“Great minds think alike” isn’t as helpful a saying as it may at first seem. But how about “Great minds don’t think alike” – might that have more potential to help you identify your USP, recognise your strengths and stand out from the crowd?
It’s time to check in on what makes you and your business unique – starting with celebrating how brilliant it is that great minds don’t think alike!
In today’s video, I’m going to be talking about why if you’re great, you’re not thinking like everyone else – and how that can be brilliant for your business.
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What Defines a Great Mind?
“Great minds think alike” – if you really think about this common saying, it doesn’t make any sense. If great minds all thought alike, wouldn’t everyone with a great mind be coming up with the same ideas?
I would argue that great minds don’t think alike. Great minds are able to conjure up wonderfully novel, new, and unique ideas that other people haven’t thought of before.
Think Novel, New and Unique – and Don’t Compete on Price!
In marketing, the novel, the new, and the unique is what’s going to make you stand out from the crowd. And these qualities give your business, your products, and your services an edge that customers are willing to pay extra for.
If you aren’t talking about what makes you unique from your competitors, there’s a good chance you’ll end up competing on price to at least help you stand out in one appealing way. But competing on price sucks! And once you start competing on price, it becomes a race to the bottom. You start on a slow downward spiral, lowering and lowering your price until you’re no longer profitable and your business becomes unviable.
If all that differentiates you is competing on price, it can literally suck the lifeblood from your business.
Find Your Unique Selling Point
If this all feels a little worrying, I recommend you consider Step 2 of my five-step approach to creating a marketing strategy for your business. Step 2 is all about defining your unique selling point (USP). It’s important! You need to figure out what makes you and your business unique. You need to differentiate yourself from your competitors so that you stand out in the best possible ways – ways that don’t involve pricing your offering under its true value.
Stop looking at your competitors and copying what they do; instead, start seeing what they’re not doing. Look at the negative space around what they’re offering – what is missing, and where is there an opportunity for you to set yourself apart from the crowd?
Communicate Your USP
In my video What is a USP, I suggest that an ideal combination of factors contributes to your USP:
What you do well.
What your customer actually wants.
What your competitors do not do well.
Now, I’m adding an extra element to this final point. Ask yourself, “What are your competitors not talking about?” Whether your competitors are doing things well or not, they may not be talking about it – and that’s a green light for you to start talking about what you do so well.
That’s what marketing is all about – communication. It’s about being able to tell people, “This is what we do, and it’s amazing!” It’s time to shine a light on what makes you unique.
Experience your Own Light-bulb Moment
For some people, discovering what they are not talking about and should be sharing is a revelation. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been in a great conversation with someone about their business, and they suddenly realise they haven’t been sharing the things that make them unique on their website. It’s a true light-bulb moment – a point at which their marketing strategies start to fall into place.
If you don’t understand what your unique selling point is or you’re not sure that the selling points you’re using are all that unique, please do get in touch. I love helping people experience that light-bulb moment when they realise, “Oh, this is what we should be talking about!”
The way you approach your marketing may be rooted in an intriguing piece of occult wisdom, which asks you to consider whether you are more cup or knife mind – in other words, whether you push information outwards (knife mind) or draw information inwards (cup mind).
Here, I explore the pros and cons of each approach, considering how this occult wisdom can inform your marketing efforts and help you turn occult wisdom into marketing wisdom.
In today’s video, I talk about some interesting occult wisdom that may help you think about how you balance your marketing focus.
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Understand the Difference Between the Cup and Knife Mind
In occult wisdom, it’s thought that you have two different types of mind: you have a knife mind, and you have a cup mind. Your knife mind is the mind that pushes outwards – it’s the mind that goes out and gets things done. It pushes your will outwards. You get creative and make things happen with your knife mind.
The cup mind is different – it draws inwards rather than pushes outwards. It’s absorbing, like a vessel, so information and ideas pour into your cup mind. You absorb information –experiences, observations, statistical data – from the world around you, which your mind uses to make plans and evaluate the best course of action. You use information to invigorate and empower yourself with your cup mind.
Utilise Your Cup and Knife Minds
When I was learning about the difference between these two types of mind, I realised that occult wisdom like this underlies a lot of human psychology – and anything that’s in human psychology naturally underlies marketing too. There are different types of marketers and there’s different types of marketing, and I realised that you need both your knife mind and your cup mind if you want to maximise your marketing.
You need your knife mind because you need to get out there and do your marketing – you can’t just sit and plan, and you can’t constantly be thinking about strategy. You need to motivate yourself to make things happen – you have to create, you have to communicate with people, you have to push your knife mind out there and make your business a success.
But you also need your cup mind if you want to see great results. A major part of marketing involves stepping back, taking stock, looking at your stats and analytics, and figuring out what is actually happening – and understanding what is happening – before you go out there with your knife mind and take action.
This is the most important message from this slice of occult wisdom: it’s not that you have a cup mind or a knife mind, it’s that you have both – and you have to use both. You as a whole person need to use both your cup and your knife mind at different times for different purposes to make things happen in an informed way.
Find the Most Effective Balance in Your Marketing
If you’re a marketer or a business owner, consider whether your knife mind or your cup mind is currently dominating your marketing practice. Are you spending more time being creative and getting things done while at the same time neglecting your stats and all the information that could be guiding you? Or are you a bit of a spreadsheet fiend, so you’re too busy measuring performance rather than using that information to get creative and make things happen?
Or perhaps you have found the sweet spot for your business – the perfect balance between monitoring all the available information and statistics at your fingertips to create a plan of marketing action that you can implement. If so, congratulations!
Maximise Your Marketing Wisdom
Understanding the differences between the cup and knife minds, and their equal importance, may help you to check in with yourself regularly so you can work towards getting the balance right for your business. I find it helpful to return to this idea whenever I am working with customers or other marketing professionals who are struggling with balancing these two elements of successful marketing. It helps me with my own marketing too – we all need to take the time to check in with whether we are finding a successful balance in our marketing approach.
The concept of the cup and knife mind may be occult wisdom, but I also think it translates well to being marketing wisdom in action. If you’d like help with focusing your marketing energy in a more balanced way, please do get in touch.
Spending time building your Instagram followers may seem a worthwhile marketing investment, but is Instagram the right channel for you to be focusing on – or might there be other marketing channels that better deserve your attention?
If Instagram follower numbers are on your mind, check out this video for insight into why Instagram may – or may not – be the ideal marketing channel for connecting you to your target person.
Check out more about Duct Tape Marketing’s “Marketing Hourglass” here.
In today’s video, I talk about Instagram followers – how many you have, and how many you feel you need. Boosting your follower number requires valuable time and effort, so it’s worth checking whether Instagram is the right channel for you to focus on – might there be other areas of your marketing where your time may be better spent?
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Why Instagram Is So Appealing
Instagram is one of those marketing channels that business owners are starting to be drawn towards, thinking, “That’s where people will see me, that’s where people are buying things.” It can also operate as a storefront for your business: it has shop features and provides ways for people to buy, plus there are lots of influencers on Instagram who may be attracted to your product or help bring attention to what you do.
It also relies on less content – it’s not as filled with text as other social media platforms, which makes it quite appealing if you’re more comfortable being creative visually rather than through words. In short, Instagram is full of great features – and it can be a fun marketing channel for interacting with your customers.
When Instagram May Be the Perfect Channel for You
There are three key reasons why you might want to focus on boosting your Instagram follower number:
People can check you out. Imagine you want to talk at a conference. You could reasonably assume that the conference organisers are looking at your Instagram following to establish whether your involvement may be valuable to the conference – if that’s the case, building your Instagram following makes good business sense.
You need to be perceived as popular. You might also want to make sure that your Instagram following is high so that your customers perceive your business as popular – maybe that’s important to you, or maybe that’s important to the success of your business, but either way it’s a good idea to boost your follower numbers if popularity leads to sales success.
Your audience is on Instagram! This is the ultimate reason to be focusing your marketing energy on Instagram. If the people that you’re serving are using Instagram – if they buy from Instagram and are influenced by Instagram, and they’re inspired by your Instagram posts enough to comment and correspond with you – then that is an excellent reason to focus on getting those follower numbers up, because the people who are following you – hopefully, if you’re doing your marketing ethically enough – will be a good match to your target person.
The Problem with Obsessing Over Follower Numbers
Instagram follower numbers recently came up in a conversation with one of my customers. They wanted to get their Instagram following up, but I didn’t think it was necessarily the right thing for their business. However, it did leave me thinking that there may be some unhealthy concerns out there when it comes to getting social media follower numbers up.
If you haven’t seen the documentary/docudrama The Social Dilemma, I highly recommend it. There’s a lot of discussion at the moment about mental health and social media use, which may lead to an unhealthy obsession with getting those follower numbers up.
If this sounds like you, perhaps take a moment to check in with yourself on this. Are you obsessing over your follower numbers? If so, is it for good reason? Is it really to serve your customers? Or is this satisfying some kind of inner need that you might want to review?
I’m no therapist, but if you feel as if you have an emotional attachment to those social media follower numbers, on Instagram or otherwise, I would tread very carefully and consider seeing a therapist. I don’t mean that in a condescending way at all – therapy is super helpful and it’s really good for making sure that you’re not taking yourself down a negative path.
Is Instagram Worth Your Time and Effort?
Is Instagram really good for your business – and are you using it effectively? It’s worth asking these questions. It might be that you’re wasting a whole lot of your valuable time and effort trying to grow your Instagram, and yet it’s not turning into business or boosting your reputation. You may be getting lots of likes and follows – but if this isn’t serving you or your business, it may not be a worthwhile use of your precious time.
How can you tell if Instagram is the right place for you? It’s time to go back to my five steps – those five foundational, strategic marketing concepts I talk about so often, in particular the first two steps:
Step 1:Understand your target person. Identify your target person. Get to know their wants, their needs, their fears and their frustrations. Get into that target person’s headspace and understand them.
Step 2:Define your (real) USP. What is your USP? What makes you different? What makes you unique?
Once you really know who you’re talking to and what you’re trying to say to them – that you are super unique and why they should buy from you – then you can figure out if Instagram is the place to talk to them. Are your target people on Instagram? And if they are, is that where they want to hear about your USP?
Remember: If your USP doesn’t fit on Instagram very well, then you might want to either reconsider whether that USP makes sense or not, or change the way you’re communicating on Instagram.
Focus Your Social Media Marketing Energy Wisely
Steps 1 and 2 of my five steps to creating a successful marketing strategy are important for any marketing channel, but they’re especially helpful if you’re obsessing over a channel and you feel like it’s not giving you the returns you need. Go back to both steps and take a look at whether you’re really in the right place, doing the right thing, and saying the right thing to the right people. Everyone’s business is different, so you need to find the right solution for your business – no one else’s.
Time is a finite resource. Use your marketing time wisely and your business will reap the rewards! If you’d like help with focusing your social media marketing priorities, please do get in touch.
If you only listen to the words your clients say when you talk to them, you may be missing what’s really being said – the true meaning underlying the words. But if you look beyond their words to their actions and the way they say things, you can identify their wants, needs, fears, and frustrations – in other words, the problems that may be holding their business back.
When we engage with our clients at a deeper level, we develop a greater understanding of how we can support them and be better partners. Find out more about the power of non-verbal communication in this video.
In today’s video, I talk about some of the things that we don’t tend to consider when it comes to communication – such as the way we reveal the things we need through our actions. When we engage with our clients at a deeper level, we develop a greater understanding of how we can support them.
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Looking for Communication Clues
Communication is so much more than words. To illustrate, consider my friend’s dog. Just by listening to the sound of his dog’s whine, combined with the way he is behaving, he can tell whether his dog is hungry, needs to pee or is simply impatient for his walk. In another example, my boyfriend once told me that when he was a child he used to talk to his childhood dog and feel as if he was having a real conversation, even though his dog obviously couldn’t speak – but those conversations probably felt real because he had been communicating in some ways with his dog… maybe he picked up on his dog’s mood when he was happy (probably out for a walk or eating!) or sad (perhaps recovering from a trip to the vets)? In much the same way, a parent can gather clues from a baby’s cries as to whether they’re hungry, tired, or uncomfortable in some way.
We don’t always need words to communicate. Our brains gather so much information about the world around us from non-verbal cues (such as body language and behaviours) that help us to understand the people in our lives and to identify their needs. This kind of information isn’t structured into logical arguments or requests through our choices of words; instead, it can reveal a deeper layer of wants, needs, fears, or frustrations that may mean more than the words we say aloud.
Identifying Wants, Needs, Fears and Frustrations
In your business, the first thing you need to do is identify your target person and understand what you can do to help them. You need to understand who they are, looking beyond categories or demographics, and listening to more than just their words, so you can discover their wants, needs, fears, and frustrations – in other words, the problems they need to solve.
When you truly understand your clients’ wants, needs, fears, and frustrations, you can start communicating to them that you understand their requirements and you’re going to do all you can to satisfy those wants or needs or alleviate those fears or frustrations.
Communicating without Words (Non-Verbal Communication)
Communication is the key to understanding what a customer wants – but remember to take on board what your customer is really saying through their actions as well as their words. Many of these actions will be subconscious, revealing deeper concerns through the way people talk about things and the body language they exhibit.
This deeper layer of understanding works both ways, too. As you get to know your clients and to understand what they need, you’ll likely be revealing similar subconscious information to them, such as automatically communicating that you understand and you have solutions in mind that can help resolve their business concerns. As your professional relationship evolves, it will allow you to communicate beyond words and establish a partnership built on a foundation of trust and mutual understanding.
Finding the People You Want to Work With
You can discover a lot about people by listening beyond words – it helps you get to know the people you want to work with, identify the support they need or the worries they have, and develop a deeper sense of how you can work together most effectively.
If you want some help with identifying and getting to know your current or future clients, please do get in touch – I’ll be happy to share with you the ‘target person builder’ that I use.
Most of the business advice you’ll find out there can become very obsessed with enhancing productivity, profit, and growth. This does make sense – a business needs to succeed after all.
But are there instances where it’s worth sacrificing some of the productivity and some of the profit in order to be kind?
In today’s video, I talk about the value of being kind in your communications – and how your prospects for growing business productivity and profit may be enhanced by adding kindness to your business strategy.
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Kindness Is at the Heart of Great Service
Recently, I saw a LinkedIn post by facilitator Adrian Ashton, who had conducted some keyword research and concluded that most people value kindness from the consultants they work with and the people that are supporting them. This got me thinking, and I realised that this idea could be extended much further. I believe that everyone wants kindness from pretty much everything, and that businesses and their customers are no exception.
If you think about why your business exists, you’re probably serving someone – most businesses provide a service of some kind. What if kindness is the main thing that people want when they’re being served? Whatever the product or service on offer – whether you’re selling moisturiser or serving food in a café – I think that everyone wants kindness to be part of the transaction.
Kindness Is Hard to Measure
The problem with kindness is it’s really hard to measure. As marketers, we love to measure things – and in business we use measures such as KPIs to track productivity and profit – but you can’t measure kindness, so it’s really hard to get a complete sense of how kind your business is towards your clients and customers.
It’s easy to focus on your productivity and your profit when you’re moving your business forward, but be careful not to leave kindness behind.
Are You Sacrificing Kindness for Profit?
Look out for red flags that suggest you’ve been sacrificing kindness for productivity and profit. One of the biggest indicators relates to how you communicate internally. If your internal communication to your own employees is often sharp and to the point, there’s a good chance that you haven’t been radiating kindness to your clients or customers.
In the drive to achieve productivity and profit, kindness may be one of the first things that gets sacrificed. Internal communications provide valuable insight as to whether your business may be tipping towards this point because it’s much easier to inadvertently sacrifice kindness to your internal employees – you’re relying on the fact that they’re being paid to work for you, so if you’re not super kind to them the warning signs may not appear straight away. They are still getting paid and you are still seeing productivity and profit.
Conduct a Kindness Comms Check
If you know your business is really focused on productivity and profit – the “go go go!” approach – it may be time for you to do a quick kindness comms check: pause, check and reflect. Conduct a good audit of your systems, especially your customer service systems, and consider whether your communications output suggests you’ve been sacrificing kindness for productivity and profit.
If all signs suggest kindness has been sacrificed along the way, aim to make being kind – internally and externally – a significant part of your business strategy. While I can’t guarantee this will further boost productivity and profit, I do believe you’ll be running a better business, you’ll have happier employees, and you’ll be contributing to making the world a better place – and I think that these should be some of your goals as a business.
Be Kind… Be Ethical!
Questions about kindness and supporting your employees can be just as important to answer as questions about productivity and profit – and when you consider these together, you are tapping into the heart of running an ethical business.
I love talking about business ethics and ethical marketing; in fact, I’ve already started some discussions on these topics and I’m sure I’ll do more in future. If you’re interested in finding out more, please do get in touch and I’ll happily point you in the right direction.
Especially when you’re still growing, you need to be wise about how you spend your budget. Marketing help is one of those things you do need to invest in – and have a little faith in – to stimulate that growth. But not all marketing help is right for all businesses at all stages.
Here’s a quick breakdown of three of the most obvious avenues to go down in getting marketing help for your small business: marketing freelancers, Virtual Assistants, or hiring someone in-house.
What type of marketing help do you actually need, in your business?
Today I’m going to talk about the differences between having a virtual assistant, an in-house marketer, or a freelance marketer when it comes to getting marketing help in your business.
When you need marketing help in your business, I think there are three kinds of major options out there, especially when you’re on a small team or on your own.
Do You Need Marketing Help from a Virtual Assistant?
The first option is your virtual assistant option. Virtual assistants are really great because you’ve got a really wide selection, there are quite a lot of virtual assistants out there.
That can be a double-edged sword because you do have to make sure that you, do your homework, make sure that that virtual assistant is actually good at what they do.
Experience Doesn’t Mean Better
Just as a note on that, experience doesn’t equal better. You can have a brand new virtual assistant, who will be way more committed to you, because they’re new, and because they’re new doesn’t mean they’re not good at the job.
The key thing about that is that, the job of a virtual assistant is often to really pick up the stuff, that you can’t do – or you don’t have time to do – in your business and do it efficiently and really well, so you don’t even need to check it. That’s when you’ve got a really good virtual assistant.
Signs That You Might Need Marketing Help From a Virtual Assitant
If you are time poor – you’re constantly running out of time.
If by freeing up your time, your business is going to make more money.
If you have systems in place already, that someone else can pick up.
If the above is true, you’re ready for a virtual assistant!
Do You Need Marketing Help from an In-House Marketer?
The second option is bringing in an in-house marketer. This is where you’re getting someone to join your team, someone who’s going to be committed to your business, to do the marketing for your business.
The Most Expensive Option For Marketing Help
This is most likely the most expensive option because you’re going to have to pay a good salary. You’re also going to have to make sure you’ve got all of your employment processes in place. You’ve got contracts and employment policies, insurance, and so on, that you need to do as an employer, in the UK at least.
What’s really important here as well, is that to attract an in-house marketer, you’re going to have to pay well. You could hire a marketing executive in-house and that might be cheaper, but be aware that if you’re hiring a marketing executive, you’re hiring someone who doesn’t yet have expertise. Which could be totally fine and something that you may want. You may want a more blank slate and, like I said, with the virtual assistant, a new person comes with a higher level of commitment too, because they’re new, and they’re ready and energetic.
So, you might want to do that, but be aware that if you are looking for expertise, which is often why someone brings an in-house marketer, you’re looking for someone at a higher pay grade.
If you are bringing in a marketing executive at a lower level, and at a lower pay rate because you can’t afford it, then that’s fine, but make sure that you’re giving them support and training, and that you are budgeting for giving them some extra support and training because they will need it. They’ll need to learn how to do a lot of this stuff, that they haven’t had any experience doing yet. And with marketing, you do learn through experience, because everything is changing every day.
So Why Might You Want to Hire an In-House Marketer?
The bottom line of what you need, of why you might want to hire in-house, is:
You have enough money,
You need to pull in some expertise
You need someone committed to your business.
And that last point about them being committed to your business is really important. Because even if you have loads and loads of money, you can hire a marketer and they will join you – money is attractive to people, and people do need money. But you won’t get them to stay. As soon as they’ve got another offer, that sounds better to them, they’ll leave. So having money isn’t the only thing about keeping a marketing person in your business.
Alignment of Values Are How You Get Your Marketing Help to Stay
You need to have a set of values that are going to attract a marketer. You need to make sure that you’re authentically living those values as well. You can’t just talk about those values and hope that they’ll believe them. You need to be authentically living them otherwise they will eventually realise.
You need to have a business that people will want to fight for because marketing can get tough. As much as people love to think, that marketing is this joyful joyland of creative creativity, marketing is a hard slog sometimes. Going through stats, figuring out new technology, figuring out why a bug has happened. And if you’re hiring in-house, that person is going to have to do a lot of things. They’re going to have to have their hands across all the different things, different channels, to make sure that everything’s working in sync. It gets tough, so if you don’t have a reason why they’re fighting beyond the money, that they’re being paid, you’re not only going to lose them eventually, but you’ll also not get the best work out of them.
Be Really Clear About Your “Why” If You’re Hiring In-House
So if you’re going to hire in-house, make sure you’re really clear about why. Why does your business exist, who are you fighting for, who are you serving and why would your marketer care. And you know what, that will apply to any employee you hire. Whether it’s an admin person, a finance person, an HR person, everyone wants to know why they’re fighting.
Yes, money is important, and they are also working to earn because everyone needs a living. But they’re staying because they want to.
Do You Need Marketing Help from a Freelance Marketer?
The last option is – surprise, surprise – a freelance marketer (like me!).
For When You Need High Expertise For Less Ongoing Spend
Why would you want to hire a freelance marketer, as opposed to the other two, is that you need that higher level of expertise in your business. Maybe you haven’t got really good marketing systems set up yet, you haven’t thought about your target person properly, maybe you’re not sure if your USP is correct and there’s all these little bits, all these foundational bits, especially when it comes to your marketing, that you need set up. But you don’t have the money, you don’t have the systems in place, you don’t have the capacity to hire someone full-time.
This is where a freelancer comes in perfectly. They’re invaluable, because usually your relationship with a freelancer is fairly fluid, so if your business is a bit money poor, then you’ll just be able to spend the amount that you have, that you can budget for, and a freelancer will be able to shape their offering, to give you exactly what you need.
A good marketing freelancer can condense their marketing expertise, to exactly what you need for your business, and to give you the tools to maybe help yourself, to get to the point where you can hire someone. Get you to where you have enough profit coming in that you are then able to hire that permanent extra support.
You can have long-term relationships with freelancers. But I think the best relationships you can have with a businesses as a freelancer is to help them get to that stable point, where your business is supporting itself, and then setting you free into the sunset.
So when you might want to hire a freelance marketer instead:
You need high-level marketing expertise
You don’t have enough money to spend on an ongoing salary
You need a flexible working arrangement to only access and pay for the expertise you actually need.
There are obviously lots of different freelancers with lots of different ways of working, which also means you can find the one that fits best for your business.
If you think that a conversation with me might help you figure out what kind of marketing help you might need, feel free to get in touch and ask for a completely free chat and I’ll help point you at the right thing for you!
When you’re a small business or solo business owner, tackling all the complicated Search Engine Optimisation language can feel like learning how to do a whole job. Is it really that necessary for business owners to be able to understand all the ins and outs of SEO?
Well, I think you probably should care about SEO, but you also don’t have to know EVERYTHING.
Hi I’m DJ from Rainbow Dragon Digital and in today’s video I’m going to talk about that one that loads of business owners are always obsessed with which is Search Engine Optimization.
If you haven’t subscribed to my YouTube channel already, please do it will help me out loads and if you click the bell you’ll get notified when I release new videos.
So Search Engine Optimization. It’s the one that like loads of business owners are like, “Oh, I need to do more. I want to appear on Google.” And the big question, is should you actually care? Does SEO really matter?
Short Answer: Yes, SEO Matters
The short answer is yes. Search Engine Optimization matters because Google handles trillions of searches a year. I think it’s estimated at something like five billion searches per day! So, people are using it. That is where people go to find information. Bottom line is yes, you probably should be trying to make sure that you’re appearing correctly on Google.
But there’s so much SEO Stuff
But the problem that business owners come up against is that there’s so much stuff. When you go look up SEO, there’s just so much technical stuff that you need to do to get SEO to work for you and it’s really hard to figure out what is it that I actually need to do as a business owner, especially when you’re on your own, or if you’re in a small team, and you don’t have a huge amount of resources. Do I really need to spend all of this time figuring out all this technical stuff?
Yes and no. So, the thing that Google wants – let’s go back to the steps of our content marketing strategy, the steps of any business. Who is their target person and what is their USP?
Google’s USP is to try and make sure that people find what they need and find it as fast as possible. So Google wants to make sure that when someone’s searching on Google that they find the the content that they’re looking for.
The One Thing You Need to Do for SEO
The key thing that you need to do, the one thing, is always make sure you’re doing what Google wants you to do with your website, which is to produce good, relevant, and informative content.
This is why your content strategy is actually super important. Go back to step one: who is your target person? Step two: what is your USP and then step three, when we’re choosing channels if we’re choosing SEO, we’re choosing that we want to make sure that we’re appearing on search (because maybe your product is something that people do search for, your service is something that people do search for) then your step four of creating your content – your content is key to appearing on this channel.
You need to make sure that you’re writing content for things that people actually want to know about, that people are actually searching for.
So, yes care about SEO but the kind of goal of SEO is getting content that people want to search for.
Produce Good Content, Hire Someone For the SEO Technical Bits
Basically, the bottom line is if you want to appear on search first produce content that people want to read. The technical bits – putting things in meta tags and alt tags, and things like putting headings in the right places, and putting keywords in the right places, doing schema – these are technical know-how that you don’t actually need.
You, as the business owner, as the small team, you don’t NEED to know all of that technical SEO stuff (see this video for more on that!)
What you need what you HAVE to produce is the content, is the knowledge, the expertise of your product or service. You need to produce that, then you can hire a marketer, hire an SEO specialist to come in and use the content you’ve created and put it in the right way that Google can read it correctly.
So my bottom-line advice for SEO as a channel is first, produce good content, then hire someone who knows what they’re doing to put it in the right place for you.
If you want to have a chat about your content or what you might need to do for SEO, get in touch with me. I’m happy to have a conversation with you.
Is your customer “businesses” (i.e. do you work in “B2B”)? Even if you’re B2C, have you been talking about who you target as your “Target Market”? Well, then you probably need to hear this.
In today’s video, I want to talk to you about how even if you’re a B2B business you are always selling to people.
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Are You Selling to “Businesses”? Or to a “Market”?
So, a lot of people who are in the B2B space – selling to other businesses – think that “I’m selling to businesses, and I’m not selling to people. I need to sell to this whole business.” And you think of your customer as the business.
And even people who are selling B2C, where they’re selling business to customer, they think they’re selling to a ‘market’, to a ‘target market’, to an ‘audience’. And these are really, really bad ways to think about your marketing.
You Are Not Selling to a Target Market
Because ultimately in marketing you are not selling to a group of people. You’re not selling to a business. The person buying from you is not this amorphous group.
The person buying from you is a person. And they have feelings. They have motivations. They have wants, needs, fears, and frustrations. Those four things that I put into that target person exercise, the “step one”. Understand your target person and really understand them deeply and emotionally because they are who is buying from you.
And it’s the reason I call that step one target ‘person’ and not target ‘audience’. You are selling to people. You are selling to individuals.
Put Yourself Into Your Business
And so, it means that everything you do – EVERYTHING you do – is personal. So, please, go and put yourself into your business. Put your values in. Put your culture in. Bring it out to the forefront. Make it clear who you are as a business and who the people are in your business and who the people are that you’re serving.
Center your business around people and people will respond to it.
I haven’t had a chance to transcript this yet, but here’s the recording of the very first Marketing Ethically discussion we had. It was an absolute blast.
Feel free to join my mailing list which will get you all the templates I talked about as a part of the 5-day course: Join the Mailing List Here
Most business owners want to start using paid advertising on digital platforms to reach their audience and can even be reasonably familiar with the basics of it. But there’s a big difference in the way ads appear and who they appear to on different types of platforms. And perhaps not in the way you might initially think.
When doing paid advertising you need to think about interruption and search marketing.
Hi I’m DJ from Rainbow Dragon Digital and in today’s video I’m going to be talking about a really important distinction between different types of paid advertising that you need to be aware of as a marketer or business owner.
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What is Paid Advertising?
When it comes to paid advertising there are lots of different platforms that you can use. Most people are familiar with Google Ads, they’re familiar with Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads or Twitter Ads and that sort of thing.
And these are what I’m talking about here where you pay so for an advertisement to appear somewhere that you think your customers will be.
Planning Your Paid Advertising
Now there’s obviously lots of steps you need to go through to make sure that this works. You honestly cannot just jump onto a paid advertising platform and hope it works. You will end up wasting money unless, of course, your product is ridiculously unique and you are a complete tech wizard, you will find that that you need to do a little bit of planning.
But the planning isn’t you know isn’t super difficult. It’s the same steps that I’ve got for your content strategy plan.
It’s the Same as the Content Strategy Plan Steps
Step 1: Who is your target person?
Step 2: What is your USP?
Those first two steps are super important it will help you.
Step 3: You’re choosing that channel. You’re choosing the paid advertising channel in this case.
Step 4: You’re creating content that matches that channel. So, the right content for that channel.
Step 5: And then you’re timelining your process.
Literally, it’s the same plan.
But in this video, I want to talk to you about these two different types of paid advertising and why that really, really matters in terms of making sure you’re getting the right content on and making you’re targeting the right person.
The First Type of Paid Advertising: Search
The first type of advertising I want to talk about is search advertising. And this is the easier one.
Search advertising is when you are putting up an ad in front of people when they’re already searching for something. So the obvious example is Google Ads. But you’ve also got things like Bing Ads you’ve got Amazon Ads and stuff like that.
So, any platform where people are actively searching for stuff – this is search advertising.
And the important considerations around search advertising is that people are already searching for your thing. So, they’re already in Consideration stage. You know that marketing funnel it’s on my website and and you know the top step is Awareness and then the second step is Consideration. So, in search advertising they’re already in Consideration stage: they know what they’re looking for and they’re now looking to compare you against other options. Or they’re trying to find the best option for the thing they’re looking for.
For Search Advertising, Focus on your USP
So, you need to keep that in mind when you’re composing your advertising because you want to be really, really, really hard pushing on that USP. What makes you different? What makes you really unique? And the U in the USP – what makes you UNIQUE? What makes you better than other people this is what you want to focus on in search advertising.
It’s also where I would suggest that you might want to start actually, weirdly enough. Because even though it’s the second layer of the funnel this is where people are already ready to buy. They’re already looking for the thing. So, you’re actually probably going to get better results here, obviously, depending on your business.
The Second Type of Paid Advertising: Interruption
The second type of advertising I want to talk about is Interruption Marketing and this is where people often really get it wrong. So, interruption marketing is things like Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads and Twitter where you’re interrupting someone when they’re in the process of something else.
And this could also relate to a lot of offline advertising like flyers and posters and billboards. These are not things where people are searching. They’re you’re interrupting their flow and you need to get their attention.
For Interruption Marketing, Focus on Understanding Your Target Person
So, you can see immediately how the content really needs to be very different here. And you’re further up in that funnel now. You’re up at that Awareness level and you need to start making sure that you’re not just talking about your USP and talking about why you are better than your competition, you also need to be making sure that this target person understands that you understand them. And that’s where that target person exercise comes in really useful because your interruption marketing should be really, really understanding. Making sure that they understand that you are someone worth listening to.
And so when you’re interrupting someone you need to give them a really, really, really good reason to interrupt that flow and come to look at your ad.
There’s a lot of complexity around this, there’s a lot of detail, and there’s a lot of ways that you can not only get it wrong in terms of not producing the right stuff for your business but get it wrong in terms of producing marketing that’s contributing to that that Social Dilemma problem. That contributing to this idea of grabbing attention, capturing attention. So it’s a place to tread carefully in but if you do it effectively and you do it ethically it can be really powerful for your business.
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