Bring your expertise to the forefront by focusing on what you know when you take your first marketing steps. You can’t do it all, so start small, use your expertise and make it happen! One channel is all it takes to get started, so go for it!
In today’s video, I zoom in on a really important reminder – just in case you need reminding – that you don’t have to do everything when it comes to your marketing. In fact, starting small, with one channel, can be the ultimate way to get started and harness your expertise in the process!
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Comparison Destroys Creativity
Today’s video is inspired by a meme I recently saw online, starring a crayon and a pencil. The crayon says, “I’m not sharp enough,” while the pencil says, “I’m not colourful enough.” And underneath the pencil and the crayon, it simply says something like “Comparison destroys creativity.”
I thought this meme made a lot of sense when it comes to marketing as well.
Protect Your Marketing from the Comparison Game
A lot of businesses, small or large, start out by comparing themselves to their competitors. And this is a helpful way to begin! In fact, one of the first things I suggest you do in Step 2 (of my 5-step approach to marketing is to check out your competitors, see what they’re doing, see what their message is and try and differentiate yourself from them by identifying what makes you unique.
Comparing yourself to others may be part and parcel of marketing, but at the same time it’s easy to look at other businesses and to feel overwhelmed, thinking to yourself, “I have to do all the things that they’re doing; I have to be on all those channels; I have to really push all my marketing out at the same level otherwise I’m not going to be able to compete.”
And if you’re not careful, you might find that you struggle to focus your marketing energies, leaving you with campaigns that lack the strength of your expertise and creative sparkle.
Start with One Channel!
Remember, you can’t do it all, especially at the start of your business journey, so the best thing to do is start small – start with one channel, start with what your resources can manage, start with what you can manage – and build up from there.
To really focus in on where to start, start with your expertise! Just go for it – go and do the thing that you know how to do. You can figure out all the other channels and strategies later… but first, you need to get your content into a place that you’re familiar with and you know how to use.
The hardest thing with anything (marketing, writing a book, whatever it might be) is getting started, so just do it! Start with one channel and get it done. I believe in you!
If you would like to find out more about focusing on one channel at a time – the right channel for you! – then please do get in touch. And if you’re already on the journey with your first channel, I’d love to hear how your one-channel start is working out!
Diversity and inclusion often starts in marketing – in efforts to look diverse and look inclusive – but if you want to prioritise diversity and inclusion then you need to look beyond your marketing at attitudes and biases across the business. Most importantly, you need to listen to your employees and learn from their wisdom so you can make marketing decisions the whole team can get behind.
In today’s video, I talk about how making sure that your marketing is inclusive is about a lot more than putting a diverse group of people in your ads.
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Inclusion and Diversity in Marketing
Inclusion and diversity often starts in marketing for a lot of businesses – I don’t think it’s the place where it should start but it often does, because many companies think that it’s really important to look diverse and look inclusive by putting women, Black people and LGBTQIA+ people in the foreground of their marketing.
I’m not saying that’s necessarily wrong – there are definitely times when you should be shouting from the rooftops and demonstrating your commitment to diversity in marketing. I think that’s really important. It’s a place you can start, but I don’t think it’s even the ideal place to start – and it’s definitely, definitely not where you should stop in your efforts to prioritise diversity and inclusion.
When organisations realise they have been recognised as being a diverse and inclusive brand, some feel as if their work is done – they decide they don’t really need to work that much harder, and they forget to check whether unconscious bias exists in their organisation and is undermining their work. However, to remain a diverse and inclusive brand, you need to prioritise diversity and inclusion across the business, including through your marketing efforts.
Inclusive or Non-Inclusive? It’s Not Always Clear
A friend of mine is a marketing manager at a very male dominated company in a very male dominated industry. She is a woman, although there aren’t many women in the office, and one day her company started work on a new marketing campaign. The campaign’s main phrase was “Got the horn?” It was meant to be funny – cheeky, without being too offensive – and even my friend thought, “Yeah, it’s not that offensive, it’s great – it’s kind of funny!”
However, there were other women in the office who felt that the language was non-inclusive because to them, “got the horn” suggested getting an erection. I didn’t think that, and my friend didn’t think that either – she was of the view that women can get the horn too, so it couldn’t be that non-inclusive – but after she looked into the meaning behind the phrase, she realised that it did indeed originate from getting an erection. Whether or not that language has now changed, or is perhaps up for debate, the fact remained that there were women in the organisation who were willing to stand up and say that the phrase felt non-inclusive – which should have been a signal that the campaign was at least worth revisiting. Unfortunately, the management didn’t agree and they went ahead and used the line anyway.
Listen, Hear and Act to Prioritise Inclusion
Even putting aside the management misstep of failing to manage their employees’ expectations and comfort, the fact that there were some women in my friend’s organisation who felt that this phrase was not inclusive means that there will be women in that industry who feel the phrase is not inclusive when they hear it.
By choosing to use the line anyway, the company’s management has taken a conscious step to ignore the fact that women in a male dominated industry may not feel included by this marketing campaign. No matter how many women they put in the campaign materials, if they use the phrase “got the horn” then it’s going to feel uncomfortable for some of the women in the industry.
If your employees are willing to stand up and say that something feels non-inclusive, and if you choose not to listen to them – not to hear them, and not to take action – your employees will feel as if their words don’t matter to you. And if you don’t care about that – maybe because you decide there aren’t enough women in your particular industry to care about – then I’m sorry to say it, but you are part of the problem.
Consider Your Whole Audience
That’s the bottom line, really – if you’re willing to not care that you’re not being inclusive because there aren’t enough people in your industry that will be negatively impacted by your lack of inclusion, then you cannot claim to be a business that prioritises diversity and inclusion. If diversity and inclusion are a part of your business value system, then you need to – at the management level, at the marketing level, at every level – be willing to listen to the people who are being excluded, hear what they have to say, and make the changes required to make them feel more included.
Everyone has different perspectives and experiences, which is why it’s so important to listen to people from across your business and your industry to ensure that you are including everyone and considering every perspective. If you would like to find out more about getting diversity and inclusion right in your marketing, please do get in touch.
Investing in marketing is a cost for your business, so it makes sense to evaluate whether it is a worthwhile investment by measuring each marketing channel’s success.
Here’s a few factors to keep in mind when you’re using metrics to assess value – plus a reminder that metrics can get a little fuzzy around the edges, depending on how you allocate your marketing costs and associated income.
In today’s video, I talk about some metrics you can use to check whether a marketing channel is worth investing in for your business – or not.
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Choosing the Marketing Channel You Want to Use
Before I get started, here’s a quick reminder of what I mean by marketing channel. A marketing channel is the avenue you are using to market your business, whether that’s through Google Ads, Facebook Ads, free social media posting and scheduling (such as using Hootsuite), email marketing, magazine-based advertising… and whatever the channel, metrics can be incredibly valuable.
A lot of people jump straight into choosing their marketing channels, but make sure you consider who your target person is and what your USP is first. These are steps one and two of my content marketing strategy. When you know who your target person is, you understand their wants, needs, fears and frustrations. And when you’ve got a really strong USP, you know exactly what differentiates your business from your competitors, and that it’s something that your target person really wants and needs. Spending a little time on steps one and two before you start choosing your marketing channels will help dramatically in terms of figuring out whether a channel is worth the effort – and investment.
Evaluating the Cost Per Lead
Once you’ve started using some of the channels that seem a good fit for your business, it’s a good time to test whether it’s been worth the investment. Imagine you’re getting some leads through the channel, you’re spending money on the channel, but is it worth it? (Note: If you haven’t identified some suitable channels yet because you are still working on steps one and two, the information that follows may not be that relevant to your right now – but it’s definitely worth returning to and/or keeping in mind going forward.)
First things first, I’m going to keep this as simple as possible: calculating the cost per lead. This calculation is super simple – you take the amount of money you’re investing into a particular marketing channel and divide it by the number of leads you’re getting.
Easy, right? Now you’ve got a cost per lead!
Measuring Your Conversions
What you’re working towards is figuring out how much money you’re getting out of a given channel through sales of your goods or services. If you’re not measuring your conversions from each marketing channel, you’re not going to be able to figure out whether the channel’s worth it.
You need to measure conversions from each channel, whether that’s through Google Analytics, your CRM system or some other method. Whatever your channel, make sure there is a helpful way you can measure conversions and identify how those conversions translate to paying customers – and how much they are paying you.
If you don’t have these systems set up in your business, you cannot measure anything; and if you’re not measuring, you’re not going to be able to tell how ‘worth it’ your marketing efforts are. You’ll just keep driving blind, which might be okay with you – maybe you’re getting enough business through the door and putting enough money in the bank – but if you want to push it, if you really want to know whether a marketing channel is working, you need to be measuring your conversions.
Assessing Your Marketing Channel: Is It Worth It?
So, you’ve got your cost per lead, you’ve got your conversions, and you know how much money you’re making from those conversions via your marketing channel. These are the kind of bare bones metrics that you need to determine whether your channel is worth it, because you can look at the income that you’re receiving and compare it to the amount that you’re investing into this channel… which allows you to answer the question, “Is it worth it?”
Look at the income figure – is it more than the costs? If the income is about the same as the costs of using the channel, and especially if it’s just a little bit higher, then keep going! That’s a good channel for your business and one you can work on growing. However, if the income is less than the costs, you might want to rethink that channel – perhaps it’s not a good fit for your business.
Even an income a tiny bit above your costs is the sign of a good channel because every single penny that you make is going into your business as profit. But – and there’s always a ‘but’ – there’s another aspect to consider first.
Making Sense of Fuzzy Measurements
Business is complicated, especially when it comes to marketing – and especially when it comes to evaluating the cost of marketing and the income from marketing, which can become a little ‘fuzzy’.
Consider an example. Let’s say you are using email marketing as your channel. You write blogs in order to produce the emails that go out. You don’t write the blogs yourself – you hire a writer to write the blogs for you (which is a cost). Then you’ve got the cost of the technology and everything as well. But the cost of that writer doesn’t just apply to this channel (email marketing), because the blog article is also going on your website, so it’s contributing to your SEO. So, in your little spreadsheet of costs, do you put it under SEO, or do you put it under email marketing?
This is the big question. This is what makes everything fuzzy when it comes to the costs of marketing, making it a little more difficult to give you a clear-cut, defined number that shows the cost of each channel.
This is okay – don’t panic! This is how businesses work – everything is interlinked. You are allowed to have fuzzy statistics; you just have to get a feel for them. This is where marketing starts to become more of an art and less of a science – you need to get a feel for whether the channel is generally working and whether it is contributing to your overall success.
Factoring in Lifetime Value
When you identify a great channel, your marketing decisions don’t stop there – in reality, you may be using a few different channels to market your business. This is fine, but it’s yet another way in which your marketing metrics can become fuzzy.
A key fuzzy feature to keep in mind is customer lifetime value. When a customer comes in and they buy from you that first time, you might be measuring that as the income from that customer. But if that customer then comes back a couple of weeks later and buys something else or uses your service again, or in a few months’ time, or in a year, that’s not ‘new’ income – that’s income that’s coming again from that same channel! That customer came in via a particular marketing channel, so any income should be attributed back to that channel.
This is customer lifetime value – how much value that customer has for your business over the lifetime that they spend money with you, which increases the income part of the earlier calculation, making the costs seem less intimidating because they are now more useful – they are responsible for generating more income for your business.
Embracing Fuzzy Metrics!
The way you calculate the value of a marketing channel is very customised to your business, and as a result it’s also customised to how ‘fuzzy’ you are comfortable with being when you assess the value of your marketing channels. Consider being open-minded about how you get a feel for each channel, and how specific and measured you want to be – and if you want to be more specific and measured, what other systems do you need to put in place to make sure that you’re tracking your metrics in the most helpful way?
It’s easy to get lost in the numbers, so I highly recommend that you top up your tolerance of fuzzy statistics. However, measuring the stuff you can measure is a great way to make sure that you’re comfortable with a channel and that it’s working well enough for you to continue investing in it.
If you want to explore the value of your marketing channels further, please do get in touch.
In times of financial pressure, it’s tempting to focus your energy on profit rather than the wider concerns that underpin your business, such as your ethical standards. But these standards are essential to helping your business stand out from the crowd for all the right reasons. Finding creative solutions can help you balance profit with maintaining the standards you choose to operate by.
In today’s video, I talk about the ethics around focusing on the profit-making part of your business, especially when you’re under financial pressure.
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Avoiding the Slippery Slope of Profit Versus Ethics
Recently, I met with a customer who’s experiencing a little financial pressure in their business. They wanted to talk about some useful strategies to help manage this – what they should focus on to help ease the financial pressure, and how much energy they can divert to the things that they want to do but that are not yet ready to make their business much money.
The temptation at such times is to focus on the activities that make the most profit – which eases the financial pressure. However, for this particular business, the activities that were making the most profit were not focused on their ultimate goals for the business – the meaningful societal goals that embody the mission of the business as well as its ethical standards.
The desire to focus on the profit-making part of your business – especially when you’re under financial pressure and in ‘survival mode’ – seems logical, and there’s no denying that profit is important to any business. I’m sure that focusing on profit is what most business strategists would suggest you do in this situation, too – get the money and survive first, and then you can worry about your ethics later.
However, I would argue that it’s a very slippery slope you’d be sliding down – before you know it, you could find yourself immersed in a process of running things in a way that doesn’t fit with your ethical standards. One day, you may find that you’re at the head of a business that isn’t aligned with your values because you’ve focused too much of your energy on the bit that makes money.
Remember: Profit Is Fuel, Not Purpose
When I first sat down to do freelance marketing, I developed a set of marketing principles, and one of these principles is that profit is fuel, not purpose. It is important to emphasise that while profit isn’t something you should ignore, it’s also not something that you should prioritise.
This naturally raises the point that was troubling the client I mentioned: “But what happens when you’re under financial pressure – that’s what matters the most, the profit!” My view is that it is at times of financial pressure when you should be especially careful NOT to focus on profit because it is at that point that you will be making decisions that affect the rest of the business – perhaps even the lifetime of the business. Businesses that focus entirely on profit often start from a place of surviving by focusing on profit.
If you’re under financial pressure, take a moment to step away from thoughts of profit, and consciously bring forward in your mind the ethical standards that you don’t want to compromise on. Remind yourself of that boundary and re-establish that boundary – and from that point, you can start to look for other solutions rather than sacrificing your values and your ethics to make that profit.
Finding Solutions without Compromising Your Ethical Standards
The customer at the heart of this story edits a lot of content. The business has a number of video editors, and so the question that needed to be answered was: “How long are the video editors spending on our content, and is it worth them spending all that time editing the videos and getting things exactly the way they want it to look? Are we making money from that?”
As we explored the situation further and looked towards the company’s standards, we noted that the video content is the business’s art, and so the question became: “Is it worth it to make the art the way we want it to be?”
Our discussion concluded with the decision to organise a meeting with the other video editors so that they could come to an agreement about the real question for them: “What’s the creative standard that we don’t want to compromise on – what’s the minimum creative standard that we’re going to meet in order to publish a video?” We identified the question they needed to answer to ensure that standards were never compromised in the pursuit of profit.
Shaping Your Business Around Your Ethical Standards
Earlier in my career, I came across this phrase that really didn’t sit well with me:
“Employees need to shape themselves around the business, rather than the other way around.”
I really disliked that turn of phrase and that attitude. In my view, the business should shape itself around your standards, not the other way around! A more useful phrase to keep in mind is:
“The business should shape itself around your standards, and not the other way around.”
I invite you to think about that phrase when you’re considering what the ethical standards are in your business – what are you unwilling to compromise on, and what will you find creative solutions for in order to make sure that you maintain those standards?
If you would like to discuss the areas in your business you are unwilling to compromise on – and identify ways to balance your focus so that profit remains fuel, not purpose – please do get in touch.
The marketing funnel provides businesses with a solid model for creating a marketing strategy, but it is worth questioning whether it is helping you to identify the KPIs that best define successful performance for your business.
Here’s a new way of looking at the marketing funnel – one that can help you focus on all stages of the funnel, as well as highlighting some useful KPIs that can provide real insight into the way you measure success.
In today’s video, I’m going to talk about the KPIs that you might be setting to measure success – and questioning whether there are some that you haven’t thought of that you might want to add.
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Redefining Performance
During a course I recently attended, I had a thought-provoking conversation with another attendee about high-performance businesses. He was talking about how the idea of being happy in the workplace is all well and good, but once a high-performing business comes under pressure, it’s all about money over people – money, profit and numbers. I countered this assertion, because to my mind, purely looking at profit metrics isn’t necessarily a good indication of what ‘performance’ means to high-performing businesses – I would like to think that a business becomes a high-performing business because it prioritises other metrics alongside profit (which is of course important).
I think it’s critical for a business that wants to operate ethically to consider what ‘performance’ means for them – and to keep this in mind when they’re comparing their performance against a business that’s operating in a less ethical, or even an unethical way. If you’re comparing your performance against a business that’s unethical, then I think you can take some comfort in the idea that their performance success may be happening at the expense of something that you wouldn’t tolerate.
Performance is about more than profit – yes, it provides the fuel to keep your business going (which is important!), but is does not give your business purpose.
Measuring Performance: Success Metrics
Setting key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure performance is crucial for making sure that your business can run successfully. It’s like checking your blood pressure to make sure that you’re healthy and well.
What are the success metrics that you look at in your business, and which ones are the most important to you? I think profit is only one metric, and it’s arguable whether it’s the most important. I think there are other metrics that are equally as important as profit, so here I’m going to talk through where to find these metrics in your business and how to rank them in your head.
The Marketing Funnel: Awareness
The marketing funnel can be thought of as the way that people travel through your business – and yes, it is modelled on a funnel, with a wide top and a narrow bottom.
You’ve got awareness at the top. Awareness is the first contact that people have with you. At this stage, they’re learning about your business – they’re finding out about what you do.
Awareness metrics include:
Clicks
Likes
Signups to your email
How many people are following you.
These are pretty important metrics in that they’re feeding into everything you do. You need the numbers involved at this stage to be the largest numbers in your metrics, and this is why this model is described as a funnel – those clicks, like, follows and signups funnel down into the next stage, which is consideration.
The Marketing Funnel: Consideration
When it comes to consideration – the next stage of the marketing funnel – you are looking at interactions with your business. People are now considering whether your product is the one that they’re going to buy. They’re comparing you against your competitors; they’re thinking about whether they actually need your product or service.
Consideration metrics include:
The opening of emails by people on your email list
People reading blog posts that explain more about your product
Potential customers booking a sales conversation to further discuss their needs
Potential customers completing a quiz or a calculator on your website to find out more about how your service or product relates to them.
Consideration metrics are where you see the numbers drop. Yes, you’ll lose lots of people, but these numbers are a lot fuzzier because consideration often happens in the head. This is true of awareness metrics as well – there’s a lot of loss that you won’t be able to measure, and you may not even be able to see that it’s happening, so a lot of what you’re measuring in these top two stages can be unclear. As a result, you can’t come to solid conclusions because there’s always another explanation that may account for changes in these metrics.
The Marketing Funnel: Conversion
The third stage of the marketing funnel is where people usually start with their KPIs. This is conversion; in other words, this is where you sell your products or services. The numbers involved in measuring conversion are fairly obvious – they relate to how many people have actually bought the product or service that you’re selling. That’s the bottom line with conversion metrics – how many sales do you make?
Profit is also a part of this stage. For example, you might want to compare actual sales against the costs of those sales and how much profit you’re making from them. As your business grows and becomes more complex, you can expand these metrics as required to evaluate conversion and profit in different ways.
The Forgotten Part of the Marketing Funnel
After the conversion stage come the stages of the marketing funnel that people often forget to use in their success metrics: loyalty and advocacy. They might vaguely measure aspects of these last two stages of the marketing funnel; they might even have some vague strategies in place. But it’s rare for businesses to use loyalty and advocacy to determine performance – in other words, to determine success – and this is a critical, strategic error.
It’s understandable why people think this way – after all, the marketing funnel is shaped like a funnel, so it’s almost guiding your brain to think these last two stages are the least important parts of this structure. But it’s a mistake to think that this part of the marketing funnel represents the smallest part of your marketing.
Duct Tape Marketing visualise the marketing funnel as a marketing hourglass, which helps to highlight the importance of these last two stages. Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch talks about how the bulk of your marketing comes in the awareness stage, but he highlights how the advocacy and loyalty stages involve nurturing your existing customers to buy from you. The loyalty stage is all about nurturing them to repurchase, while the advocacy stage involves getting people to talk to other people about buying from you. This turns your customers into your best salespeople. If you can get the loyalty and advocacy stages working in your business, sales will pick up like a snowball because that’s where people’s trust lies – in the people close to them telling them that your product or service is worth buying.
Loyalty and advocacy metrics include:
Customer satisfaction
Reputation
Employee satisfaction.
As a side note, employee satisfaction arguably improves the entire length of the funnel, so maybe it should be a more important metric when it comes to determining performance. Employee satisfaction can be directly related to your profits – what if the unhappiness of your employees is impacting your profit? It’s certainly worth considering.
The metrics that count at the loyalty and advocacy stages are more ‘concepts’ than they are actual metrics because the metrics that you need to measure when it comes to satisfaction and reputation are going to be more specific to your business. Maybe they’ll relate to customer surveys or the numbers of reviews you have, or maybe they’ll relate to rankings that you have on an industry website that people trust – such as checking a tradesperson on a website like Checkatrade.
Remember the Bottom Half of the Hourglass
I think that remembering to factor in loyalty and advocacy is one of the most important indicators of performance success. While conversion (and therefore profit) is seen as such an important focus – and it is true that your business needs to make that fuel – maybe you need to be looking for your success metrics at the bottom of the marketing funnel, at the bottom of the marketing hourglass.
Your success metrics are going to have a profound effect on what you decide to do with your strategy, so check what you’re measuring, check what you’re really paying attention to, and see if focusing that attention on certain metrics changes your strategy – and maybe transforms your business.
Are you wondering about whether your current KPIs translate to truly useful metrics for success? Please do get in touch if you want to explore how you can redefine how you evaluate performance in your business.
Storytelling can be incredibly powerful in marketing. I’ve been reading a book that shares some interesting insights into the science behind storytelling – how selflessness is seen as good and heroic, while selfishness is seen as evil and villainous.
This video shares a quick breakdown of this core idea and considers how the science of storytelling may be able to help you understand your target person.
In today’s video, I want to talk through an excerpt from a book I’ve been reading and explain how it might help you define your USP in a way that your target person might care about.
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I’ve been reading an interesting book, The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr. One section in particular stood out to me, so in today’s blog post I want to explain how storytelling might be really helpful when you’re defining your USP.
Heroes and Villains: Exploring the Science Behind Storytelling
In Will Storr’s book, I was drawn to an explanation of the science that backs up the power of storytelling. It made think about how storytelling connects to the way we understand our target person (step 1 of my five steps).
As Storr explains: “We’re wired to find selfless behaviour heroic and selfish deeds evil. Selflessness is thought to be the universal basis of all human morality.
“An analysis of ethnographic accounts of ethics in 60 worldwide groups found they shared these rules:
Return favours
Be courageous
Help your group
Respect authority
Love your family
Never steal
Be fair.
“All are a variation on ‘don’t put your own selfish interests before that of the tribe’.”
Illustrating the Science Behind Storytelling
A little later in the book, Storr goes further and shares a great example of how we are wired to favour the good and punish the bad, which begins from the youngest of ages.
“Even pre-verbal babies show approval of selfless behaviour. Researchers showed six- to ten-month-old infants a simple puppet show in which a goody square selflessly helps a ball up the hill while a baddie triangle tries to force it down. When offered the puppets to play with, almost all the children chose the selfless square. Psychologist Professor Paul Bloom writes that these were bona fide social judgements on the part of the babies.”
He later continues: “Just as our storytelling brains are wired to valorise pro-social behaviour, we’re designed to love watching the anti-social suffer the pain of tribal comeuppance. These darker instincts are also evident in children. Another psychologist puppet show starred an evil thieving puppet who is struggling to open a box. A second puppet tried to help the villain, while a third puppet, the punisher, jumped on the lid, slamming it shut. Even eight-month-olds preferred to play with the punisher. Brain scans reveal that the mere anticipation of a selfish person being punished is experienced as pleasurable.”
Marketing and the Power of These Hardwired Stories
So, you may be wondering – what does this have to do with marketing your business? What I take away from these two puppet-based experiments is that the businesses and the people that we are hardwired to want to ‘play’ with are those who are helping other people and not being selfish, and those who are punishing those who are being selfish. We favour both those types of people – and that can be extended to businesses, and the people who represent them, too.
If our human brains are wired that way, then this can help your marketing. Consider when you’re building your USP. Your goal when you’re building your USP is to make sure that people want to play with your business – they want to buy your product or invest in your services. If you want people to connect with you, you either need to show them that you are selfless – that you are putting the world’s, or your tribe’s, interests over your own – or you need to show them that you’re punishing someone who isn’t putting the tribe’s interests ahead of their own.
Thinking About Your Target Person
Tapping into the power of these stories can help you understand your target person – and in the process, it can help you stand out from the crowd if you are operating in alignment with your values and showing that you want to help people.
If you’re currently thinking about your USP and your target person’s wants, needs, fears and frustrations, maybe you can also think about who is in your target person’s tribe. How can you show yourself or your business as being a hero for that tribe? How can you show yourself as someone who can help that tribe succeed or who can help to minimise any damage to their tribe from others?
Do These Stories Resonate with You?
What do you think about people being hardwired to favour the good and punish the bad? I find it really interesting, though I feel as if this walks on some ethical boundaries, perhaps, with regard to the darker instincts in human behaviour that this seems to explain.
I’d love to hear if you have any comments about how our storytelling brain works, and whether it’s right or not to consider these stories in our marketing. Please do get in touch to share your thoughts or your opinions on this blog post or the book, or to reach out with any questions you may have about the next steps for your marketing. I’d love to take the conversation further!
Creating marketing content can seem like a daunting task, but you can simplify the process by using a few helpful tools and strategies.
Here’s a brief introduction to a useful approach to content marketing – the List, Offer, Creative framework – which provides you with a good place to get started. It also aligns well with my five steps!
In today’s video, I talk about the List, Offer, Creative framework. I explain what it is and how it can help you with creating your marketing content.
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Breaking Down the Framework
The List, Offer, Creative (LOC) framework is a really useful tool you can use when you want to create some marketing content but you’re not sure where to start.
The LOC framework consists of three steps:
List. First, you need to identify a list of people that you’re going to contact with your marketing. When you define your list, it’s important to make sure that the list is relevant – you don’t want to be using a gigantic list full of people unless you can target your marketing at them all.
Offer. Once you’ve identified the people you want to target, you need to define what you are going to offer them. What is the offer that you’re making to them, and are you sure it is an offer that will be meaningful to them – one they will care about?
Creative. The final step is to build the creative content based on your offer, which will go out to your list.
You need to approach the LOC framework in this order – identify who you are targeting first, figure out what you are going to give them, and then create the content that you’re going to send them.
Why I Think the List, Offer, Creative Framework Works So Well
One of the reasons I love this framework is because it resonates with my thinking about marketing – it aligns well with my five steps to building a content-led marketing strategy because it helps you centre your target person in your marketing by focusing on your USP:
The List is your target person (step 1: Understand your target person)
The Creative is creating the content (step 4: Create your content ideas).
Your List and your Offer need to work together, just like your target person and your USP need to work together. And, as with my USP, you need to make sure that the content you’re offering satisfies the wants, needs, fears and frustrations of your target person. In LOC terms, your Offer needs to match your List.
Looking Beyond LOC: My Five-Step Strategy
You’ve probably noticed that in my five steps, I have two extra stages in the content marketing process (steps 3 and 5). I think step 3 (which focuses on choosing your marketing channels) is important because I feel that you need to check that the creative you build matches the channel that you’re going to use to distribute that content.
I also add a final step (step 5: Manage your resources) because you personally may not be creating that marketing content. When you factor in managing your resources, you take the time to consider who will be working on the content, how much the content creation will cost and when it will be delivered – and who is responsible for pressing the ‘go’ button.
If you’re feeling stuck when it comes to content marketing – or you’re not sure where to start – I recommend that you simplify the process. You could start with my five steps, or simplify things further by trying the List, Offer, Creative framework approach first. Wherever you begin, please do reach out if you’d like to talk through your plans or if you need some advice on next steps.
Staying on top of marketing technology trends can be exhausting – but not all marketing has to take place online. By turning the marketing process into a cycle you can take a fresh look at some old ideas – and maybe find a novel way to reach your target person along the way.
In today’s video, I talk about the cycle of marketing channels – and if you’re worried you might be a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to the latest marketing tools and technologies, I explain why that may be a good thing for your business.
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Marketing Needs to Be Novel
Marketing is all about getting yourself in front of people and getting them to notice you, and one of the best ways to achieve this is to offer something new – something novel.
Our brains are wired to notice when things are different – when things are new when things are not as we expect them to be – and they are also wired to completely ignore things when we expect them to be there, as we don’t have the capacity to absorb every single bit of information that’s thrown at us (which would be information overload!).
As a result, our brains are constantly sifting through the information around us to sort the important new things from the same old things we see all the time, taking notice of what we need to know and ignoring the rest. This tendency of the brain speaks to the very essence of marketing – it reinforces why it’s so important that your target person is able to see your USP so you can stand out from the crowd. If you want people to notice your business, your marketing needs to be novel.
Do You Need to Keep Your Finger ‘On the Pulse’?
One of the strongest ways to be novel in this digital age is to have your finger on the pulse – to know all the new technology, get onto channels that are not being used yet and see if you can be the first to dominate that space.
And yet, for some of us, it can be exhausting to follow the latest advances in technology and learn how to use them on the off chance that your target person will see your message. If after all your time and effort you miss the people you want to reach the most, or the technology doesn’t take off as you expected, then you’ve spent a lot of time learning something for nothing. Why not save your energy for something else?
Avoiding Banner Blindness to Maintain Marketing Effectiveness
Marketing works in a fairly consistent way:
Something in your marketing picks up and gains traction.
People start responding to it.
Other people see that other businesses are using that approach/marketing channel effectively.
Everyone starts using it!
The trouble with this process is that when everyone starts using it, people eventually start ignoring it because our brains think, “I’ve seen that before; I’m just going to start ignoring it.”
A really good example of this is ‘banner blindness’. Think about all the display banners you see on the internet. You can pay for Google Ads to display banners on websites that deal with particular interests, which is where you might hope to reach your target person. However, if people automatically filter out those banners because they know that they’re ads, you risk losing out on your investment because your target person has seen it all before. This is why Facebook has to keep changing up the way it shows its users advertising content – it needs to hold people’s attention.
Turning the Marketing Process into a Marketing Cycle
If a marketing channel loses its effectiveness, meaning people stop using the channel, this is where the marketing process can turn into a marketing cycle – you try something new, something novel, something different to reach your target person, which takes you back to the beginning of the process, helping you avoid the concept of ‘banner blindness’. But you don’t have to change from one technology to another – you could find a novel approach in older ideas that may not be in use any longer but still have the power to reach people.
A good example of this might be direct mail. Businesses used to send out enormous catalogues showcasing things you could buy from them, but direct mail marketing is far less popular these days. However, this means that the competition in that space is less than the competition in the email space where so many businesses target their customers. But this is just one example – there may be other, more retro, and appealing marketing channels that you might be able to get some really good results from because they’re not in use anymore.
Time to Get Creative and Embrace Your Inner Dinosaur
If you feel like you aren’t keeping up with today’s marketing trends, don’t panic! Instead, try sitting down and thinking about what might work for you and your business to help you find an alternative way to reach your target person. What marketing techniques really worked for you at the start of your career – or even when you were a kid? What marketing tools seemed to work once upon a time but aren’t being used anymore? You may find that you can create a whole new marketing channel for your business by dusting off some tried-and-tested old-school favourites.
If you’d like to talk through your marketing ideas to help you reach your target person, please do get in touch – I’d love to help you out.
In every industry, it’s easy to fall into the ‘minimum level of acceptable deception’ trap in your marketing, where you look around at your competitors and decide that their minimum level of transparency must be okay, so you can follow suit.
But what about your personal and business values? How can you make better ethical marketing decisions so you can go beyond the minimum and attract your target person to your business? Check out my video to find out more.
In today’s video, I talk about a key aspect of communication ethics in marketing, which considers the minimum level of deception that you may be tolerating when you communicate with your target person.
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Truth Leads to Trust, which Leads to Loyalty
In any industry, it’s easy to fall into the ‘minimum level of acceptable deception’ trap in your marketing, where you look around and see the level of truth-telling from your competitors and decide that this must be okay – because everyone else is doing it. You might say to yourself, ‘Well, our competitors are saying this, so we’re gonna do it too because otherwise, we’ll lose out on business.’ You can convince yourself that you have no other choice and that you have to live with this minimal level of deception – this low bar of truthfulness in your marketing.
Often, however, this minimum standard becomes the norm, so unfortunately a lot of businesses only end up doing the minimum – they don’t go above and beyond. But the truth is, if you do go above and beyond – if you actively try to do more, be more transparent than your competitors, be more ethical than your competitors – it becomes one of the key reasons that you stand out from your competitors, so it’s kind of a win-win. Not only are you practising your business ethically and practising your marketing ethically, but you end up having more loyal customers as a result!
Understanding Ethical Fading
What do I mean by ethical fading, and why mention it here? It’s actually very similar to what I mean when I’m talking about the minimum levels of deception – essentially, you’re avoiding the moral implications of a choice you’ve made, whether it’s telling a lie, allowing a lie to persist or pretending that misleading someone doesn’t matter. Like the minimum level of deception in marketing, it challenges your ethical values.
If you haven’t already taken a look at my ethical fading video, I highly recommend you do – and then I suggest you listen to the episode of Simon Sinek’s A Bit of Optimismpodcast on ethical fading. This is a fascinating topic and starts a conversation that I think needs to surface more often when we consider how to market products and services ethically.
Going Above and Beyond the Minimum
What are the minimum standards that you have for yourself? Make sure that you’re going beyond your minimum and acting in line with your values, whatever your industry and whoever your customers are. I assure you that when you do, you will attract the right people to your business – the people who agree with you and who are aligned with your values – and your business marketing practices will become easier and feel more authentic.
The only thing that you lose on the way may be some of that profit, but do you really want to profit when you’re unhappy? When it’s difficult? When you’re possibly contributing to a worse world?
Putting Your Trust in Ethical Marketing
What are the values that you want to have in your business?
It’s something to think about. I imagine that many of you reading this blog or watching this video are already going well above your minimum, but it’s good to consider because sometimes it’s hard to see. Even though this is something I live and work by, I still have to question myself a lot of the time and ask myself, ‘Am I going beyond my minimum?’
If you’d like some help with exploring how you can go above and beyond to grow an ethical, trustworthy business that attracts loyal customers, please do get in touch – I’d love to help you out.
When a real estate agent is selling a house, they emblazon their logo over the signs outside, which tells you who is selling the house but gives you no clues as to what makes their business special. But those signs are valuable marketing real estate!
In this article, I explore how you can make better use of your marketing to reach out to your target person and demonstrate your USP.
In today’s video, I talk about why real estate agent signs outside houses are a waste of prime marketing real estate – and what you can do to make optimal use of these marketing spaces.
If you haven’t subscribed to my YouTube channel already, please do – it will help me loads, and if you click the bell you’ll be notified when I release new videos.
Marketing 101: Is Adding Your Logo Enough?
When real estate agents sell or rent a house, they put these big, obvious signs out the front so you can’t miss them. Maybe the sign says “Sold!”, “For sale” or “To rent”, but they always have the agent’s logo and branding in place to signal to passers-by who is managing the sale or rental. Clearly, they are hoping to be recognised as a strong local presence or aiming to drive traffic to their website.
These are good reasons for putting up these signs – it’s base-level marketing. But really, it is little more than, “Throw my logo onto a thing!”
Imagine you’re building a Facebook ad and you take the same approach: “Oh, just put our logo on it.” Would that work? I’m not convinced, and I think that anyone who’s tried marketing on an advertising platform knows that “throwing your logo on a thing” is not the best marketing tool in your toolbox.
Use Your Prime Marketing Real Estate Wisely: Give Something!
If you think about it, those real estate signs are prime marketing real estate. They are right in front of people walking on the street, especially those who are looking at houses. But if all they see is yet another real estate sign, the signs become repetitive eyesores – which is not great for the agency’s brand!
So, what could real estate agents do differently? One approach would be to give something to their customers.
Giving something to your customers is a foundational marketing ideology. If you can internalise this ideology and make it a part of every single decision you make about your marketing, it will become ten times better.
Always make sure that your marketing is giving something to your customers. Make sure that they are receiving something that is of benefit to them and that they want to receive. Make it a good experience to encounter your marketing.
Might Humour Work for Your Business?
TikTok offers some really good insight into the power of giving something. If you want to use TikTok in your marketing, you probably need to be funny (which is one reason why I’m not on TikTok, as I’m not that funny). But the users on TikTok want to see funny content, so if you’re a brand that’s trying to get on TikTok, be funny!
Going back to those real estate signs – if they were funny, people might enjoy seeing them more. Humour might not translate into more house sales, but you know what? People will remember your branding because it’s making you unique. It’s all about step two of my five steps: what makes you unique, what makes you stand out from your competitors? This is so important, and I feel like real estate agents are wasting a huge opportunity to stand out from the crowd with this prime marketing real estate.
Giving Helps You Stand Out from the Crowd
Giving something goes beyond step two – beyond being unique and making every interaction with your business a fun experience. When you give your customers something, you can make the experience really beneficial to the customer. For example, you could put a QR code on a poster or sign that gives them access to something they really want. This comes back to understanding your target person (step one of my five steps): you know what you can offer that target person that’s different to your competitors, which means you can make that the first thing they experience from you. As soon as they understand how unique you are and they receive something from you that they want or need, you’ve got them hook, line and sinker.
If you haven’t identified what really makes you unique from your competitors, then you have nothing to say to your customers – and if so, maybe all you can do is throw your logo on a sign. But if you can figure out what makes you unique, you can figure out what needs to go on that sign.
Of course, this doesn’t just apply to real estate agent signs. Look at your marketing and do a quick check with yourself – are you putting your USP in front of your customers in every space that you can?
Are You Giving Your Customers a Good Experience?
If you’re just putting your logo and your brand out there in a passive way, you’ve not won the battle yet. What you really need to do is give something that your customer loves – something that they want to see again and again.
Even if you’re not a real estate agent, I hope that this resonates with you and that you’re able to apply these ideas to your business. If you’d like some help figuring out what you can give to your target person to help you stand out from the crowd, please do get in touch – I’d love to help you out.
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