Picture two groups of animals. The first group is a really big mob of sheep. There are lots of sheep, and they all look the same. The second group is much smaller, and contains only individual animals – one horse, one cat, one dog, one giraffe, one frog. About 95% of people and small businesses are [...]
Generally, before we make a purchase, especially an important purchase, we visit several websites to do our research. Imagine, for example, that you were thinking about joining a gym, so you decided to visit the websites of two local providers. Gym 1 has lots of educational blogs about health, fitness and exercise Gym 2 doesn’t have [...]
Do you remember Mel Gibson’s famous battlefield speech from Braveheart? When he’s trying to convince the sceptical Scottish soldiers to take on the might of the English, he doesn’t do so by presenting them with a dry list of facts. Instead, he uses powerful, emotional story-telling to do his marketing for him. “Fight, and you may [...]
Obviously, you’d make more sales if customers regarded your small business as a trusted authority figure. So how, then, do you turn your small business into a trusted authority figure? The answer is content marketing. That’s why I always tell business owners that they need to publish content every single day. But not just any content. [...]
Fun fact: pubs don’t sell alcohol. Huh? No, it’s true. Think about it: you can get that same alcohol at lower cost and greater convenience by visiting the supermarket. So why, then, do people go to the pub to buy the alcohol? It’s because they’re not going to the pub for the alcohol. They’re going for [...]
People are consuming your marketing without you realising it. Every time you publish something on social media, the number of people who consume that content is probably 10 times greater than the number of people who like and comment on it. In other words, for every one person who publicly identifies that they’ve consumed your content, [...]
Good on you if you want to take risks in your marketing. But don’t push things too far. For example, while humour can be a really effective marketing tactic, offensive humour will only upset your customers. Also, while it’s all very well to portray the glass as half-full rather than half-empty, you don’t want to falsely [...]
Want to hear a successful three-step formula you can use to improve your marketing? The formula is called Goal-Obstacle-Plan. Here’s how a travel agent might use the Goal-Obstacle-Plan formula when pitching to a client. Goal – “Mr Client, you want to enjoy a relaxing beach holiday.” Obstacle – “But you don’t know where and when to [...]
When you read about wars and battles throughout the ages, one important lesson keeps shining through. The key to victory is to do the thing your enemy least wants you to do. Now apply that idea to business and answer this question: what is the thing your rivals least want you to do? That would be [...]
“Strive to understand before being understood.” What a wonderful piece of life advice – and marketing advice. The reason a lot of small businesses put out ineffective marketing is because they try to get their customers to understand them – so they put the focus on the business not the customers. Instead, businesses should strive to [...]
