The Biggest Secret

Shh! Don’t tell anybody, I’ve got a secret to tell you and it’s huge. 

The secret, you want to know what it is? My business. 

If that sounds like you, if your business is a world kept secret then I totally feel your pain. Been there and I’ve done that. It’s frustrating, you’re good at what you do, you’ve been doing it for a long time, you deserve to be successful, you’re a good human. 

Everything that’s right about the world is part attributed to your loveliness, munificence and the greatness of your business. 

But nobody knows about your business. 

It doesn’t matter how good you are, how good your business is, doesn’t matter what you think you deserve, because what happens is smarter, quicker, faster, better, cheaper alternatives show up like last-minute attendees to a party swan in and nick all the business. 

If that sounds familiar then I understand how you feel and I totally know how to solve the problem. 

I’ve solved that problem. 

99.9% of the time down to two things; 

• Activity and
• Positioning

Activity you can solve. It’s really easy to do more, but the reality is if you don’t have a strategy and a plan – what are you doing?

If it’s not lined up and coherent, if it’s not consistently talking about the same messages to the right audiences, if it’s not feeding the the right people with the solutions to the pain they feel, if they’re not aware of you – you’re not gonna win the business. 

You’ve got to be absolutely in competition at the moment of decision making for a service or purchase for a product to be able to stand a chance of winning the business. 

The first point around activity is yes you can do more, and so many times I see so many businesses get busy. They just start “Right let’s send out an email, lets send an email! Oh my god! Yes! We haven’t sent an email out for weeks!” 

Don’t just randomly fire out an email. 

Because the reality is what you’re going to achieve is probably poor messaging, you might get the targeting right because you know your business, you’re more likely to understand your audience than not I would hope. And you’re gonna fire out something, whether it’s email, whether social, whatever it is even if it’s a flyer on a letter drop, you’re gonna fire out something that isn’t gonna hit the target nearly as well as it could. 

That is going to have two impacts. 

First of all it’s a numbers game. So you want to be absolutely hitting as many people as possible but relevant with the right message. So by being suboptimal on any of those elements, you’re automatically decreasing your chances.

The second impact it is going to have is that because it’s not going to quite be the right message and maybe the targeting is a bit off or maybe the method you’ve chosen for that marketing piece isn’t quite right, doesn’t suit the audience or for whatever reason and there are hundreds and thousands of variables in play here – you’re going to annoy or irritate. 

You’re going to give a negative experience from your brand to some of your market. 

So not only are you lowering the numbers that you can compete with, but you’re now making it worse by increasing the people’s irritation. 

It’s a no-win situation. 

We call that reactive marketing.

Reactive marketing is dangerous at best, at worst it’s positively destructive. You might get lucky, some people do, but trust me when I tell you that reactive marketing is the devil’s work. 

You’re better off not sending that email today. What you’re better off doing is sitting down, working out what your core messaging and targeting is once and for all. Working out the semblance of a really simple marketing strategy. It doesn’t have to be rocket science. It could be we’re gonna do three things a month and we’re gonna do them really well. It doesn’t have to be anything wildly complicated and overreaching to the point where you’re never gonna do it anyway. 

From that marketing strategy you can then determine a marketing plan. The marketing plan could be actions in a calendar – we’re gonna do this on this date and here’s the messaging and we’re gonna do that on this day and here’s the messaging, here’s the calls to action.

You could keep it as simple as you like, but simple and effective beats complicated and sub-optimal every day of the week for both of those reasons. 

First of all you’re now going to increase your chances of success because you’re going to play the numbers, so you’re gonna have something that’s relevant and targeted and it ticks as many of the boxes and of those variables as possible. So you’re gonna have something that is on the money. 

And the second thing is you’re not going to irritate people. Because what you’re doing is considered and relevant. You will always irritate one or two but you’re massively massively playing the numbers a lot better there. 

The second thing is positioning. 

It’s easy to get busy and active, it’s easy to have a sense of being a busy fall right, nobody wants to be a busy fool. So you want to do things that are appropriate and that means that you’re going to move from reactive to proactive marketing. 

As a result of that you’re going to have to have a semblance of a plan. Nobody gets in a car looks at the sat-nav and drives where it says without putting in a destination first. If you don’t know what your destination is you’re effectively getting in your car and just driving randomly wherever the sat nav tells you to go. It’s not a good idea trust me I’ve tried it. But that’s another story.

The bottom line is you’ve got to get your positioning right. 

Your positioning is a story, we started here and we’re gonna end up here and this is the road we’re gonna take, this is how we’re going to achieve that journey. 

Your positioning needs to be interesting to the customer, to the clients, to the prospects, to the marketplace. It needs to be relevant, it needs to be interesting, it needs to be innovative, it needs to be disruptive so that you can compete with your competition more easily without having to outspend them.

That really for me is the key. 

If you find that your business is a well kept secret then this message is for you. 

Get away from being reactive, start being proactive.

 Get yourself a strategy, consistent messaging and a plan and ultimately then just execute that. 

It’s that easy, not rocket science. 

If you want to know more get in touch, we take business leaders and turn them into marketing leaders in just one day. We give them all of that and just one day, we can revolutionize your life and your business all we have to do is get the chance to serve you and we look forward to hearing from you. 

Have a great day and let’s start telling everyone about your business!