Use Follow Through to Increase Your Influence

Flakey is for Pie Crust, Not Marketing
Flakey is for Pie Crust, Not Marketing

I realize upfront that a lot of people do not want to address the topic of the things they neglect to do. It is uncomfortable to think about all the tasks that we forget, or put off until another day. Even the mention of it will probably make a lot of people think I am looking right down my finger at them. Don’t worry, this is not a message of scorn, because you are not the only one who is guilty of that thing you know you should have done but hoped nobody would notice or remember your failure to follow through.

Have you ever been stood up? Maybe it was a date, a business meeting, a telephone call, or many other possible ways that somebody did not follow through with what they told you. Do you remember how that made you feel? I can tell you that it is one way to end up in my recycle bin, and I am not the only one who feels this way.

When people do not follow through on their words, it often becomes a personal matter. It is insulting. It can even strangely cause a sense of shame or guilt for the recipient, with thoughts like “Well, I guess I was not all that important to them.” More often, it will bring about a dismissal of the individual’s words, both past and present. It destroys trust, and in business, that is a tragic fate which often negates even the best marketing efforts.

This topic comes up in my business and personal life once in a while, and the person I discuss it with is my wife. We have operated businesses for decades, and we have each encountered liars, cheats, and thieves on multiple occasions. We have also encountered a lot of people who are not quite classified as horrible, but rather what we call “flakey”. You do not have to look very hard to find flakey people. They are the ones you look at with a cautious eye when they tell you something that will require them to take action beyond the moment at hand.

Losing Influence is Easy

There are a squillion examples of what I call “flakey”. I’ll give you a quick example, but it can be far more subtle. In this example, it is the customer who lost influence and trust. I make this point because it can go both ways, and we each determine our own individual influence which we carry everywhere we go.

My wife and I own a thriving cakes and confections business. Mad Eliza’s Cakes and Confections has become quite a hit in our town, and I have found that cakes are about the easiest thing to sell that I ever brought to market.

Somebody recently placed an order for custom cupcakes from Mad Eliza’s and expressed urgency to pick them up at a specific time on Halloween Day for a party he had scheduled. The time came and went, and that afternoon, my wife rang him on the telephone. He quickly blurted “I’ll call you back in just a minute.” Did he call? No. Did we have some nice Halloween-themed cupcakes to hand out to friends that day? Yes, we did, and people loved them.

Being “flakey” in this case involved a blatant lie, right? Well, probably, but we cannot be so sure. Maybe he was in a terrible accident with a hair dryer and a bathtub. We do not know the whole story, but what we do know is that the lack of follow through took this person down a few notches on our “listening scale”. This guy clearly lost influence. He may not ever need any influence, but what would it look like if I saw him in the waiting room of a friend’s business applying for a job? Stranger things have happened!

With the massive popularity of social media, there is an even more profound importance of doing what you say you will do. People talk about things they find distasteful. Although you may think that lacking the integrity to follow through on simple tasks may not be conversation-worthy, you can bet that if your name comes up, there will be significantly less excitement for somebody to say great things about you. If lack of follow-through becomes a common problem within your company, even with “insignificant” tasks, it can destroy your influence. In more extreme instances, you can end up looking horrible when somebody searches for your company name.

Increasing Influence is Easy, Too!

Trust is a tricky thing. I wrote about the topic of building trust a while back, and it included some good food for thought. The article was titled “Building Trust Comes First in Business, But How?“.

Influence has a lot to do with trust, but influence can also be relatively easy to build if you do what you say you will, even when it seems insignificant to you. Being consistent and always following through with even the “little things” can build up over time.

About a decade ago when my company, YourNew.com, was new, I asked my wife and business partner what made us different. I was trying to distill what would set us apart and make our company great. She had a nearly immediate and very definite answer. She told me “I can sum it up in a single word … Integrity! That has always stuck with me, and I think of it every time I tell somebody I will call them back, email something, meet for coffee, or anything else when there is an opportunity to let somebody down by not following through.

I am certainly not a saint, but I try really hard to make a priority of keeping my word, regardless how trivial a matter may seem to me. It may matter a lot to somebody else. I hope that you will try hard, too.

Do you have an example of follow through building your confidence in a person or a brand? Do you have examples of it destroying your confidence? Please share your thoughts.

Photo credit to DigiDi via Flickr

Facebook Marketing: Pages, Customer Modeling, Promoting, and Awesomeness

Facebook Marketing Awesomeness
Facebook Marketing Awesomeness

I find that for a lot of people, Facebook marketing consists of creating a Facebook page (or worse, a Facebook profile) and gathering a few “fans” who will give them just enough inspiration to feel they are being productive. They will put the Facebook “f” on their website in order to appear more modern, and keep their fingers crossed hoping that somehow Facebook will increase their profits.

There is a lot of confusion about Facebook, and especially for small businesses. However, small business is not alone, and unleashing the real value of marketing using Facebook is elusive for many companies. Efforts are often just enough to keep the person signing the checks on board for another 30 days for more trial and error. Poor planning and lack of measurement are commonplace in social media marketing, but that is not an effective way to run a marketing campaign.

Facebook marketing is often looked at with an eye toward “trying it out” and keeping the risk low. It is challenging for many people to accept, but the risk should go down the more you put into it.

Facebook can be a great place to market your business. If performed well, it can also help you to gather a lot of really useful data to help your business outside of the Facebook platform. Let’s unwrap a true sense of how a Facebook marketing campaign could look. This is the dramatically abbreviated version, of course. I will break this down into steps as follows:

Skip around as you like. Some of this is for the novice, while some of it is less novice. In any case, I hope that you will find it to be useful information.

Facebook Marketing Step One: Your Facebook Page

There is a lot that you can do with a Facebook page. Of course, note that I said “page” and not “profile”. There is a huge difference between a Facebook page and a Facebook profile. More companies are figuring this out every day as their profiles are being deleted for breaking Facebook’s policy regarding using profiles for business.

Name your page well, fill out every field in the Facebook page setup, and seed it with enough information that your earliest fans will know why they should “Like” it other than just because you said they should.

Tip: While creating your Facebook page, roll these few words around in your head: inviting, interesting, creative, unique, different, informational, entertaining, humorous … or whatever will be attractive to the audience you seek.

Optional: If you have a good FBML (Facebook Markup Language) programmer and a designer worth a hoot, it will help. This is not critical, but can be very useful.

Facebook Marketing Step Two: Customer Modeling

The step of customer modeling is skipped so often that there should be little wonder why most Facebook marketing fails miserably. Lack of proper customer modeling is a cause for many marketing endeavors to fail, but this is especially true in the current world where “everybody is a marketer” as witnessed in abundance on Facebook. A large segment of Facebook marketing is not performed by a marketing professional, but rather a business owner or somebody with limited marketing experience.

One of the tragic pieces of information missing for the average person trying their hand at Facebook marketing is that marketing does not just mean shotgun blast advertising. To get the most out of marketing, we need to know answers to questions of who, what, where, when, why, and how. We need to reach the right people or we waste credibility.

I don’t care how great your hamster skin purses are, I am not in the market. Marketing those purses to me is a huge waste of time.

Customer modeling involves creativity, analytic thinking, and data. If you do not have the data to tell you who, what, where, when, how, and why people will respond to your marketing, you need to create it. Without knowing how to reach the right people with the right information, you may as well skip all the rest, because your time and money will largely be wasted. Worse yet, it can damage your brand value.

Think of how much you enjoy receiving badly targeted advertising for things you would never purchase and then consider how much people will enjoy it coming from you.

Fortunately, there are reliable ways to get your hands on this data you so badly need. If you are certain that you already have a good handle on customer modeling, move on to the next step. If not, don’t worry, I will get back to this, so move to the next step anyway.

Facebook Marketing Step Three: Promoting Your Page

An easy first approach to promoting a Facebook page is to suggest it to all of your Facebook friends. Sure, that makes sense, and if they actually like you, there is a better chance they will “Like” your page. This is fine, and I recommend it, but often not a really good target demographic for your business. Besides, don’t all of your friends already know what you do for a living?

A common hope is that you will have something so brilliant and earth-shaking that some of those friends will buy from you, and when their friends see that they “Like” your Facebook page, that it will spread massively and the whole population of Facebook will come swarming and buy everything you offer for sale. Yes, that sounds awesome, right? Rub a lamp! It does not work this way, and if you tried it, you probably already know this is the case.

Your Facebook friends, although surely a great group of people, are often not as passionate about what you sell as you are.

An effective alternative is to use carefully targeted Facebook advertising to reach a specific audience. I am going to provide an example of how to reach specific people, and also how to use the information you gain from it.

Mark’s Example: Let’s say I am trying to sell Smart Slate interactive whiteboards. No, I do not sell these, and I have no stake in the market. I chose this, because I wrote about it as another example a while back. This is just an example to explain targeting using Facebook advertising to build a better marketing strategy.

What do I know about the Smart Slate market off the top of my head? I know that they are used in a lot of classrooms. I also know that schools have a hard time budgeting for them. I actually know this because my kids’ school has had fundraisers to buy them. So, in this case, I may want to test my Facebook ads with teachers and other school related interests. Why do I want to connect with teachers? I will explain that more in Step Four.

Since I am only going to sell these items in a specific region, I only want to target specific areas. I could choose to target anything from a worldwide audience to only my specific city. For the example, I will use my state of Kansas, and the surrounding states of Nebraska, Missouri, Colorado, Oklahoma. Now, in order to target teachers in my target area, I will go to create an ad on Facebook and see what kind of a target I can come up with. It will look something like this screenshot:

Notice that this brings the selected audience down in size but it is still far from being targeted. It still leaves me with 8,578,280 people age 18 and older who live in Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma or Colorado. That is far too broad, and it could look like selling hamster skin purses at a college fraternity party. I am not out to waste time and money. I want more customers.

Next, I will set some demographic details. In this example, I will target young teachers who may be more interested in technology, so I am using 30-40 year old college graduates who have specified interests in their Facebook profiles as follows: teaching; teacher; elementary teacher; teaching resources; or teachers. Note that Facebook helped me by suggesting interests. Here is what it looks like:

Now I have an estimated reach of 44,480 people who live in Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma or Colorado between the ages of 30 and 40 who graduated from college and like teaching, teacher, elementary teacher, teaching resources or teachers. This is looking better, but there is still a lot of potential for fine-tuning. This simply gives me a starting point for one of several ads I may want to use for testing my audience. In other test ads, I may want to broaden or narrow the age range and condense or expand my target based on demographics.

Once I have run the ads for a couple weeks, I will want to give careful attention to who responded. Facebook will report this information to me, and tell me what other common interests my responding test audience have. Who knows, I may find that a lot of my respondents also love hamster skin purses. If so, you can bet I am going to use that information in my other marketing efforts, as well as how I address my new pals on my Facebook page. I will use this information in my blogging and search engine optimization, as well as other online and offline efforts.

Do you remember that customer modeling that I mentioned? Information like this is what helps you to understand your model customer and stop wasting time and marketing dollars.

Facebook advertising is not where you will make a squillion sales and is not the entire campaign. It is just one tactic within the overall strategy of the campaign (see “Social Media Tactics Without Social Media Strategy Fails“).

Facebook ads are often best used for building brand awareness and bringing in those Facebook fans who will “Like” your page so that you can communicate with them. I said communicate … not just promote your latest special or badger them with flavorless advertisements. Provide them with value in whatever way you can. This is another step, and I will get to it, but mark my words: “Provide them with value!”

Something really great about Facebook advertising is the potential for segmentation. You can target an audience based on very specific interests that they have expressed with their “Likes and Interests”. This is not guesswork, and the segmentation possibilities are quite useful.

For a good read about using the data from Facebook advertising, read an article by a friend of mine, Tommy Walker, titled “How To Use Inception Marketing on Your Blog“.

Facebook Marketing Step Four: Making Awesomeness

This is tricky for a lot of people. What are the keys to making awesomeness? A lot of it comes with experience. Awesomeness requires continual effort, so it should not be seen as just a quick fix. Marketing talent is not just inherited. It takes practice and patience.

In the case of my example in Step Three of reaching teachers with a message about Smart Slates, I want to learn from them. I want them to teach me their challenges, and learn how I can help them to afford my products. I want to learn what they have found useful about the products. I want to hear their success stories of school fundraisers which worked well. I want to help other teachers to find better ways to get my products into their classrooms. If I do this well, and if I am really useful to them, I will have a lot better chance of selling more Smart Slates in their school district. Plus, I will connect with a good number of teachers who may be more willing to relay my brand name to others.

Now, doesn’t this start to look more like a strategy than just advertising? This is what I mean by creating awesomeness. Doing things different from the rest and making a useful impact in some way.

Listen to the people on your Facebook page, and give them reasons to talk to you. Give them what they want. If you have done your customer modeling well, you have the information you need about what they will respond to. Use this information well, and use it for their benefit and not just your own.

  • If you have restaurant, ask them what their favorite menu item is, and how you could make it even better. Ask them reasons they like you and how you can improve. Have fun with them and post a challenge to see if anybody can eat the whole thing.
  • If you sell engine blocks, start a Facebook discussion and ask them if they have any engine replacement tips to share with others. Find out if they love auto racing, and what kind. Get them to post photos of the cars they are putting those engine blocks in. Learn if there are other performance auto parts they need.
  • If you sell Smart Slates, provide helpful tips for teachers or information for running a successful school fundraiser. Learn from the teachers.
  • If you sell cars … well, don’t get me started about car dealers using Facebook. That is another blog article, and I already wrote it.

I think you get my point. Just don’t act like a stereotypical car salesman!

You can do this all alone, or you may choose to enlist the assistance of an experienced marketer. In either case, it is best to pay attention and keep your eyes wide open to the possibilities. Marketing is a whole lot more than just shouting into a crowd and hoping for results. Applying good principles of marketing to the right people and with a better message can provide measurable benefits to a company.

This is a lot more targeted, measurable, and useful than other marketing tools such as the once-popular television advertising. I mean, just look at what television is doing these days.

WIBW Channel 13 Jim Ogle Facebook Dog Poop-Talk
WIBW Channel 13 Jim Ogle's Facebook Dog Poop-Talk

Performance Auto Parts Marketing Exercise

Who Loves Speed?
Who Loves Speed?

Performance auto parts may not be on your agenda to buy, or to sell, but the automotive performance parts industry can still provide the basis for a useful marketing exercise. If you follow this exercise, I ask that you look for ways it can be related back to your industry, whether that is automotive-related or astrophysics.

Challenges of the Performance Auto Parts Industry

The performance auto parts industry, including an astonishing number of retailers, manufacturers, engineers, wholesalers, and users of automotive performance parts have each had a pretty hard time over the past couple years. The economy tanked, gas prices skyrocketed, and the world has tried to become more eco-friendly. The significance of these direct blows to the performance auto parts market makes it a great example of the importance of marketing.

Any of these challenges could single-handedly crush a small or shaky organization, but together, they have created havoc that puts gray hair and wrinkles on business owners. For those who are left while competitors drop off the RADAR, the market gets a little stronger. This creates an opportunity to generate brand loyalty from customers of fallen competitors, and use market failures to increase market share. Without addressing market share, a company will often be just a little closer to falling off the RADAR themselves.

Imagine for a moment that you are in the business of selling performance auto parts. The thought of having heavy financial interest in this market would send a lot of business people screaming and running for the exit, but not you. You are fearless, and you are in it for the long haul. Sure, it is largely a scared market with bad influences from many angles, but you are up to the challenges of looking long-term and setting a course to success. You want the kind of success that uses the lows to come out stronger than before.

Let us think about this as an exercise to stretch our minds and discover new success. I will be your partner in this example, and together we will do some thinking about how to keep our make-believe performance auto parts business bringing in the customers and giving them reasons to tell their friends about us. We need customers, but how will we reach them, and what will we do to place ourselves ahead of the competition? Come on, partner … we are in this together, so let’s get to thinking.

This will require a lot of ongoing work, but I will offer some ideas to get us started.

Maybe We Should Blog About Our Performance Auto Parts

Blogging is popular, and it can bring in a whole lot of valuable website traffic and build brand awareness, but what can we blog about? How much can we really say about fuel injectors, turbochargers, and race-tuned suspension parts? Wouldn’t that get pretty boring?

I am stunned by how many people I speak to who think of a blog in terms of simply reaching immediate customers, and neglect the blog’s contribution toward building a brand and creating a community of loyal readers. Many companies neglect blogging, because it all starts to seem like work, and they do not recognize the many benefits. So, if you don’t care about or understand all of the other valuable reasons to blog, just consider the enormous link building potential that will help your website rank better for more “performance auto parts” related search phrases.

Something we should perhaps consider is not just blogging about fuel injectors, turbochargers, and race-tuned suspension parts, but rather things like auto racing, race car drivers, automotive events, car maintenance, and a variety of other things car lovers are interested in. Maybe we could do a series of automotive performance “how-to” articles along with diagrams and YouTube videos. Maybe we could publish something about the American Le Mans Series Michelin Green X Challenge and how it is improving eco-friendly race technology. We could discuss how it affects consumers, now and into the future. Maybe we can create something interesting, informative, entertaining, or otherwise useful to our market influencers.

The racing industry and performance automotive engineers do great works to improve “greenness” of the automotive industry. If we get really creative, maybe we can even find some ways to grow our brand recognition for pointing out the good … and even great things our industry is doing to help people, economy, and our planet.

It is starting to seem like there could be a whole lot more reasons to blog than we thought. It seems like a good time to read “10 Really Good Reasons to Blog” and keep the thinking cap on.

Do Facebook Users Like Performance Auto Parts?

The fact that over five hundred million people are using Facebook seems to indicate that Facebook is useful for reaching people. With half a billion people, there is sure to be a race fan, race car driver, racing team, automotive engineer, ecologist, popular automotive blogger, or speed junkie in there somewhere who would like our company. There must be something there for us!

A mistake many companies will make is trying to pitch a deal to people instead of creating a reason for people to know and like their “performance auto parts”, and the people and culture of the organization. It is wise to note that name recognition always comes with an attached mental image. A sales pitch usually leaves little or no image at all.

See reason number 5 in 7 Reasons Your Marketing Sucks.

On the surface, it seems that nobody in our market is doing so great at reaching the Facebook speed junkies. Does this mean Facebook is not a good tool for building a community? After all, it is not working for most of the others in the performance auto parts industry. Maybe it is a waste of time.

Upon a closer inspection, it seems that this is largely because nobody is making significant creative efforts. Most of the performance auto parts people I found are only trying to advertise their performance parts like a bad used car salesman and do very little to create a genuine interest in their brand from people who purchase or influence the purchase of performance auto parts. It seems that since spewing advertisements fails so miserably for the majority of companies, many of the Facebook pages I saw have not been updated much.

Now, doesn’t this start to seem like an opportunity for us, or would we rather let other people’s failures of strategic planning and marketing creativity dictate our success? No? That is what I thought, my fearless performance auto parts selling partner … we are in it for the long haul, and that is why we will win the hearts and minds of Facebook. Let us go there and do something brilliant!

Automotive Performance Meets Twitter

Should we use Twitter to communicate with customers, potential customers, and market influencers? It seems like it may be just a big waste of time. Who is going to do that tweeting, and what will they tweet about? What if they tweet the wrong thing and make us look bad?

Have you ever looked at the competition to see just how terrible their marketing is? It is a pretty good place to find ways you may be missing the mark with potential customers. Sometimes it is a good idea to see what people are doing in some other random industry, because then it is even easier to be critical.

Maybe we should do some Twitter searches to see what others in the performance auto parts industry have to say, or what people are saying about them. Who knows, maybe we can pick up some good information and ideas as spectators. Then, maybe we can find an angle to help us build our market and find out what people like. I suppose that may be worth a shot, what do you think, partner? Should we see what Twitter is talking about and think about ways we could do better?

What Do I know About Performance Auto Parts?

I know that it can be hard to think outside of your own four walls, but with a little exercise, it can provide great benefit to your marketing. Most people, and most organizations do not have a really spectacular plan to improve their market. When you do, you can come out ahead, but it means that you have to try harder than them. You have to think differently than them.

I hope that giving a little thought to the performance auto parts industry will be helpful to you, whether it is actually your industry or not. I suppose I could be wrong with my automotive industry suggestions and analogies. Although, considering how many performance automotive parts suppliers’ logos I have put on brand new Corvettes, it would be a shame if I was wrong. 😉

YourNew.com Racing Corvette Z06: Driver Mark Aaron Murnahan
YourNew.com Racing Corvette Z06: Driver Mark Aaron Murnahan

NOTE: There are winners and losers in every industry. Marketing is often the biggest determining factor.

Are You Ready to Market Like Einstein?

Market Like Einstein
Market Like Einstein
Marketing is what makes things sell, and it is what makes businesses profitable. Without marketing, whether word of mouth, television, radio, print, Internet, or some other medium, even the best companies with the best products will fail. Somebody has to make buyers aware of an offering, and do so in a desirable way, before it will sell. That is marketing in a nutshell.

Great marketing takes us by the nose and leads us to a brand. The best marketing makes us think. Sometimes it makes us laugh, and sometimes it makes us cry, but it always makes us think. When it makes us think enough, it makes us talk about it. It enters our conversations around the water cooler, at little league games, sitting at a bar among friends, and in boardrooms. When marketing is done at optimum levels, it permeates our conscious and our subconscious. That is the kind of marketing that makes the difference between Fortune 500 companies and all the others who came and left. It is also the kind of marketing that makes the difference between your little company and the little bigger company you want it to be. It only makes sense for you to want to know how to market better.

Marketing is not just about putting your words out to a bunch of people. Marketing also means bridging the divide between the way a producer thinks and the way their consumers think. It is not something that everybody is built for, but it is something they can practice and become better at. A lot of people can perform the more menial tasks associated with marketing, and millions of them can clearly send a tweet, update their Facebook, spam LinkedIn, or write a blog. Only a relatively few will make the necessary sacrifices of planning, learning, and stepping outside of themselves enough to do something truly brilliant that attracts people to them. It is precisely why marketing is not, and will never be a commodity.

Today’s Murnahanism: Good marketers must answer why their marketing is more expensive than others. Great marketers refuse to answer, because they don’t want the client who doesn’t already know.

Brilliant marketing comes with a cost. The cost can vary greatly, and I don’t just mean money, either. It often comes with the cost of a marketer who studies people and understands what drives them to take action. It takes somebody with a uniquely analytical mind who thinks differently than those around them. It comes with a whole lot of what I call “brain sweat”. If you are unprepared to afford these traditional costs associated with brilliant marketing, you had better be ready to sweat a lot, with your brain.

Are You Ready for Einstein-Style Brain Sweat?

If you are dedicated to your marketing, you must exercise your thinking. Einstein was a great marketer. Although it was not his vocation, in many ways he was one of the best marketers ever. After all, we have all heard of him, and he was quite effective at selling his ideas to the world. If you think it was easy, just try marketing theoretical physics and see if you can make a household name for yourself. Some of Einstein’s greatest struggles were in bridging the gap between his thinking and the conventional wisdom around him. He had to look at things from other peoples’ perspective in order to understand how to best explain his thoughts to them, and thus “sell” his ideas. The cost to Einstein was that he was criticized by many and became a bit “crazy” by some standards. Brain sweat does that to a person. It is a huge challenge to carry such divergent thoughts of both the producer and the consumer and know how to package them and sell them. In my estimation, this is the greatest challenge of marketing.

The best marketers I have ever met are all just a bit “crazy”. I think most marketers prefer the term “eccentric” over “crazy”. Trying to think like other people is tough. It was tough for Einstein to try and think like others around him enough to get his ideas through to them, and it is similarly challenging for many people trying to market their product or service. It tends to stretch a person’s imagination. It is like a rigorous brain exercise, and like any exercise, it makes you stronger with repetition.

I have often been called “eccentric”, but if you ask me, I am crazier than a shithouse squirrel (I wanted to say “shithouse rat” but my editor asked me to change it). I push myself just a little closer to insanity every time I try to understand people and how to most effectively market something to them. It is my job, and I quite enjoy it. They say there is a fine line between higher thinking and insanity. Personally, I try my best to straddle that line with one foot on either side. It beats being bored. It does not mean that I am calling myself smarter than others, it just means that I use what brain I have, and I push it to an uncomfortable limit where the competition is not willing or able to go. That is often what it takes to create the best marketing.

Einstein kept pushing forward even when other scientists were not on his side. He knew his product, and he persevered against the odds. Einstein was fortunate to have much assistance to see him through his research, but most businesses (and most other theoretical physicists) are not so fortunate. Albert Einstein’s marketing was often just good enough to receive his next round of funding and to continue his work. Most businesses only have one shot to get it right, and to achieve enough market penetration to sustain them through to the next higher level.

Are You Feeling Brilliant Yet?

The process of learning how to produce great marketing is long and hard. It would be great if I could just hand you a “brilliant switch” that you could turn on and instantly start thinking like your customers. I don’t have a learning course to sell, and although I say that I am for hire, I say “no” to the vast majority of the people who try to hire my services (largely because I am not cheap). What I can offer is a pretty sizable blog archive of marketing articles that may help jump start your thinking about your customers and how to address the challenges of marketing what you offer. I hope that it will help you.

If you are not ready to think more like your customers and dedicate more of your mind to your marketing, it is best to leave it to the people who do it for a living. Otherwise, you risk regurgitating the same old junk that has become so commonplace on the Internet. It does not work the way many people may lead you to believe, and it comes at a much higher risk of failure.

How To Sell Paper Clips: A Closer Look at Marketing

Sell More Paper Clips!
Sell More Paper Clips!

Think about paper clips for a moment. They are about the most basic thing you will find in your desk drawer. When you consider your marketing, try to imagine selling paper clips. You probably do not think much about what brand you are buying when you need to replenish your paper clip supply. This is likely true of your product or service, too. Unless people have a good reason to remember you, it will be a lot harder to grow your paper clip market share and to become more prosperous.

If you challenged multiple companies with a truckload of paper clips to sell, somebody would sell out sooner than the rest. One would almost surely hit their stride and empty that truckload of paper clips before the others, and there must be a reason.

A basic essential of marketing is to get people to talk about you in a positive way. When other people talk about your brand, it is far more valuable than when you talk about your brand. This is proven every day, and in many markets. Just think about the ones you remember and why you remember them.

In order to emphasize the point, I have created this short video to show you how to sell more paper clips. I hope that you will enjoy it.

Addendum: After comments from Jim Rudnick at Canuck SEO (JVRudnick) both below and on social networks, I picked up the phone to call and thank him. We chatted and he told me of a remarkable story about a man who traded a paper clip for a house. If you doubt the value of good marketing and how to build value in something as simple as a paper clip, you should see the story of Tyler Wright.Thanks for sharing, Jim!