of your website visitors to “convert” – in other words to subscribe to receiving emails from you.
Ian Brodie on March 3rd, 2013.
If I had to give up every marketing tool in my arsenal – apart from one – the one I would keep would be email marketing.
Without a doubt.
Ask any successful professional what the most important element of their marketing is and the answer will almost always be some variant of “follow up”.
“Keeping in touch”, “relationship building”, “being top of mind”.
People don't hire us to perform high value services for them after the first meeting. We've got to build trust and credibility. It's follow-up that does that.
And email marketing is the only form of follow-up marketing you can do “en masse”. Do it right and you can build credibility and trust with large numbers of people with just a little work and by pressing the send button.
Nothing else comes close. That's why, when the Direct Marketing Association evaluated the ROI of different marketing strategies, email marketing had almost double the ROI of it's nearest competitor.
Yet so many professionals either don't do email marketing, or get it so badly wrong they don't see any results from it.
Here are the three simple principles I've found to be the real foundation of effective email marketing.
1. Email marketing is about relationship building not (just) selling.
Whether you sell high value products like me, or in-personal coaching consulting, training or other services; you need to build high degrees of credibility and trust before someone will be ready to buy from you or hire you.
So my email marketing is geared to build that credibility and trust over time. Step by step.
2. Email marketing is about me and you.
Most email marketing – even when you get it from small businesses – seems like it's been written by faceless corporates.
It puzzles me why so much email marketing feels so impersonal. Perhaps there are marketing agencies out there coming up with this rubbish and convincing their clients they need to sound “professional” or have a newsletter filled with fancy graphics.
It just doesn't work.
What works best is if your marketing emails read just like your normal emails. You're writing from you as a person to them as a person.
That way they read them properly – and not with their “oh oh, I'm being sold to” shields up.
3. Email marketing is about delivering REAL value.
Your potential clients have a huge dilemma. They have big issues and opportunities in their business they need help with.
But before they hire you they need to know you have the true expertise that will deliver results for them. You need to prove it in advance.
How can you prove you can get results for them.
Well, you could claim you can. You could offer a huge guarantee. You could show them your qualifications or awards. Or you could show them testimonials from your satisfied clients (assuming they believe them).
Here's an alternative: deliver real value to them in your emails that allows them to get results before they ever hire you.
There's no better proof that you can get results by working with them than for your advice to have already delivered for them.
Makes sense, right?
Ian Brodie on February 24th, 2013.
No gardening disasters this time I'm pleased to report…
A while back I got a call from the head of a division of a large international firm. The conversation began…
“I've been reading your blog for a couple of years…I'm a big fan”.
As you can imagine, the chances of working together when the conversation starts out like that are pretty high.
For me, the most significant words in that quote are “a couple of years”. And they're important for two reasons.
The first is that it's often a very long time from when a client first starts paying attention to a problem or opportunity to them deciding to take action to fix it by hiring someone to help.
The second is that the thing that convinces clients to work with you usually isn't one big “hit” – it's the gradual drip, drip, drip of great content, great ideas, great stories.
When those two things come together, that's when the magic happens.
Most of us put the majority of our marketing effort into going for that big hit. Trying to make a tremendous impression with one meeting, one advert, one free report, one sales letter.
But as my example shows, what really counts is the day in, day out drip, drip drip.
Shouldn't we be putting more of our focus onto that?
Ian Brodie on February 22nd, 2013.
Think about the companies you've dealt with in your career, specifically the individuals in those companies and what drives their behavior. Chances are you've worked with individuals at various positions and levels, and people at different levels are driven by different motivations.
Part of what makes any professional who deals with business successful is being able to relate to each stakeholder's personal motivations. I've always believed whether you are consulting, selling, advising, or whatever to business, your success is highly dependent on your ability to understand and influence the motivations of individual stakeholders.
Ian Brodie on February 18th, 2013.
In November 2011, Apple Macs hit a market share of 5% of the global PC market. Sales were up 25.6% in the home market (vs the industry average of 4%) and 43.8% in the business market (vs an average of 4.8%).
There are many reasons why Apple's doing so well. Power, usability, ergonomics, fashion.
But I believe one of the biggest reasons for Apple's recent success in computers has simply been the iPod.
The iPod – and later the iPhone and iPad – made millions of people "Apple people". People who hadn't previously considered themselves as Apple buyers.
Not only did they have a positive experience of Apple through the iPod, but for the first time, they considered themselves to be Apple buyers.
When it came time to buy a new PC, instead of just looking at Windows options as they'd done previously, many of them widened their horizons to consider a Mac. Previously, a Mac just wouldn't have figured in the decision – it'd have been ruled out subconsciously.
But once our self image includes an Apple buying element it becomes much easier for us to consider a higher priced part of the range.
We no longer have to make that psychological leap to seeing ourselves as an Apple buyer. We're already there.
The same thing happens with many potential clients.
If they've not hired consultants, coaches or whatever it is you do before, there can be a huge, inbuilt resistance to doing so.
They just don't see themselves as someone who hires a coach or a consultant. They barely consider it.
But if you can construct a simple "no brainer" offer. Your version of the iPod: a brilliant product with a low price tag. You can shift their perception.
You can get them to see themselves as a person who hires consulting or coaching. And so someone for whom buying a large project is just a step up from what they've done previously, not a whole different thing.
Someone who's bought just 1 day of consulting is 5 times more likely to buy a big engagement than someone who's never bought consulting before. The same goes for almost every conceivable service.
So what can you construct that's a low-cost, no brainer offer that will get your potential clients to see themselves as a buyer of your type of services.
What's your iPod?
Ian Brodie on February 17th, 2013.
Here's something that happened to me a while back that was painful at the time (literally) but taught me a valuable lesson.
I was re-glazing one of our greenhouses and managed to walk into a sticky-out metal bit that the door runs along. Man it hurt. Nasty cut on the side of my head.
Five minutes later I do the exact same thing again. Cut on my forehead this time.
Fast forward 15 minutes and I walk into it again.
Luckily by this time, Kathy had spotted the blood dripping down my temple, asked me what on earth I'd done, and had taped a sponge over the offending sticky-out metal bit.
So this time no injury (well, just to my pride).
It's funny how with many things in life we keep making the same mistake again and again.
Marketing that just doesn't work, yet we keep on doing it. Arguments with co-workers or employees or family we just keep repeating.
We've all got blind spots. And sometimes it takes someone looking in from outside to spot them for us.
Unfortunately, in business, the evidence of those blind spots isn't quite as obvious as blood running down your forehead.
For others to spot our mistakes we need to open up to them. Tell them what we're doing. What results we're getting. What we're concerned about.
And that's tough.
What if they see through our veneer of competence? What if they think we're no good? And what if they tell us?
It's a big step to open up like that. But if you're not doing it, you're missing out. You're bound to have at least a couple of blind spots that are holding you back.
So find someone you can trust to open up to. A friend, business partner, significant other, coach, mentor. Or a group you can speak to regularly.
It'll make a big difference to your business.
Ian Brodie on February 15th, 2013.
OK – this is a little bit scary. I'm going to make a very public commitment and then regularly report on my progress.
If you get my Insider Strategy emails (and if you don't, you should, they're the absolute favourite thing I do, click here to sign up) you'll know my focus for this year is on three things:
Of all three, the biggie is going to be scale.
Ian Brodie on January 30th, 2013.
Today's blog post is by Margaret Adams, a writer and speaker on inbound marketing. Margaret's article gives you some rock solid advice on creating a “lead magnet” to generate leads – a topic I know a lot of people struggle with. Over to you Margaret…
If you want to generate more leads for your business online, you will need to encourage visitors to your website to join your e-mail list. Many professionals write a special report or “lead magnet” to help them do this.
However, creating an appealing report is difficult. Before you put time and effort into your document, it’s worth checking that you’re planning to write a report that will work hard for your business. Use the following guidance to help you.
Click here to read Margaret's guidance on creating a Lead Magnet >>
Ian Brodie on January 13th, 2013.
I've decided to lose a bit of weight over the next few months. And like many people, I'm using a little App for my iPhone to track my progress, what I'm eating, and how much I'm exercising.
It's amazing the effect it's having already on my behaviour. Just the very fact of making my activities and my progress visible is causing me to make different choices about what I eat and drink.
Read more about applying these principles to your marketing >>