Get Results: Quit investing sense of self in beliefs
Beliefs….
Drive your actions,
Your choices,
What you do,
What you don’t do,
What interests you,
And what doesn’t,
What you enjoy,
What annoys you,
What you’ll do,
What you won’t,
What turns you on,
What turns you off,
What you say and how you say it,
They choose your friends,
Where you live,
What you do for a living,
If you drive or not,
Where you holiday,
If you holiday,
What you buy,
What you throw away,
They are your focus,
Your filter,
They colour your world,
They make you liberal or conservative,
Leave or remain,
Kind or mean,
Social or reclusive,
They make you fat or thin,
Successful or not,
They determine if you’ll give up or soldier on,
They are your path to freedom or your prison.
So what are beliefs?
They are rigid thought forms invested with sense of self. Formed from assumptions, inferences and the testimony of other people. They are a consequence of our social conditioning. Our thoughts are largely given to us by others.
What they are not, is fact or truth. They can be changed, reformed, manipulated to serve you better. They can and are manipulate by skilled persuaders to get you to do things for them, so be warned, be vigilant. Bring awareness to your beliefs, if they are hiding from scrutiny, observe your behaviours and emotions and ask why? What belief is driving this?
Get Results: beliefs share your worldGet Results: Quit investing sense of self in beliefsGet Results: beliefs become your destinyGet Results: what customer thinks is what mattersGet Results: don’t argue with someone who believes their own liesGet Results: use thought don’t be use by itGet Results: opinions are the greatest deception of manGet Results: fewer facts stronger opinionsGet Results: don’t argue with someone who believes their own liesGet Results: change the way you look at thingsGet Results: seek the truthGet Results: Love and do what you willGet Results: Overthinking is the biggest cause of unhappinessGet Results: fear stands forGet Results: open to wonderGet Results: don’t be a prisoner of your pastGet Results: beliefs are liesGet Results: bother each other with opinionsGet Results: spend too much time in your headGet Results:at peace in the presentGet Results: change perspectiveGet Results: Truth is where you areGet Results: Only PresentGet Results: Never ASSUMEGet Results: Eckhart Tolle quotesGet Results: PerspectiveGet Results: Successful present momentGet Results: Self AwarenessGet Results: Perspective
Get Results: Essential elements in brand development
When it comes to building a brand, there are many considerations, but there are 3 that I would suggest should be at the forefront of your brand building activities.
Differentiated positioning
Differentiated positioning involves your branding standing apart from the competition.
Your brand should represent unique meaning from the point of view of customers.
Think about some of your favourite brands, what simple meaning do they represent to you? Volvo represents safety to me, Apple represents innovation.
Positioning is also about where you position your brand in the marketing, are you a specialist, a generalist, are you a premium brand or a value driven brand?
No two brands can successfully hold the same market position, the first in that space will usually be the winner.
Look to disrupt and challenge the status quo, by shaking things up and approaching the market from a unique and refreshing direction. Think about how Netflix have changed the landscape of the video rental business into the streaming services we now see. What would look different in your space?
Play to your brands unique qualities and strengths. What has your brand got to offer that will allow you to stand apart from the competition?
Provide value to customers
The fundamental requirement of any brand is for it to provide value to its customers.
If there is no benefit for the customer in interacting with your brand, why are they going to bother? They just aren’t going to, life is too short to waste time on brands that don’t benefit anyone.
Provide a valuable solution that addresses customers wants and needs.
Make sure your solution fits your brands strengths, talents and skill-set.
Try to ensure your brand is focused on a specific part of the market. It’s often better to focus narrow and deep, rather than shallow and wide in terms of market coverage. Leave the mass market to the big boys who have a big enough budget to reach them.
Brands should attempt to connect emotionally with customers, because emotions and not reasoning or logic, are what connect people to people and people to brands.
To matter to customers your brand has to provide value on a regular basis, so that if you go away, they will miss you.
What do customers want or need that your brand can provide a valuable solution for?
Effective communication; perception control
Value offering and differentiation are no good if you aren’t able to communicate them effectively to customers or prospective customers.
Brand building orientated marketing is required to tell your story to customers so that they get what you’re brand is about. Speak to your target customers in a language only they will understand. It’s okay if your communication goes over the heads of non-targeted people.
Be inspiring to customers, provide them with hope; show them that whatever they are wanting to achieve, can be done, and they can do it with your help.
If possible connect to a bigger cause – be part of it, together. Play to customers aspirations. Romanticise a calling – “I’m a photographer” changes to “I help celebrate family – happy families make for happy communities.”
Ask yourself “What does the market think of us? Is this as intended?” If there is a disconnect between the two, revise your brand communications.
Get Results: branding is the art of differentiation
Branding is about owning a word in the mind of the customer.
Having a simple to understand and remember position, separate and distinct from all other competition.
It’s not about saying something short, dumbing down or using sound bites. It’s about prioritising the core message which should be both simple and profound. Proverbs are the ideal in doing this, like “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you; a one sentence statement so profound that you could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.
You can build on top of schemas to leverage existing knowledge, like describing Speed as Die Hard on a bus, or being the test crash dummy of online marketing, as with Pat Flynn.
A good core message helps customers understand and remember your brand, while also helping employees decision making. As with Southwest Airlines’s core message being THE low fair airline, customers know what southwest are all about, while employees know what intent should drive their decision-making when it comes to a choice of say, putting extra filling in the sandwiches or not.
Commander intent is used in much the same way by the Army, a simple, plainly-worded statement that summarises every military order, to ensure everyone understands the underlying tactic to be accomplished.
Journalists would describe it as making sure you’re not burying the lead, but instead putting it front and centre of communication, as if you might be cut off at any time.
Doing this prevents decision paralysis caused by overload, and uncertainty. It’s harder to remember 3 things than it is one. One clear message is easier to communicate, to get across and strengthen.
Use this core message as the centerpiece of your marketing, but branding is also about driving it into the customer experience at every touch point. This means making it part of your value promise and then delivering it, consistently over and over. If you don’t deliver on your promise, your message will be undermined and diluted.
Your Core message doesn’t have to have all the information built it. Treat it like breadcrumbs. The low cost airline, doesn’t advocate saving money on airline maintenance and is not as accurate as “improving shareholder value” but is more usable and memorable, and guides employee decisions by knowing the commanders intent when making individual decisions.
As long as you know where you currently are, and where you want to go (your goal), you will be able to map out what is required to fill the gap between the two. Getting results means you have to have a plan of action to move you towards your goal.
Now many people think about this in simplistic terms. For example lets say you want to start a business online and you come up with the following plan of action;
Simple isn’t it, this is a outline list of tasks that need to be done for you to get a business up and running online.
However if you think this is all you have to do and the world will be knocking down your door, you’re very much mistaken.
Each step is somewhat more complex than I’ve shown above because it’s not just about what you do, it’s about how your audience responds. If your website isn’t pressing the right buttons for visitors they are not going to take the action you want them to and buy from you.
So you may have to try different marketing channels, different messages, different media and different offers to see what works for you. Complexity comes from things you can’t directly control or predict. There is often no one right way of doing things, and what works for one business might not for another.
Sure the vast majority of people are looking to improve their situation in some way, they are looking for growth in economic wealth, for social wealth for physical and psychological wealth. If your solution nudges them in that direction, you’re going to have a better chance than you would otherwise.
But you’ve got to communicate this benefit to your audience through your marketing messages. What you think will resonate with them, might not, so you have to test ideas, tweak, improve and test again. You also need to understand their pain points, what is going to motivate them to take action and so on. Below is table with some of this complexity factored into it.
Are they willing to pay for a solution I can provide?
Is it worth doing from my POV?
Where can I find prospects to find this information?
What is the business model?
Where will the solution be available (online or bricks and mortar)?
Set up website
Hosting
Domain name
Marketing business
Drive traffic from..
Social media channels
Adverts
Offline channels
Target prospects wherever they are
Deliver the right message at right time to the right person
Allow prospects to know, like and trust you
Encourage goodwill by providing value to prospects who aren’t ready to buy just yet
Engage emotionally through branding
Consider marketing channel choices
Test channels/ideas/media/messages
Build social proof/signals
What channels are prospects spending attention on?
How can I get their attention?
How can I engage with them there?
What type of messages will help me get known, liked and trusted?
E-commerce to take payment
You must work to improve your results through continually improving your plan of action and improving your problem solving capabilities.
It’s vitally important you factor complexity into your plan of action, it’s the one thing that is going to hold things up and stand in the way of you getting results.
This is a system focused on KNOWLEDGE and PRODUCTIVITY, it doesn’t take into account any MOTIVATIONAL elements that might be holding you back from taking the action YOU need to be taking. If you fear failure or disappointment or loss, if you fail to take responsibility, if you lack resourcefulness or self awareness, these are all motivational problem areas that need to be addressed.
Motivation is a subject in its own right and there are lots of articles throughout the site dedicated to it. Check them out here.
You’ve probably heard the term “content is king” countless times, and it’s ever more important in today’s internet-centric business environment.
The aim of content creation should be to allow your business to stand out from competitors, and help prospective customers get to know, like and trust you, so that they will, in time, consider doing business with you.
In other words content should be used to build your brand!
If you try to transact your prospects every time they interact with your brand, you will find you have to compete with all your competitors doing the same thing, and that can get expensive in terms of advertising costs.
Using advertising to first grab attention, then trying to convert prospects via a landing page or over the telephone is a big ask, and prospective customers are very guarded against slick sales messages. They will only consider you if you make the right first impression and are able to build trust quickly.
Consider an alternative solution, which is a longer term strategy but can prepare the ground by building trust and goodwill with people that are not quite ready to buy just yet, but who might be in the next 30, 60 or 90 days. This is called content creation.
When it comes to creating content you should be looking to give visitors something for nothing, to provide value to them without asking for something in return. You should try to help your prospective customers get to know more about your brand, to get to like how you do business and allow them to build up trust in you.
So, create content that prospects want from the page they arrive at. Make sure your adverts or links from adverts or social media posts are clear, and informative and accurately reflect what you’ve promised them. Don’t promise something that you fail to follow through on, just to get them onto your website. That is the surest way to ruin your reputation and destroy trust.
Once they are on your page you need to understand who the prospective customer is, what is their desire? What solution are they seeking? What possible questions are they asking and wanting answered?
To provide value for them, you need to answer these questions effectively, thoroughly and as uniquely as possible. Don’t just regurgitate the same old information, that everyone else is doing. Instead do it in your own voice.
Some content ideas…
1. To build awareness on social media use ENGAGEMENT POSTS – any format, to get comments or a reaction (clicks) – this pushes up in news feed and can include questions, funny memes, photos with a question
2. To grow authority – Encourage testimonials, case studies, speaking engagements, you in action doing what you’re trying to sell – honoured rather than boastful
3. To get clients – leads (email list sign up or phone) and clients attraction. Questions, graphics, videos, gifs
To provide value;
Be relevant – You must have content that interests your prospective customer, otherwise why would they be interested in what you have to say.
Be contextual – formatted for each channel specifically. Try to reformat your content to suit where you want to be found. Vertical video works better on Facebook than it does on Youtube.
Facilitate access,
Be transparent – builds trust,
Be authentic – be true to yourself,
Inspire interaction – build community,
Be current – so that you resonate with your audience today,
Aim for connection – It’s better to be narrow and deep than wide and shallow- 100 loyal fans better than 10,000 none engaged followers.
Content should be made up of:
Opinion,
Expertise,
Information,
Insight,
Access,
Passion.
Get Results: content is emotional intellectual
There are only 3 types of content when you boil it down.
Escapism and entertainment
Escapism – being removed from our mundane real life situation for a short time, to forget.
humorous,
clever,
insightful,
interesting (aligned with audiences interests),
create a knowledge gap and fills it,
curiosity,
unexpectedness,
surprise,
inspirational,
emotional,
highlights a threat,
challenge plot, creative plot, connection plot.
Information and utility
Providing information that will help prospects in some way to improve their understanding, increase their knowledge or make life easier or better in some way.
Core information your customers need to know about your products and company before they’ll include you in their consideration set.
Product information,
Customer FAQ’s,
How – to’s,
Styling,
Customer ratings and review.
Ancillary content – This is the supporting and additional content. Think of ancillary content like the bonus tracks on a DVD.
Take prospects behind-the-scenes,
Let prospects get personal with your employees,
Encourage customers to share photographs using your product.
Re-imagined content – Plan different versions of your content to ensure it’s contextually relevant to each specific platform. Again, this is best planned in advance to maximize resources and include it in your content creation contracts.
Provide Commentary – This is the related content and comments that your employees, customers and fans create in coordination or as a result of your core content.
Commentary works best when your audience creates it out their desire to share with their circle of friends and social connections such as Facebook and Instagram posts.
Internal content curation – This is where you maximize the value of your own previously published content by using it in the creation of new content and the re-promotion of old content, giving it new life. It has one or more of the following attributes.
Make content contextually relevance,
Extend content into a new format.
Some additional ideas..
Target a new audience for old content,
Provide access to a location, a person, an institution,
Curation of other peoples content,
Provide insight,
Chart your own progress in some relevant endeavor,
Your journey to build your business – moving your business online,
Your progress in a new job,
Learning a new skill,
Put sales techniques into practice,
Sell something different every day testing your sales skills.
Current niche trends,
Current trends/techniques,
Software trends if relevant,
Explore the topic more freely and in-depth,
Cover local issues,
Real estate – local amenities, history of area – reasons why it’s good living here,
Local relevant events.
Social
Connect people and community, to share ideas and stories.
Coming up with content ideas
Here are the 33 prompts that you can use to write just about ANYTHING… feel free to copy and paste them into notepad so you can use them every day when you sit down to write content.
Ask a question,
Reference current events,
Create your own terms,
Reveal news (new/introducing),
Tell the reader to do something,
Give stats,
Make a comparison,
Promise useful information,
Direct offer,
Tell a (quick) story,
Make a recommendation,
State benefits,
Use a testimonial,
Arouse curiosity,
Promise to reveal a secret,
Be ultra-specific,
Target section of your audience,
Time-based headline,
Stress urgency,
Scarcity of savings/value,
Deliver good news,
Challenge the reader,
Highlight your guarantee,
State the price (as benefit),
Set up (seemingly),
Contradiction,
Address reader objection/concern,
“As crazy as it sounds”,
Take them to the promised land,
Demonstrate ROI,
Reason why headline,
Stress cost saving and value,
List / answer questions,
State / deliver on reader’s goals,
Highlight cost of mistakes.
Use this website for content ideas http://answerthepublic.com/ enter a keyword and it will suggest content ideas
Types of content
List pages,
Check lists,
Resource lists,
Lists of lists,
News lists,
Demonstration,
Series,
Infographics,
How-to guides,
Researched statistics,
Timelines,
Did you know,
Flow charts,
Whitepapers,
Research,
Trends,
Topical guides,
Beginner overviews,
Downloadable guides,
Live Blogging,
Event coverage,
Covering fast changing situations,
Live Q&A’s,
Round ups,
News round-ups,
From around the web,
Summing up events,
Q&A’s,
Q&A session,
Q&A for interviews,
Q&A FAQ,
Informal Q&A,
Opinion pieces,
Controversial posts,
High level breakdown,
Forecasting trends,
Deep dive,
New angle,
Interviews,
Industry leaders,
Innovative companies,
Topical expert,
How to’s,
Content curation,
Case studies,
Charts/graphs,
Ebooks,
Email Newsletters/Autoresponders,
Cartoons/illustrations,
Book Summaries,
Tool Reviews,
Giveaways,
FAQ’s,
Webinar,
Guides,
Dictionary,
“Day in the life of” post,
Interview,
Lists,
Mind Maps,
Meme,
Online Game,
Helpful Application/tool,
Opinion Post,
White Papers,
Vlog,
Videos – screencasts, talking heads, illustrations, graphics, film roll,
Podcasts,
Templates,
Surveys,
Slideshares,
Resources,
Quotes,
Polls,
Podcasts,
Pinboards,
Photo Collage,
Original Research,
Press releases,
Photos,
Predictions,
User Generated Content,
Company news,
Announcements,
Timelines,
Meme – Meme Generator and Quick Meme,
Even more..
Social equity – introductions, access to contacts (interview, insight) – Leverage status (fame), membership (masons), contacts, relationships.
Guides – A guide is a detailed and fairly long piece of content. Think of it as an epic blog post. It goes beyond the length, style, and approach of an ordinary blog post.
Book reviews – A book review is a simple discussion of a book plus your take on it. You recommend good ones, critique not-so-good ones, and share the value that you glean from them. Book reviews are great because they help to position you as a thought leader.
Opinion post (rant) – This style of post is substantially different from your typical blog post, mostly due to its tone. You may be used to publishing a careful and researched discussion of a topic. The rant or opinion, by contrast, may be stronger and more expressive. The more vociferous your position, the more it’s going to get read and shared.
Product reviews – Like the book review, a product review can help establish authority and leadership in your industry. Every industry has its unique array of products, software, and services. When you engage key developers, manufacturers, or service providers, you gain recognition and respect. All you need to do is share your experience with the product and provide your recommendation.
How to.. The how-to is one of the most popular types of content, especially in my niche. On my blog, I write a lot of how-to guides. How-to articles have awesome long tail search potential due to these popular long tail query introductions: “How to…” and “How do I…?”
Lists – Lists have endless appeal. We’re wired to love them. Chance are you’re going to see or read an article today that involves some sort of a list — “5 Security Breaches You Need to Know about,” “17 Ways to Rank Higher in Google in One Month.” Hey, you’re already reading an article with the title “15 Types.”
Link pages – link page is simply a post that provides links to great resources around the web. The great thing about link posts is that they spread link love to other sites, provide your own site with authoritative SEO signals, and assert your thought leadership within your field.
Ebook – An ebook is long content packaged in a different format, usually as a PDF. Ebooks are often a downloadable product, available for free in exchange for joining a mailing list. Producing an ebook helps to strengthen your authority within a field, and it makes for a powerful method of sharing your knowledge with others.
Case study – A case study explains what your product or service is and how it helped a client. The case study basically says, “here’s what we do, how we do it, and the results we get.”
Podcast – Podcasts had their phase of popularity, and they’re still a great form of content. Plus, they’re not hard to create. Many people listen to podcasts during their commute or exercise. You have a chance to spread your message farther and better using this format than a lot of other formats.
Interview – Every field has its leaders. When you’re able to interview a leader, you can garner a lot of respect from others in the field, not to mention huge amounts of traffic. Interviews are unique. No one else has this information — only you.
Research and original data – Most of us work in data-intensive fields, where numbers and metrics hold a lot of value. Sharing your findings with others is a powerful way to drive traffic, build trust, and establish your authority. When you do the research, which is hard work, people respect that. What’s more, people share it.
Contextualising,
Communicating,
Digesting info and regurgitating/repackaging and presenting it to your audience in a new package,
Content curation and Content aggregation, where you filter good quality content for your readers, this adds value for them and saves them having to troll through low quality content,
If you don’t have anything to say, DOCUMENT! – easier than having to create new content,
If you’re not an expert in your niche you can become a well informed commentator (share stories from niche – curate content made by others and add your own commentary).
Inspire,
Connect.
Look after your readers
Always reply to comments or messages,
Say thanks,
Use names and tag people,
Share things – if you come across something you like share it,
Be an investigator – Google Alerts – gives you news about a chosen keyword(s),
Check out the results, go to a page and leave a comment as a nice gesture,
Make navigation around the site easy,
Decrease page load times,
Get rid of annoyances on site such as pop-ups and distracting ads,
Surprise audience – give something for free,
Include transcript with podcasts or video,
Use high quality audio and video,
Skip the sales pitch – the best sales pitch is no sales pitch at all,
Reply with a video,
Invite participation – reader challenge, ask for opinion, calls to action – get people involved,
Be honest,
Be passionate,
Get personal – infuse your personality and life to get deeper connection,
Provide unique content such as provide case studios, experiments, income reports etc
Proof read content before you post it,
Remember who you are and who your serving,
Always over deliver,
Write post which is potential vehicle for income. Good quality, unique, have affiliate links in sidebar so on every post and in text,
Create a visual representation of the information you are talking about to help you and your audience remember it,
Transformation – what’s the transformation you want your audience to go through. Another way of putting it is what’s the purpose of your article. What’s the goal,
Start with in this episode we are going to talk about x. by the end of this you will be able to Y using your Z,
Tell them what you’re going to tell them, Tell them, Tell them what you told them,
Reverse engineer the transformation. Work backwards. What supporting content do you need to include to achieve the transformation,
Write down all possible objections and include a reply to each of these in the supporting content,
Tell stories (more memorable) or Include case studies or Research and data. Always include the professors full name and qualifications include accurate data to the penny,
Subdivide the article so that it is easier to understand and follow. Subdivisions could be steps, tips,
Make the beginning and end memorable,
Ending should have a call to action, get audience involved, show how what you have talked about actually works, surprise audience in some way (must be relevant),
Beginning should have a video or high impact beginning,
Aim for Consistency,
Talk like a human being,
You shouldn’t be vanilla – take a point of view,
Don’t talk at your audience, talk with them. connection, interaction.
So as you can see there is a lot to consider with regards to your content. The best advice I can give is get stuff out there and see what works best for your audience.
Branding is a key function that will allow your business, product or service to stand out and mean more to the prospects you hope to turn into customers, as well as to your existing customers, so that they keep coming back to you, rather than the competition.
If you’re not a brand, you’re a commodity.
We love to use the acronym B.R.A.N.D. to remind us of the essential elements of a successful brand.
Bold
To stand out, above the competition, your brand has to be bold. Vanilla brands just aren’t going to cut through the noise from all your competitors messages.
Get off the fence and take a position. Have a strong message that resonates with your prospects and customers. It’s much easier to get into the customers mind if you have an emotional connection with them.
Relevant
To make an emotional connection with prospects and customers, you’ve got to be relevant. If you and your message isn’t relevant, you’ll be ignored and overlooked.
The human mind is conditioned to pay attention to things that mean something to it and filter out everything else. People go about their daily routines in a trance-like state, and grabbing attention is only possible if your message is relevant enough to pull your prospects out of that state and give your message some consideration.
Advantageous
People are always looking to improve their sense-of-self, via some type of perceived increase. Increase of knowledge, increase of valuable connections, increase of property, increase of standing in the community. At their core people act to seek pleasure and avoid pain, it is the driving force of the human race, and most other species.
So your brand should act to help them do this through your brand promises. Mercedes helps customers tell the world how successful they are and that’s the promise their customers are willing to buy into and pay for.
Your brand has to do the same to be successful.
Notable
Your brand needs to be worthy of attention by being as close to remarkable as possible. This will help you stand out and be remembered more easily. Marketing guru Seth Godin will tell you to “Make things better by making better things.”
However it’s not enough to just be remarkable, the key is to make sure you tell your story in such a way that your prospects and customers buy into it.
Different
Being different means positioning yourself uniquely within the market you operate in. Branding requires you to own a unique word or have a unique meaning in your customers mind.
To do this you have to position yourself away from competitors. No two brands can own the same word or meaning if they are going to be successful brands. Think about how you position Mercedes and Ford within the automotive market, or how you position Tesco from Aldi from Asda within the supermarket space. They all occupy unique brand positions.
Different isn’t a nice-to-have element in branding, it’s arguably the most important one.
Successful branding is about controlling the perception of your business/ brand in the mind of prospects and customers alike. It’s made up of …
Impression
The impression people have of your business is going to heavily influence whether they are going to consider buying from you or not.
Being perceived as credible, likable and trustworthy, is particularly important with regards to people who have had little or no previous experience of your business/ brand.
Perception is a dance between impression and reputation. As people get to know more about your brand/ business, reputation becomes more influential, but even then, people’s impressions can still be altered through ongoing interactions. In the same way you can go off people, you can certainly go off brands and businesses depending on new information. There is no such things unconditional love, with regards to branding. However people tend to be more forgiving of bad experiences, or bad publicity if they have previously built up positive history with you.
Reputation
Your reputation is about what people say about you when you’re not there.
Always be looking to strengthen your reputation through all customer touch points for new and returning prospects, and customers. Reputation is spread through word of mouth and technology that performs in the same way as word of mouth. If you have a bad reputation, you need to take a serious look at what is going wrong, having a strong brand with a bad reputation is the worst place possible to be.
Remember this point; If you’re not strengthening your brand, you’re weakening it, there is no middle ground here, so ensure you’re strengthening it at every opportunity.
Throughout the customer journey, there are a number of touch points they are exposed to your business/ brand in some way. You should look very carefully at each of these points and consider how they impact your reputation, and influence impressions of your business/ brand.
Some possible touch points might include..
Social media channels
What are you posting about?
What value are you adding to prospects and customers?
Are you constantly trying to sell or are you adding value in other ways? Consider Gary Vaynerchuk’s jab, jab, jab, right hook principle, otherwise known as build brand, build brand, build brand, push offer.
Are you’re communications giving the impression you want them to give, through the imagery, copy and other media?
Are they driving your brand promise home?
Search engine listings & website
If your customers are searching on search engines for the solutions that you provide, you must make sure you can be found there, either through SEO, or PPC.
What pages are you being found through?
Are people finding your page, but not clicking on your link? If not clicking on your link, why not? Are you not giving them a reason to click?
Are you communicating the right messages on those pages, once they click through?
Are these pages helping to build your brand, through the copy, images and other media?
Are you demonstrating enough social proof through reviews and testimonials, case studies and the likes.
Premises and signage
Is your premises and signage giving the right impression of your business/ brand?
Is it all ON BRAND?
Your people and value delivery
Your people include your Customer service reps, Receptionists, Employees, Leaders, and sales people. Your brand promise is not just something you just say, it’s something you live from and in. All beliefs and values, and the subsequent behaviours that come from them, should be aligned to drive you brand promise forward. Branding starts within your business and is then communicated out through what and how you do the things you do to bring value to the market.
Control OPINIONS
At the end of it all, you are trying to control the OPINIONS of your prospects and customers, and indeed, everyone else that comes across your business/ brand.
They have to KNOW, LIKE and TRUST your business/ brand.
To KNOW you
They can only know you, if they see you, so been visible. Share your story with them, let them see you in action with behind the scenes content or a 247 like backstory. Be as personable as possible, don’t hide behind a corporation persona, because people prefer to buy from people.
To LIKE you
Think about the people you like and why; generally people are attracted to people who are like them. People who they feel they are on the same side as, and have things in common with. We learn this through interaction, and sharing, so your business/ brand needs to do the same kinds of things, by sharing and caring.
To TRUST you
To build trust, you must be AUTHENTIC, TRANSPARENT, CONSISTENT and GENUINELY want to look out for best interests of your customers.
Without these, people will see through you and your intentions.
Summary
It’s vital you control the narrative and story around your business and brand. Make sure the reception of your message is as intended, during the transmission of it. Otherwise you might mistakenly misread what people think about your business /brand, so keep communication channels open both ways, to ensure you’ve got a good handle on the opinion of the people that matter; your prospects and customers.
Make sure your message is simple to understand and easy to remember, emotionally meaningful from the point of view of prospects and customers, and further strengthens your brand promise.
When it comes to earning a living, there are so many different options, but if you want to be really wealthy, as in having lots of spare dosh, what’s the best way to go about it? For a more in depth guide, check out our wealth guide, here.
We’re keeping the discussion limited to income options in this post, but our wealth guide talks about dealing with expenditure as well.
#1 LINEAR income
This is the option of providing value once, and getting paid once for it. It’s the route the majority of people go down, trading time for money, as in working for a salary, or a fee, if you’re a freelancer. This is considered the least expandable, because there is a limit to the number of hours you can work and the income you can make. Sure you can, if you’re say, a sports star earn incredible income from your work, but it’s still limited to some extent. Many sports stars earn extra income from merchandising or other deals that take advantage of their celebrity.
#2 PASSIVE income
Create or buy assets or provide value once, and get income from it over and over again. This could be achieved from buying stocks and shares, and getting dividend payments year after year, or royalties for say music or art that you own, or licencing of intellectual property that’s yours. If you’re thinking of charging for say a video course, you film it once, and get paid over and over again for it, if it’s considered valuable enough.
Some other examples of recurring income
Affiliate sales
Property income (rent) or profit made from buying and selling
Marketing activities that attract paying customers
Royalties from intellectual property (art, photos, ideas, writing, music)
Licencing fees (ideas, inventions, IP)
E-books sales
Book sales
Pension income
Stocks and shares income
online courses (videos, e-books and email automated)vert
Peer to peer lending
Rent out a room in your house (Airbnb style, or to a student, or lodger)
Lead generation website – supplying leads to local businesses
Online store selling products that can be drop shipped
Youtube videos that are popular and have advert placements on them
Pay Per Click adverts on website
Property renting out advertising space (car, building, fence)
#3 RECURRING income
Recurring income comes about by providing ongoing value or owning assets that you get regular payments for. This would include things like memberships or subscriptions for magazines or websites that you own, or from rent, if you’re a landlord.
#4 LEVERAGED income
Last but not least is leveraged income, which involves making income from other peoples resources, such as their money, time, effort, assets, skills, or popularity. You can do this if you own a business and employ people for instance, you get them to use their skills to make you money. You can also leverage other people’s resources via partnerships or joint ventures.
Other examples of leveraged income include
Owning a franchised business
Network marketing (avoid these)
Being a talent agent
Owning a freelancer service website where you earn a commission
So there you have it, I’ve tried to keep this post as short and concise as possible, hope you got some value out of it.
Get Results: marketing quotes battle of perceptions
A teacher stands in front of his class of business executives and holds up a lottery ticket. He says to the audience,
“This ticket was an unsuccessful match for numbers two weeks ago. It cost me £2 for it. Will anyone give me £2 for it?”
None of the class responds.
“I’d happily take the best offer you’re willing to give for it, anyone?” asks the teacher.
Again, none of the class responds.
“I’d happily take 20 pence for it, last chance!”
There is a nervous shifting in chairs as the audience look at one another confused, but again none of them responds with an offer for the ticket.
“Okay”, says the teacher. “Well, if I tell you this ticket didn’t win anything two weeks ago, because I only actually purchased it for the lottery this coming weekend. What would you give me for it now?”
There is a number of humorous exchanges between audience members before one of them shouts out “I’ll give you a £1 for it.”
The teacher asks “Any better offers?”
Another audience member shouts out “I’ll give you £2!”
“Okay!” says the teacher, “I think I’ll keep hold of it in that case, because this ticket wasn’t purchased for this weekend’s lottery, it was purchased for last weekend, and it was a winning ticket for the £30 prize!”
Now the audience members responded with some laughter and a realisation they have been fooled.
The teacher asks “Now what will you give me for this ticket?”
One of the audience says jokingly “I’ll give you £2 for it!”, but then offers £20
Another says “£25!”
The teacher hands the ticket to the person who has offered £25 and says “It’s yours”, the person gives him the £25 after checking that the ticket is a genuinely winning ticket, he realises it has in fact won the £100 prize, not the £30 as stated by the teacher.
The teacher asks, “So this person has got herself a £100 prize which has cost her just £25! How silly do the rest of you feel now lol?”
The audience agrees they have missed out on a great opportunity, and congratulate the woman who had got herself a great deal.
Now this story is used to illustrate the perception of value and how it can be manipulated.
When the class are led to believe the ticket was a failed attempt from a couple of weeks ago, it is valued at zero. None of the audience perceived any value in it at all, and why should they?
When the ticket is described as actually a ticket purchased for the upcoming lottery draw, audience members value it more, in fact £2 is offered for it, which is the face value of the ticket anyway. Why has the audience member offered this? Well because that is the market value for a ticket in an upcoming draw, and the person may think they have a chance to win something with it, as they would if they purchase the ticket themselves. In fact they were going to buy a ticket anyway for this weekend’s draw and think the opportunity that has presented itself may be a lucky omen.
When it is revealed the ticket is in fact a winning ticket, the offer goes up to £25, which still provides a surplus of £5 for the winning offer, which of course is still a good deal.
When the audience discovers the prize is actually £100, much of them feel quite envious of the winning bid, because they have missed out on an even better deal.
The ticket is the same ticket throughout this whole scenario, the only thing that has changed throughout, is the story the teacher is telling the audience, about the value of the ticket and the subsequent perception from the audience.
The value of the ticket isn’t wrapped up in the material it’s made of, after all it’s just made of paper! It’s not wrapped up in its cost, the cost of the ticket is the same in all the proposed situations.
The value of the ticket is perceived to be in its winning potential, in its reward value.
If I told you I could guarantee you £2 for every £1 you spent with me, would you not spend as much money as you could get your hands on, if you trusted me to deliver on that promise?
Of course you would!
That’s what marketing is all about, the promise of a reward that outweighs the cost of that exchange. The rewards don’t have to be just monetary gains either, psychological gains are often even more important. Having more money is only valuable because of what having more money means to you; more money equals more freedom, more choice, better or bigger possessions etc.
If you can genuinely provide more value than you take in return (in the way of money), and make sure the audience perceive that value, you’ll be a successful marketer.
But remember great power comes with great responsibility. Use your marketing powers for good, and keep your promises!
