Flipping FOMO

Today I want to talk about FOMO. 

It’s a word that I’ve heard for a long time, it stands for Fear Of Missing Out for those of you that haven’t heard of FOMO. But it’s been around for a few years now at least and FOMO is almost certainly killing your business. And this is why. 

The reason FOMO has an impact on our business, is we never want to say no to any deal, we’ll take any work as long as it’s roughly within our sphere of activity, we’ll do it. 

Sometimes it’s because we are under the impression that we’ve just got to take whatever revenue we can get. I think everyone in business has probably been there. 

Also we always believe that helping someone in a very small way for no margin, even a huge time cost to us, could turn into something bigger. I get that and I understand sometimes you need to serve people strategically, even though you know it’s not worth it at the time but you know it’s going to turn into something later down the line. 

That’s how FOMO hurts the business because it means we end up doing work we don’t want to do, for people we don’t want to work for and for a margin that isn’t good enough. 

For people we don’t want to work with, 

doing work we don’t want to do, 

for a margin isn’t good enough.

That’s a triple whammy no for me. 

It’s not work I want to do. It’s not a good enough margin to help me grow my business. And I really don’t want to work with that specific client on this specific topic, it doesn’t float my boat. 

How do we flip FOMO? 

Well for me it’s all about the difference between supply and demand. Ultimately in any business you have something to give away to the market a supply of X, and over here you have a market that have a demand of Y. These fluctuate all the time of course, they go up and down and generally probably mirror to some degree because markets always adjust accordingly. 

However most business operate in high supply and lower demand. 

What that means is most of the time, for most businesses, we have more to sell than the market wants to buy. It’s very difficult to get into and sustain a position where you don’t have enough and the market wants more. 

The reason for that is because we tend to go and find ways to fulfil that and try and bring that back up at least a parity or near parity. So that we’re supplying the market exactly what they need. 

However most companies operate in high supply low demand. As a result the pressure is all on us, the company. 

The consumer knows it because they can hear it in our voice; we’re keen to the deal, were keen to get this out the door, we keen to hit our targets. As a result we do less deals because we sometimes are more desperate, sometimes we challenge the wrong objection, we might think that people want to lower price but they haven’t mentioned price. 

From a marketing perspective we’ve got to be really really clever at resetting the balance here.

There’s a way to do it, I call it flipping the FOMO. 

What we need to do is we need to take the supply pressure and remove it, regardless of how much we’ve actually got to supply. And we need to increase the demand pressure regardless of how much they want to buy. 

This is how I think we’re doing it. Ultimately either we are going to our customers, or our customers are coming to us. Most of the time it’s a bit of a mix, but in the lazy marketing academy and with our marketing mastermind clients we certainly advocate getting people moving towards your business, customers coming to you as much as possible. That’s the kind of activity we want to encourage. 

Whilst FOMO means we’re nervous about missing out on any specific value or revenue, that leaves the FOMO on us. 

To flip the FOMO and put the FOMO on the customer, we have to be super specific, as they say in America (it doesn’t work here) but as they say in America;

“There’s riches in niches.”

We have to get super specific, really terrific at defining ourselves in as tight a circle as possible. By doing that we flip the FOMO on to the consumer, because now the consumer wants to know whether we will work with them.

“I know Al you’re a marketing specialist and I know you do marketing, you help people and I know that you have a specialist in helping law firms and accounting firms and technology firms and publishers and people like that, but I don’t run a business of any of those types, would you be able to work with me?” 

Now I’ve had that happen to me quite a lot in my life, people asking whether I can help them, whether they’re right for me, whether I have space in my program for them right now. 

That’s what FOMO flipped looks like.

Because the client wants to make sure they can qualify themselves in as fast as possible to work with me. 

That’s the same for anybody watching this, the real challenge isn’t in how do you define your business, but how do you define your business in a way that means people will want to work with you so bad that they will now experience FOMO, fear of missing out, because they might not get to work with you. 

That’s a great place to be because it means now that the demand and supply has shifted and no matter how much supply you have, you’re always trying to keep demand on top of it. You’re always trying to make sure you can grow the business because the demand is always greater than the supply. 

Ultimately that leaves the FOMO on them and they’ll love you more because they’ll realise they’re part of your tribe. Even people who are not in your tribe will still identify with you, they’ll understand you more, they’ll know what you do and they may well need what you do and now that you’ve defined it, that may help them understand that. They might also know other people that you can help, that are in that tribe. 

There’s a no-brainer example that we had in one of our master classes, we had a lady who was a copywriter and she was worried about specialising. But the reality is she was just a copywriter the minute specialised, she became a copywriter with an expertise in.

It doesn’t take anything away from your overall skill set, but by creating specialisms you’ve positioned yourself really uniquely, and you put the FOMO pressure back on to the customer. And that’s where it needs to be. 

So where’s the FOMO pressure for you today? 

Is that on you? 

Is it all about supply? 

Is it on demand? 

Is it somewhere in the middle? 

Or do you think you can flip the FOMO? 

I’d love to hear how you think you can flip the FOMO and if you’re not sure how you can flip the FOMO, get in touch, let’s have a chat and see if I can solve that problem for you on a call.