Does Your Marketing Egg Look Like This?Have you ever asked yourself what it will take to double your business? Adjust this question to your business however you like, but you should always be able to answer the question. If you operate very small or new business, doubling it is a pretty easy task. If you have been around a while and have a significant market share in your industry, this may be a pretty lofty goal. If you want to be “realistic” (by the way, realism is very subjective), maybe you want to increase your business by 15 percent, 25 percent, or 35 percent. Whatever the number, ask yourself what it will take to achieve it, and set a course to do it. Make a goal and treat it like an egg. Keep it warm, keep it safe from harm, and nurture it every day.
Treat Your Business How You Want it to Hatch
Successful business people ask what it will take to grow their market. Successful companies, even the small ones, treat their business like it is a big one, and like it will eventually hatch into a huge one. This is a pretty important principle that drives many companies to massive success.
Lately it seems that many companies have given up on the hope of growth and just beg to keep the market they have. A shocking truth I often find is that many businesses have a lot more means to grow than they give themselves credit. Many of them are too backed up in bureaucracy and indecision to actually make the efforts it will take to achieve growth. Executives are so afraid of losing their jobs for making a bad decision that they make the worst decision of all, which is indecision.
Don’t Lose your Business in the Marketing Omelette
There is often a simple answer to increase your business, but finding that answer is the tricky part. A truth about businesses today is that as the economy changed quickly in the past couple years, marketing changed even faster. Marketing became more confusing, and companies have to be a lot more creative to reach those elusive customers. It seems insane to me that as competition is stronger, a lot of companies have either tried really hard at doing all the wrong things or just gave up to take a “wait and see” attitude toward their market. They gave up on their egg and are letting the competition come and peck away at it. They ran out of ideas, and stopped seeking that simple but elusive answer of how to keep growing.
Business Growth Requires Defined Efforts
Flight does not happen by accident, and if you ever want that egg to hatch and fly, you must take good care of it. Achieving business growth requires defined efforts and careful attention. Here is that question for you, again. What will it take to double your business? If you cannot answer this with a clearly defined plan for success, there are people who can help. It is my job to make companies successful. Ring me up at *REDACTED DUE TO AGING WEBSITE* (*REDACTED DUE TO AGING WEBSITE*) and I will be happy to help you in the right direction. If I am not the guy to help you, rest assured that I know people who will be delighted to work with you. I am always happy to pass along a referral. Most importantly, don’t give up on your egg and do something to nurture it every day. Success is likely a whole lot more achievable than you give yourself credit.
What Will Fear Keep From Your Reach?I want to offer a lesson in how and why fear drives your market, and how to better address that fear. It is not only fear, but emotions … many emotions that drive your market. The biggest one to overcome is fear. I will give you examples, but first, I want you to look at your own business motivations. If you look at your own motivations, you will better understand what motivates others. Here are some easy questions to help illustrate the point and get your thoughts moving in a good direction.
Question One: When you think of your marketing, do you think of having your name everywhere so that people will buy more of what you offer, or do you think of how nice it will feel to have a more secure business? (NOTE: They may go hand in hand, but the result is what you are after … not the cause.)
Question Two: Do you think of the money you earn, or do you think about the great neighborhood you live in, or hope to live in one day? (NOTE: Money alone is not a good result … What you do with it is another story.)
Question Three: Do you think of the fancy possessions and the great fortune you will amass, or do you think of the feelings those things will give you? (NOTE: Wanting something without a reason is no better than not wanting it at all.)
Question Four: Do you think of the things you want, or do you think of why you want them and how it will give you opportunities that you do not have today? (NOTE: I suspect there is a hint of what you really want in this question.)
Question Five: Do you really think you have a good idea of why people do business with you, or do you project your own opinions onto them in hopes it will work? (NOTE: If there is some doubt, you may want to consider what happens if you are wrong.)
There will be two categories of answers here, and one creates success, while the other will leave you disappointed. One is visionary, addresses emotions, and overcomes fears. The other will keep you where you are, with what you’ve got. It may shock you to find that you often use logic to override your own good decisions because of fear. The way logic and emotion relate in your life will have a lot to do with success or failure in how you see your business and it is reflected in your marketing.
I see it all the time that scared people do not make successful decisions in their business and in their marketing. On the other side, I find that the people with balls the size of Volkswagens and who can overcome their fear are taking success to a whole new plane. This is reflected in USA, where there was a 16 percent increase in the number of millionaires in 2009 (yes, during recession) and a 17 percent growth in households with a net worth of $5 million or more. This came following a major decline in 2008, and is a high-level look at how recession separated the fearful from the courageous.
In sales and marketing, the topic of emotion vs. logic has often been referred to as selling the sizzle and not the steak. The steak is an object. The steak represents the simple logic that people must eat to stay alive. The sizzle is an exciting representation of how that steak smells, tastes, and how satisfying it will be to sink your teeth in and enjoy.
If you want steak and the logic it represents, you are seeking the wrong thing. If you find that you want sizzle, and the things that come along with that steak, you are on a lot better path to getting things right, and getting what you want.
The list of questions and analogies can go on forever. Whatever your answers, I can tell you that success in marketing is strongly based in emotion and not logic. People do not choose their careers with an emphasis on logic, and when they do, they often end up making a career change when they realize it does not make them happy. People do not make purchasing decisions based solely on logic, either. They try very hard, but if there is an awkward feeling along with the purchase, they are gone and not coming back.
Logic Fails in Motivating a Market … Yes, Your Market!
Logic can help people to be creative with overcoming their own fears of buying what you offer, but the logic alone is only a tool. Logic is a tool to help people make good decisions, but it actually ranks pretty low in decision making when compared to emotions … namely fear.
Do you remember the last time you went to buy a car? This is something that drives fear through the roof for a lot of people. Cars cost a lot of money, and something has to help you overcome the fear of loss. You replace the fear of loss with the huge gains you receive by driving that new car. You replace the fear of loss with the fear of not getting what you want.
You may try to use the logic that you “need” a new car, or that it will “save” you money by not breaking down as often. That is bologna and we all know it. You want that car, and the sooner you overcome the fear of all that money you lose, the sooner you can sport around in that nice smelling head-turning new car. Won’t it feel good to show it to all of your friends and family? It will be so nice that everything works just right and it is nice and clean. Wow … This new car will be great!
Just believe me for a moment when I say that emotion is what drives these decisions. Sure, you may like to deny it, but go look at your car while you think about this. Just don’t get too emotional or you may end up visiting a car salesman today!
A Drive Down Logic Street
As I drove down my street on the way home from visiting a friend this weekend, I saw a lot of interesting answers all around me. I was thinking, as I often do, about my work in the field of marketing. I thought of all those lovely homes, nice cars, and best-dressed people. I thought of what motivates them. I thought of what it means to them that they drive this or that, that their postal code is this or that, how they got there, and how emotion is what made it all possible. Emotion is what drove their decisions, and emotion is what drove the decisions of the people who helped them get there.
I arrived home and looked at my blog’s visitor statistics. It shows me that many people search the Internet seeking logic to make decisions. They search (and find me) for things like SEO hourly rates, rates for web developers, and a squillion other terms that reflect fears. This reminded me how many people get the questions all wrong. Let me put it to you this way: You cannot get the right answers if the questions are wrong!
These readers in my statistics logs are not really looking for success, but rather seeking something logical to magically tell them how to achieve success. It reminded me that the majority of people get this totally backward by trying to find logical ways to get over their fear. After all, the logic may tell them that less money involved will mean less risk. This is their fear speaking to them, and they miss the elephants walking by while they are looking at all the ants around them. Their fears are telling them to seek something that completely diverts them from what will actually give them the success they want. This is a common fear mechanism that kicks in and keeps them from seeking the scary truth of what will bring them success.
Seeking what seems safe should be what really scares people. Most people want safety, which means that most people are doing the same things. This leaves little room for anything spectacular … just average. Average does not make it very far in a competitive market.
The reality is that overcoming fear of loss by replacing it with another fear such as “what if I get this wrong”, is what will deliver you that sizzling steak. You can probably find instances of this in your own life, but I can provide logic to support this if it alleviates some fear for you.
Begging for Logic in Marketing
People come to me every day hoping to find the perfect logic that will help them to make good decisions. I often point out logic in my work, and I can quantify everything from A to Z. Read my blog for about an hour or so and you will have enough logic about marketing to last you a century. Marketing is a very mathematical and logic-oriented field, but that logic and math is only a tool. I am an uncanny good marketing guy with a lot of facts and figures to prove it. My clients want that logic to help them overcome their fears. The truth of the matter is that what they really want is the sizzle, but they are still hung up on the fears that hold them back.
Proof of Emotion in Marketing
In a recent article titled “Polarize Your Audience and Stop Making Everybody Happy“, I explained that a word I made up went kind of crazy online. The word had ZERO representation in a Google search on February 23rd. Today, just a few weeks later, the word “dubeshag” returns nearly 14,000 results (click it if you need some logical proof).
This did not happen because of logic. It happened because of emotion. I wrote something funny and people became attached to it in some small way. They passed it around, they told others, and they linked to the article.
Here is a little more proof of emotion in marketing. In the photo you see above, there is about a half million dollars worth of toys. I purchased every last one of these vehicles (and more) within about one year, but I never bought one with logic in mind. I wanted the sizzle! The same is true of the clients who afforded me the ability to buy them. They wanted the sizzle, too! Fortunately for them, and me, they discovered their real motivations and overcame their fears enough to pick up the phone and call me (at toll free *REDACTED DUE TO AGING WEBSITE*).
The question it begs is this: What fears will stand between you and the sizzle you want?
Creative Marketing Pulls NosesThere is a lot of math and science in marketing, but just how important is creativity in marketing? Regardless what you may believe, creativity still holds much emphasis in successful marketing. If you look around the huge marketing arena of the Internet, you can see what I mean, illustrated in a squillion different ways.
You will see companies who believe that simply being listed at the top of a search engine result is all that matters. It matters, a lot, but without giving people something to rave about once they find you, and converting them into customers, fans, or something other than a ten second click, it is worthless.
If you doubt me, just question why you have heard of Nike, and not that other shoe and athletic apparel company who tried so hard to make you a customer. If you think it just comes down to massive amounts of money to spend, you surely forgot that Microsoft started in a garage. The founders knew what it meant to be creative, and they made that creativity clear in their market outreach. This can mean consumer marketing as well as marketing to investors, so make no mistake on that.
Marketing creativity is what makes things popular, and takes ideas to the next level. An example is the way Roche Applied Science, a company dealing in genome sequencing made something so geeky and scientific as apoptosis a fun topic. They knew who their market was, and reached them with their massively successful “Cell Death Tour” marketing campaign.
Marketing creativity is also what Matt Harding did for Stride Gum when he produced a video with 27,267,455 views and counting. It was creative enough that millions of people passed it along to their friends.
The list of examples is long, but I will try to keep this short by explaining that creative marketing often makes the difference between a ten second click and a massively successful market reach.
Creative Marketing Drags You by the Nose
You can try to ignore it, but what drags you by the nose to embrace a brand is the work of the creative marketer. Some may say that their market is more logic-based and that people are just looking at the numbers. Even if that is the case, they should really be looking at the explosion of numbers that happens with creative marketing that is perfectly crafted to reach the target.
Sure, marketing is a numbers game, and with enough numbers, anything can be a success. While many Internet marketers fight to be more visible, and with high-traffic to Websites being rewarded with unrealistic hopes, creative marketing is often neglected. I sometimes think that this is one of the top reasons so many people are getting the shaft from Internet marketers who make big promises about traffic, while having little idea what actually motivates a market.
Creative Marketing Does Not Just Mean Cute
When I say creative marketing, I do not just mean delivering a creative message, but also how to reach the right audience, and not just any audience. Reaching a lot of people is great. It allows the opportunity for people to share the message with the audience you seek. However, it also leaves a lot of chances that your marketing wheels are left spinning and stuck in the mud.
A Creative Marketing Proposal
As I was preparing a marketing proposal just yesterday, I was thinking about how to provide the best reach into the client’s target market. I had discussed the client’s marketing objectives enough to create a nine page well considered proposal. It dealt with many areas of math, geography, and demographics, but there was something more. While I was proofreading the proposal, I got to thinking about what makes marketers different. What is that key element that sets the great apart from the good in marketing? When I reached the portion of my marketing proposal dealing with cost where it explained that we do not breed elves, it struck me. Creative thinking is one area that truly sets marketers apart more than any other. I already knew this, but the tricky part is in expressing it.
Here is a portion of the marketing proposal, but I offer you this preface: Call me crazy if you like, but I am not a salesman. I give the facts, and I try to deliver it in a unique way. I will also add, as you may find here, that I do not seek everybody willing to drop a few dollars and dip their toe into the marketing pool to test the water. There are sharks in there, and I never want to see a client’s leg bit off by dipping their toe in. I want that diamond client that I was able to carefully carve out of the rough and polish with care. I want the one who is not afraid to be successful. I want the one who understands marketing creativity and the huge value it offers. When the client “gets it” I am ready to get to work. When they just want to follow the flock of sheep off the edge of the cliff, they call somebody else.
INVESTMENT IN YOUR BUSINESS
We see it all too often that price is the concern rather than wise investment in a company’s success. Our job is to increase the bottom line of your company. We don’t chase unicorns or offer elf breeding. Our work is based on real data, using real science that really works. This is not myth, and the return you receive will reflect the investment you make. In order to create massive success, you simply cannot do it with minimal investment, or with marginal marketing providers, as you have already witnessed.
In order to achieve both short-term and long-term results for your brand, we seek an initial budget of $25,000 with ongoing services to be recommended only following 30 day, 60 day, and 90 day benchmarking. We will not come back and ask for more money without a very good reason, and if we do, it is best that you spend it.
This initial budget will allow us to focus on the quality and quantity of your reach, and the creativity to achieve high conversion of your prospects into active customers and money in your pocket. It also provides the opportunity for proper benchmarking in order to make determinations of a performance-based opportunity between our companies.
The question of high quality and sustainable marketing should not include any questions of whether it is worth it. We will be pleased to provide enough quantitative data to show the value. The only question we allow room for is whether our clients care about their business enough to make a wise investment in its future.
Are you reaching your market with a voice of authority or are you at the mercy of a market that is not what you hoped for?
I find that many companies fail to bring a sense of authority to their marketing. It is time to improve that right now. Let us consider where marketing authority comes from, and why so many businesses are lacking it.
This world is made up of people … flawed people … every last one of them. Businesses are made up of one or more of these flawed people, so can you really expect perfection to come from that? Of course not, and those flaws often come through in the same ways in business as they do in the flawed people’s personal psychology. This makes perfect sense, right?
Lack of authority is a weakness for many people and it comes with insecurity, which often comes from lack of proper information. Fear is a strong emotion, and one that can wreck your hopes of bringing authority to your marketing. With all of the right facts and figures to draw from, it starts to look like science, and that makes it harder to deny. It also makes it much easier to have confidence and to market with authority!
How do we begin to repair that lack of authority and reach your market with confidence? I want to offer you some ideas.
Define Your Authority
If you are marketing pizza, and people tell you it is the best pizza, they offer you authority. Take it and use it! Stop being afraid. If enough people say that your pizza is the best in town, all of the sudden, guess what … it is! Testimony is a hugely important factor in court trials … even the court trials that get people hanged by the neck until dead. Shouldn’t your customers’ testimony be enough to give you authority, too?
Sales Volume Does Not Equal Authority
It is really easy for companies (flawed people) to perceive their authority to be diminished when sales are slumping. It begins a downward spiral. I will stick with pizza for this example. If you are marketing pizza and a Pizza Hut or other chain moves in and captures a piece of your market, does that mean your pizza is not still as good as it was? Sometimes this is the case, but as an after-effect, and not as the cause.
If you have good pizza to market, be sure to market it with the same authority that it deserves, and not based on the mood you awakened to on a given day. It is really easy to get this wrong, but a common and very inappropriate response to the marketplace. Remember that only because Pizza Hut sells a lot more pizza than you do it does not mean they take authority away from your brand.
Uphold your Authority
If you convey authority, there is an inherent responsibility to uphold that authority. I believe it is easy for people to forget all of the things that give them authority in their marketplace. This is especially true when their authority is questioned. Tragically, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when it is questioned from the inside.
You can see this all around you, if you look for it. Just consider how many companies you can find that beg for business instead of taking the time and effort to become an authority, and project that authority in their marketing.
I see this problem more often in smaller companies, but weak efforts and asking to be right are problems of companies in all sizes. It seems that it often comes with an uncertainty of how others perceive a business, rather than having a rock solid position that the company is better than the competition, and knowing why.
Are You an Authority?
Maybe you are already an authority in your field but you just don’t know why, or how to prove it. If you are not an authority, maybe it is your time to get there. The odds are pretty good that you are an authority at something. Come on … there has to be something. Start with that “something” and grow it! Lastly, don’t neglect to push your marketing “Go” button!
This is perhaps my simplest blog post ever! It came to me that there only two really important questions about marketing your business, online or otherwise. Sure, there are other questions to ask, but these are the two that matter above all others.
1.) Do you want more targeted leads for your business?
This is a really simple one for most people in business. If the answer is no, you clearly have no business here on this blog. If the answer is yes, we should be talking!
2.) Is it too late because you neglected it too long?
This is the single most punishing question to answer, but it is the most true and realistic reason people make bad decisions in their business. If you say that you cannot afford to market your business, you should really think again. The truth is that you cannot afford to neglect the things that pay you. Marketing should never be a cost to you, because it is what pays you. Without it, you are dead in the water. The better question should really be whether you can afford to not expand your marketing. Here is a simple reminder:
“The man who stops advertising to save money is like the
man who stops the clock to save time.” –Thomas Jefferson
Simple Enough?
I tried to make this my simplest blog post ever. If you think too far beyond these two questions, you may be missing the big picture. Once you have answered these two simple questions, there should be no reason to put it off for another moment.
I would like your input, so please give your comments here on the blog and also feel free to reach me by telephone (direct line *REDACTED DUE TO AGING WEBSITE*) or on Skype (username murnahan).
