If you want to stand out from the crowd and consistently attract more clients through your doors, the four strategies shared in this week's Marketers Club podcast are a must. 

00:00:00:03 - 00:00:36:01
Paul: So Happy New Year everybody. Welcome to the year 2020. And of course not only the beginning of a new year but a new exciting decade. And what will this decade bring for you. Well I'm hoping it's going to bring breakthrough results. Great success. And a new opportunities for you to reach your true potential. And I'm here to help you do just that. Now in this episode I want to share with you four critical strategies that I think are going to help you build your framework for success not only in 2020 but in the years to come. But before we dive into that let's cue the intro

00:00:47:16 - 00:01:03:10
Warick: Welcome to the Marketers Club Podcast. The show all about helping you work smarter earn more and accelerate your success and now here's your host Paul McCarthy.

00:01:06:19 - 00:02:44:05
Paul: So welcome to the Markets Club Podcast I am your host Paul McCarthy and I'm here to help you market your talent so you can earn what you're worth and ultimately make more of a difference in the world. Welcome to Episode 20 and to a brand new year the year 2020. I thought that was a great synergy to have managed to land the 20th episode of the program at the beginning of 2020. It was of course completely by accident not by design but I thought it was pretty cool so I'm going to take a credit for that one but I hope that you've had a fantastic Christmas, New Year if you're listening to this program as we launch into the new year. Happy New Year to you. And of course if you're catching up on this later I hope that you did have a great start to 2020 of course. To all my Australian listeners of which there are many we have been having a terrible time here with bushfires raging across our country we've suffered the loss of life the loss of lots of properties we've lost half a billion animals in the process. It's been an incredibly challenging time for our country but at the same time it's been remarkably inspiring to see the generosity the spirit the courage of our men and women who get out and volunteer and fight these fires and just everyone pulling together to help each other to get through this really trying time. So most importantly I hope that you are safe and well and that if you have lost something that we can work together to help you rebuild that.

00:02:44:07 - 00:04:53:08
Paul: But this episode is really all about setting yourself up for success in 2020 and beyond. These are four elements strategies trends that I think are going to be increasingly important to your success as a business owner as a marketer to make sure that you have more success. This year I want to walk you through these four things that I think are going to be at play an increasingly bigger bigger part in your success moving forward. So let's dive into these four ideas for you to start working on as we move into this new year. Step one is going to be the idea that coming to understand that everyone is not your customer. Increasingly you know we are going to need to narrow our focus if we want to be successful from a marketing point of view. You know for many people marketing is kind of counterintuitive. If you ask most people if you said look if I try and tell more people about more things that I can do surely I would attract more business that way. But the reality is and increasingly it's the absolute opposite. That's going to get the results. So we might have to fight our intuitive sense of trying to tell everybody about all the things that we do and start to narrow the focus. You know as a musician you go into a recording studio and you start laying down tracks and ultimately you're working towards building an album your your body of work if you like. But at the end of the day when the album is done musicians don't come out of the studio and focus on promoting an album. They lift a single off the album and use that as the focus point. That's the thing that gets pushed out to everybody because we're trying to get one single to grab people's attention because we understand that if we can get them listening to one thing then we have a better chance of them wanting to buy the whole album and listening to the whole body of work and business is exactly the same and it's only gonna get more so as we move forward. So we need to develop what I call a single focus in 2020 we need to get really clear on the one message that we want to drive out to the world.

00:04:53:10 - 00:07:50:26
Paul: What's the thing that you want to showcase. What's the thing that's going to best position your expertise and then narrow the niche the better. As we move forward. So we made it really clear what is that thing that you want to be famous for. The thing that you really want people to know that you are the expert at. Now I remember some years ago that I was doing a one day marketing conference and I was talking about this sort of concept and the morning tea break. A woman came up to me and she introduced herself and she explained that she had started a business about six months ago as a life coach and that she was really struggling to get clients and while she was hearing what I was saying she wasn't really investing into it or agreeing with it because you said you know I'm struggling to get clients as a life coach so what I think I need to do is I need to also go back now and study to become a personal trainer and add personal training to the suite of services that I can offer. Now of course she is doing the absolute opposite of what I'm recommending she is adding another string to the bow trying to create more reasons for people to buy by adding more and more things and in the process simply diluting her own expertise and positioning confusing the marketplace. People won't know what she is. By adding another string and you know the rule or the law of line extension Ries and Trout talked about all these years ago in the 21 Immutable Laws of Marketing that we have to make sure that things are connected that they make sense. But we have to have a single focus. Kevin Kelly wrote about the fact that we don't need to attract everybody. He talked about the idea of the thousand true fans so we've got to realise that everyone is not our buyer. When you're a musician you realise that not everybody wants to listen to your style of music. You know we can be eclectic in our taste but that only stretches so far and remember the Blues Brothers movie where they said Yeah I will. We play both types of music here. Country and Western. So you know we have to be clear about the fact that people are going to have a taste thing that they're interested in and you are just trying to appeal to the group of people who want what it is that you specialise in doing. And by trying to appeal to everybody. We ultimately will appeal to no one. So a big step in 2020 and beyond is going to be getting really clear that everyone is not your customer. So who is your ideal customer and really doing the work to figure out who that customer is because that's gonna be the heart of your decision making moving forward and is going to be critical to your success. So narrowing your focus down and saying okay, so who do I really want to work with. Who do I really want to attract. Who's gonna be interested in what it is that we can do for them. And if you narrow that focus you're gonna enjoy a lot more success moving forward in this year.

00:07:50:28 - 00:09:48:24
Paul: Strategy number two is before you spend money on marketing you've got to earn people's attention. Now what I mean is you know social media and the advent of social media has seen a massive growth in direct response marketing. It is the biggest marketing platform. The amount of money spent and the volume of advertising done on social media swamps any other medium out there. So while people are pumping lots of money into promoting and advertising on those channels it's worth remembering that not only is it the biggest. It's also the easiest to ignore. So we are spending a fortune trying to disrupt and grab people's attention and failing at doing so on a large scale. So the reality is before you get busy spending money trying to get people to pay attention to you on social media you've got to get their attention first. And I really think that this comes down to again a music metaphor for when you are a musician you have to make some decisions about what sort of musician you want to be. Do you want to be a cover artist or do you want to be an original artist. Now it's very tempting to be a cover artist because there is it's much easier to find an audience it's easier to find work. People will pay you to play other people's music in pubs and clubs so you can start to earn dollars you can make a bit of a living doing that. But there is a ceiling on the sort of income that people are going to make as cover artists with a few rare exceptions most people can sketch out a living but they're not going to live an incredible life. They're not going to enjoy great fame or fortune from doing that. So if we want to go down the original path we have to understand that it's going to take more time. It's gonna be a longer burn process to build an audience around that and to start to get people who want to sing your song.

00:09:49:03 - 00:11:51:28
Paul: But ultimately that's where the great success is. Being more original developing up some unique and different ideas if you're gonna be a carbon copy of everything that's already out there then you are already consigning yourself to be commodities to being reduced down and competing against other people who are doing the same thing and being very vanilla in your approach another me too provide. So part of the process of moving forward in 2020 is about you making spice to be creative and develop some original ideas to develop things that are going to grab people's attention and not simply be regurgitating and pushing out advertising that is the same as everybody else because that's gonna be a race to the bottom and it's gonna be a quick way to go broke when you don't know how to get people's attention first. So before we start throwing any more ad money let's get to work on earning people's attention and that means also switching around with the focus of your energy is going so we've got to seek to serve rather than seek to sell when we're first building this communication ultimately the goal for you with your social media communication is to get on somebodies playlist. You know in the old days we had to build playlist by getting a tape cassette and there's probably many listeners that are young enough that they don't even know where to tape cassette is. But if you're of my vintage we used to get that cassette and we put it in and we press pause record play and we'll record the songs off the radio and build our playlists on cassettes. These days it's much easier. We have our Spotifys and we just build our playlists but rather than listening and buying whole albums. People build playlists of particular song particular artisan. Typically there's only one or two tunes from any one artist on that playlist and that's our goal now in business is how do we get on the playlist of our prospective buyer.

00:11:52:00 - 00:14:09:19
Paul: How do we get in the mix of people that they're paying some attention to that they've got some interests. So that means that we've gonna have to develop a story that becomes repeatable that they are going to remember and it's gonna stay and become a part of their playlist. Now what we need to do is what we call build a hook statement. So it's a simple framework that allows you to communicate what you do in a repeatable way. So there are a few pieces to this framework for this. Let me walk you through them first. I help who. Who do you help? help? So we help and we get clear again about who the target market is that you assist. One of the first things that's going to grab people's attention is when they realise you are talking to them. So by being more specific about who you talk to you have much more chance of getting somebody's attention and you help them to do what. And that is to tackle the issue or problem that they are facing. So you have to identify what is the primary pain, problem that your market is facing that you specialise in helping them with. When you know who you're talking to and you know what pain or problem now they're going to start to realise you are talking directly to them. And thirdly you help them to do that so they can create what outcome? What is the outcome that you produce for people what is the result that they are looking for? And when you start to build a simple framework that shows who you help the problem you help them to solve and the outcome that you help them produce in a simple repeatable statement you will begin to get a lot more attention from your marketplace just like a musician would go into a rehearsal room to practice and work on their song so that they can repeat that song over and over every time. As a business owner you need to create space for rehearsal. You need to rehearse and develop your hook statement so that it becomes second nature that it becomes easily repeatable consistently repeatable so that people start to lock onto it. This will be critical to helping you in 2020 and beyond to become more successful at attracting the attention of the prospects that you are looking to gain.

00:14:09:21 - 00:16:23:10
Paul: So strategy number three is to turn the camera around. In 2020 we need to increase our levels of communication but we need to adjust the focus of them you know as we move forward as we become increasingly time poor people are going reward you for zeroing in on things that matter to them. We've become you know it's a real selfie generation of people shining the camera on themselves. Now that's fine as long as the story you're telling is of value to the listener. Unfortunately what we've become absolutely obsessed with is just telling our own stories and telling people what we're up to. And it adds no value to the to the viewer to the listener to the watcher of that information. People are going to reward you for making the conversation about them and not a conversation at them. So we're gonna need to get really clear about how you are going to start to turn the camera around and become customer focused in the information that you're producing. Now we can break communication down into three levels information that's about selling. Now if you're purely building sell information out into the world most of it's going to be ignored. If we want to move to tell information. Well some people will start to consider that when you're telling them what they should think about what they could do or what you can do for them but ultimately we need to move to become teacher. So we've got to teach people if we want people to consume your information. You've got to start to educate them share things that help them to move forward. Help them to solve their pains their problems. So if you want more success with your communication if you want more people to engage in it to share it to consume it then it's going to start with making sure that the conversation is about them that it serves them and it helps them. And you know a great question to ask yourself before you post any information out into the world is is this information about me or is it about my audience. Who is it truly focusing on.

00:16:23:12 - 00:18:30:05
Paul: And if you're continuously building self focused communication that's just sharing what you've been doing that adds very little value to an audience. They're going to ignore it because they don't have time to invest in your story. They're too busy developing their own. So strategy number four is to enhance the customer experience. It's going to be increasingly important to be developing the quality of the experience that you're delivering for your audience. You know one of the primary goals for any business is the building of a database. You need to create a fan base the audience that wants to hear from you. So in all of our activities and on social media we need to be making sure that our end goal is to pull people off those platforms and into an email database that we control a flow of information that we can send and add value to our customers in a timely manner. So we need to be working to build that fan base actively and to do that we're going to have to continue to enhance the customer experience the more value that you can add the more people will share that experience and therefore draw more people to you you will become more magnetic in your marketing by enhancing the customer experience increasingly as we move forward through 2020 and beyond is going to be driven by referrals and recommendations will become increasingly more important to the success of the business. Increasingly we're going to be relying on our customers will become bigger and greater sources of referral and recommendations for us for our customers and our colleagues other service providers to help us to spread the word about what it is that we do. So it's important that we've got that narrow focus. People know what we're good at and that we're sharing and adding as much value as we can to people through that process so that people know who we are we can synonymous with that way of doing business and that becomes shareable. You know its, we understand that its very easy to tap into the negative mindset.Most human beings are kind of hard wired to focus on that. Its why news programs are always focused on negativity, because anytime they focus on all positives, people switch off. So they are looking at that sort of doom and gloom side of it all the time. Now there used to be an old rule in business called the four and twenty rule which said if you do something really, really well, I'll tell about four people. But if you do something badly, I'm going to tell at least twenty. So negativity would always rule strong, but of course it is an old rule because now in the world of social media, we can expand that 20 out to 20,000, or 200,000 depending on the reach of the person whose sharing that negative view so we have to be aware the fact that negativity can spread very quickly and that we need to be doing more to drive positive value based experiences for people.

00:19:32:24 - 00:22:30:02
Paul: And on a personal front I was reminded just how hard wired we are for negativity. I've just come off the back of an incredible European holiday with my family. We went to amazing countries, great experiences, doing tours and stayed in various Air BNBs and beautiful houses and accomodation that we had along the way, we were really having this fantastic time. And as we were going we were just making a note of some of the great places we were stayed, the great guides that we had, and we made a commitment that we would make sure that we took the time to provide positive reviews for these people to share our experiences and help promote them to other people that would be looking to do the same in the future. But as we travel along we stayed at one accommodation that was a little below par and felt a bit you know not quite what had been sold as. Now in the lead up to the woman who ran the Air BNB was very friendly and helpful. But when we arrived we were a little disappointed with what we had. And remember you know my wife and I you know sort of chatting and talking about the fact that it wasn't quite up to scratch. It'll be fine and we got through it. It's not no big deal. But while we were there the woman who owned it. had a left a new DVD Player for us and kind of hint decided that she would come in and drop off some DVD while we were out so she had come into the property while we were away. And certainly that shot sort of a bigger spark of disappointment. And it was interesting that the um if you like the anger around you know having things not the way they were supposed to be fired us up to say well we should probably do a negative comment and say that this is not right. And then we talked about the fact isn't it interesting that we are motivated to get this negative comment done almost immediately in the moment whereas the positive ones that we'd sort of been banking up and we must get to that. You know we're sort of busy holiday but we wanted to make sure that we recognise the great work that these various people have done and places we'd stayed but we hadn't got around to that yet. But the negativity sort of peaked and we were going to do it straight away. End you know we've delivered all the positive feedback. And we sent a private message to the woman sort of suggesting that that wasn't wasn't so cool to do that and we didn't want to sort of lambaste her and do a big public shaming and those sort of things that we just did that the negatives if you like privately. But it's fascinating that you know the wiring of the brain that we'd been putting off delivering the positives. But as soon as we'd had that negative experience that we were ready to to jump at it. Key here is that we are hard wired to say the negatives.

00:22:30:04 - 00:24:12:01
Paul: The thing that fires it up us up and we have to work a little bit harder to get people to find the energy and the time to put the positive out into the world. So when we think about the value that we're delivering we can think of it at three levels that we have just supplied what people expected. Now of course if you just supply the basics you meet the basic need of the promise then there's very little chance of any positive feedback about it. It still leaves itself open to some negative but it's unlikely that people will ever recommend, refer or repeat the experience when it's just supply. We can move to the next level where we we've satisfied people where they feel truly satisfied with what was done. And that may get them to come back but usually doesn't get them involved in becoming fans where they are raving and sharing about it. So it really moves to the third level where we look to surprise. What can we do. That surprises our customer and takes the experience to a new level. It's really about this idea of being remarkable if doing something that surprises people creates the ability for people to remark on it. So if you're doing something a little remarkable then we're going to create a bit more buzz a bit more word of mouth and create more recommendations and referrals from the fan base that we're working to build. So there's four key strategies that are gonna be essential to your success in 2020. You know 2020 we will be about you developing and building your brand voice. What is the single story that you want played on high rotation out there in the world.

00:24:12:03 - 00:25:45:28
Paul: What's the thing that you want people to remember and repeat about you and your brand. So it's gonna start with you getting really clear about what that is. What's the thing that you want them to remember and repeat. So let's just recap on those four. Number one everyone is not your customer need to get really clear about who it is that you want to serve. Who are you best suited to serving and get clear about who that is so you can start to target your energies and efforts at them. Number two before you spend money advertising you first got a gain and earn their attention. It means getting original being different. Stepping away from just being another me too supplier number three is to turn the camera around. Never forget that the customer is the star of the show. People want to read listen and watch their story not your story. So it's about how you can serve them rather than simply tell them what you want to do. You know if I say one more social media specialist filming themselves inside a gym in the words of Terry Wahls I think I'm gonna throw up. It's just not what people need. That's not assisting them at all. And the fourth is to enhance the customer experience to keep looking at how you can add more value to the experience and the relationship that you're building with people so that they become more active resources for recommendations and referrals moving forward.

00:25:46:00 - 00:27:54:17
Paul: So if you want 2020 to be a breakthrough year let me share a quote from Sun Tzu in The Art of War. He said victorious Warriors win first and then go to war while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win. Now my definition of that is simple that you have to go into the battle of marketing your business with a plan. You have to understand what it is that you're trying to do. Too often we are wandering onto the battlefield of business and we are completely oblivious to what really needs to be happening. And as a consequence we get battered bruised and finish up very bloodied by the mess that gets created and the things that are thrown at us. So to have success this year really is about starting with a plan. Getting clear about these key strategies are going to help you move your business forward. So that's it for Episode 20 our first episode of the year 2020. I've got a whole bunch of great guests lined up for you. And next week and get me joining you with an expert in resilience and I think it's a timely conversation to talk about how we bounce back from stress and challenges how we can pressure proof ourselves as we move into another busy year and as we come off the back of some some tough times here in Australia on the bushfire front. So I hope that your year is going to be a tremendous one. I look forward to being with you along this journey and helping you as much as I can to take your business to a whole nother level of profit and performance. But most importantly I hope that it's a safe and healthy year for you for your family and that you enjoy great times ahead. So thanks for joining me again for this episode and I look forward to joining you for many more across the year as I continue to work to serve you and help you build the best business possible. So until we speak again I wish you nothing but success with your businesses. But much more importantly with your lives. Take care. Bye for now.