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Feb 20 2013
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Why Playing It Safe May Be the Riskiest Path of All

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Marketing podcast with Randy Gage

Back when I started my own business, some twenty-five years ago, I was a bit of rebel. I was taking a leap and doing something that many considered terribly risky.

Risky

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Well, the game has changed dramatically since then and now not starting a business, not figuring out how to be paid well to do something you truly love or not taking a leap of faith is perhaps the only risky thing left in the world of work.

This month I’ve been meeting with and interviewing coaches and consultants that help people chase what they were meant to do and I’m sharing their advice and stories as part of my monthly content theme. People like Martha Beck, Jonathan Fields, Pam Slim and Randy Gage appear on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast this month. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss a single interview!

For this week’s episode I visit with Randy Gage, prosperity coach, speaker and author of nine books including Risky is the New Safe: The Rules Have Changed . . .

Technology change, political change, human develop have led to a time where security is all together a different thing than it once was.

Some of Gage’s nuggests:

  • Opportunities to solve problems are abundant and that’s where wealth is created.
  • We are all now in charge of creating our own channel and communicating that with the world.
  • Technology makes audacious ideas reachable today.
  • Nobody has a money shortage we simply have an idea shortage – come up with the right idea and money will be plentiful.
  • Ask the right questions about every industry – Who owns the moon?
  • What are the three things that keep my market awake at night?
  • What’s going to happen with every form of technology in my market?
  • You must understand cyclical, linear, hard and soft trends to predict the future.
  • If something is impossible, how could it be possible?
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Feb 13 2013
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Would Anyone Care If Your Business Disappeared?

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Marketing podcast with John Mackey

The title of this blog post is the gut wrenching, eye-opening question that every business must consider if they are to make a difference.

empty seats

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I’ve found over the years that most business owners are motivated by the fact that they can make a difference with their business. It may not always start that way, but over time, and through conscious consideration, a higher purpose often evolves.

But how do you bring that higher purpose to the entire organization? How do you make it the focus of why you do what you do?

My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is John Mackey, founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market and author of Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business

In our interview Mackey shares his most important idea about purpose. “First off, business is not zero sum game – it creates values when everyone wins – all stakeholders – customers, employees, suppliers, investors,  and the community at large.”

So, how do you find purpose in your business?

Do a purpose search.

Bring some small group of all of your stakeholders together and let them tell you – Why the world needs your business or the difference you are currently making. This could be an incredibly powerful set of meetings and it just might inspire a totally new and motivating direction for your entire organization.

In his book Mackey’s cites dozens of examples of companies that are doing well by doing good and outlines a plan for finding purpose, developing conscious leadership, creating systems intelligence and building community based on mutual benefit.

Purpose is, in my opinion, the most potent value proposition you can create. It’s how you make a difference and differentiate in the same breath.

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Feb 6 2013
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Will Facebook Remain Relevant?

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Marketing podcast with Ekaterina Walter

With over a billion users, a place in the everyday life of over 60% of Internet users and a track record as one of the fastest growing companies in history, the title of this post may seem odd.

Marketing Zuckerberg

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But, like every white-hot phenomenon, Facebook must continue to evolve to remain relevant in the lives of those that built it. There are already signs that people are growing weary of the behavior the social network fostered.

The Facebook generation is growing up and the next wave of high school and college age folks don’t think it’s all that cool. Vine and Instagram seem so much hipper right now.

So, is the future of Facebook a sure one?

My guest for today’s episode of the Duct Tape Podcast thinks Facebook has something that other companies lack – a leader with a long-term vision.

In Think Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebook’s Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg, social media innovator at Intel, Ekaterina Walter outlines how 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg revolutionized the Internet and why he may continue to do so.

Walter contends that Zuckerberg possesses the traits that have driven other leaders such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos, to create innovation and breakthroughs over and over again.

Most notably she stresses Zuckerberg’s uncanny long view. In the face of mounting pressures to produce profit for shareholders, a place on the world leadership stage and constant criticism for decisions on innovation and privacy, Zuckerberg has remained passionate about the long-term path for Facebook and that, Walters suggests, is why she would not bet against Facebook.

Throughout Think Like Zuck Walters illustrates the nature of five traits that are shared by brilliant leaders and signal the healthy traits of any leader.

The five traits or P’s are:

  • Passion — Keep your energy and commitment fully charged by pursuing something you believe in.
  • Purpose — Don’t just create a great product, drive a meaningful movement.
  • People — Build powerful teams that can execute your vision.
  • Product — Create a product that is innovative, that breaks all the rules, that changes everything.
  • Partnerships — Build powerful partnerships with people who fuel imagination and energize execution.

It’s funny how many recent works, including my last book, The Commitment Engine, have explored the relevancy of things like passion and purpose in business.

There is little denying the impact these traits bring to the story and culture of a business and, love the idea or hate it, Mark Zuckerberg is a shining example of what it takes.

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Jan 30 2013
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5 Things Your Referral Sources Desperately Want to Know

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Marketing podcast with Michael Port

referral education

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Most marketers are clear about targeting their marketing and advertising messages. but when it comes to referrals it seems that notion is no longer valid.

The thing is, we all want referrals, but what we really want are referrals and introductions that fit, that match what we consider our ideal client profile.

And here’s the other thing, our referral sources often are equally enthusiastic about providing referrals, but when we don’t help them understand how to do this in the best possible way, we make their job that much more difficult.

You need to think in terms of an education process for referral sources, be they clients or strategic partners, just as you think in terms of educating prospective clients.

On this week’s episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I visit with Michael Port, author of Book Yourself Solid and upcoming Book Yourself Solid Illustrated, about this very thing.

Michael has consistently advised an approach that mandates that you get very, very specific about who does and does not make an ideal client for your business and during this conversation we talk about how to bring your “red velvet rope policy” to the generation of referrals.

Your referral sources need to know the following five things.

1) How would I spot your ideal client?

Describe your ideal client in such detail that most would have a hard time not identifying at least a handful of people that fit perfectly. Or better still, identify several actual prospective individuals or companies to use as examples. The more detail, including the types of pain or challenge they might be facing, the better prepared your referral sources are to make the right introductions.

2) How would I best describe why they should hire you?

Hopefully you have a very clear understanding of this first. I often refer to this as your value proposition or why us. Give your referral sources the actual words to use to describe how you are different from everyone else that says they do what you do.

3) What are some common trigger phrases I should listen for?

Whether you sell siding or software people probably don’t sit around with friends and discuss how they long for some siding or software. You’ve probably discovered that people talk about the problems in their lives and you’ve got to be good at translating that into the need for what you do. So, someone might say, “I sure hate painting my house every other year” or “my accountant is all over me because we can’t ever produce accurate sales reports.” These are what I call trigger phrases and you should produce a solid list of the actual things a hot prospect might say and provide this list to your sources.

4) What is your follow-up process?

Go ahead and tell your sources exactly how you intend to follow up and exactly how you would like them to be involved. This helps turn a lead into an introduction and set their mind at ease that you have a professional and valuable follow-up process rather than a hunt and kill approach.

5) What’s in in for me?

This last one may take many forms and only in rare instances would I suggest some form of monetary incentive. It is a good idea however to reinforce two things – why this is a valuable thing for them to do and how much your appreciate it. Often times connecting referral generation with non profit support or allowing them win something related to your business makes a lot of sense and can add some fun to the process.

You can create a one sheet document, web page or just informally address each in a meeting, but the key is to make it easy for your referral sources to do what they quite naturally want to do.

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Jan 25 2013
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Marketing Is a Habit, Not an Event

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Marketing podcast with John Jantsch

Get this 12 month blueprint as a free eBook here – Total Online Presence Blueprint

Live by the calendar

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Business owners often view marketing as something they must finish so they can get back to work.

Marketing, as I’ve stated often, is never done, it’s just another system that you must operate at the highest level possible at all times.

With that in mind, you must view marketing as a habit. It must be something that invades your daily routine. You must identify and keep two or three high priority marketing activities at the top of your project list each month.

One of the ways that I’ve been successful at pushing this “live by the calendar” mentality is to get business owners to create a monthly theme of focus and build their plans around this focus. You can practice this idea with a monthly content theme or a monthly action plan theme.

Once you have your monthly focus you can develop projects, resources and partnerships related to your theme. You can create weekly staff meetings that keep your theme alive and measured. And, you can start to make daily marketing habit appointments with yourself and others to continue steady progress in this all important arena.

When you take this month by month approach you’ll find that progress happens, things get moved forward and the view of marketing looking back over six months of this practice looks pretty astonishing.

For this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I present the audio version of a month by month action plan aimed at helping you build a Total Online Presence.

I take you down a 12 month journey and prescribe a theme for each month along with six to eight action items. The idea is for you to choose no more than three items each month and attack them until finished.

You may also find slides I prepared for this talk to be helpful.

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Jan 16 2013
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The Number One Mistake People Make When It Comes To Referral Marketing

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Marketing podcast with Bill Cates

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Everyone loves referrals, but let’s face it – the real point of a referral is a customer. If you’re getting plenty of referrals, but few are turning into new clients, it’s time to change a few things about your approach to referrals.

referral introduction

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The number one mistake people make in the business of referral generation is to ask for leads or referrals when they should be asking for introductions.

So many people seek referrals by simply asking clients, or anyone that will listen, if they know anybody who needs what they do. If the referral source can come up with a few names we’re often tickled to have some new “leads” to go chase.

But, what do we really have? Something less than cold call – maybe. Sure, we can name drop, “Bob said I should call you.” But, we’ve all been on the other end of that call and know how that usually ends up.

If you want to make referral generation a significant part of your marketing success you need to start asking for introductions and not simply a list of names. You need to build the trust and leverage that would allow you to ask a client to introduce you to three others that could benefit from the value you bring.

In this week’s episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I visit with Bill Cates, author of Get More Referrals Now and the upcoming Beyond Referrals. Bill has spent many years coaching financial professionals on the fine art of authentic referral generation and in this segment he shares some well tested tactics.

The key to generating introductions is to make it as easy as possible for your referral source to do so. Offer a list of specific prospects you would like to meet and see if they know anyone on the list. Offer to host an informal educational workshop and allow your best customers to bring a friend or two. Take a handful of customers to lunch and ask them each to bring a guest.

Cates mentions a former client that would ask his clients to introduce him to two colleagues who would take his call just because they asked them to.

Getting your customers or contacts to rise to the level of engagement required to make introductions or bring a friend to lunch requires a level of value that few can muster. This is the key to making this idea work. You must bring value to every interaction, conversation and setting.

When you can do this, people will gladly introduce you to others. When you change the context of a referral to that of an introduction you automatically raise the stakes for all parties and that’s the place where you can do your magic.

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Jan 9 2013
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The ROI of Relationships

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Marketing podcast with Bob Burg

I suspect the title of this post will raise some eyebrows. I mean relationships aren’t about ROI right? They’re about something much deeper. Something you don’t measure in the same way you might, say, the performance of an ad.

relationships

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Well, maybe. Relationships in business are more important than ever and why not think about the return on the time and assets you invest in building real ones.

Relationships can and do feed the soul and make businesses more human and they are quite often the key to great success.

When we work to build relationships we invest our relevance, our influence and our network – all valuable assets. So, why not think in terms of investing these things wisely.

But, if we were to take this ROI notion to heart, we must measure the right thing.

I visited with Bob Burg, best selling author of Endless Referrals and The Go-Giver for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and right off the bat Bob offered this, “All things being equal we do business with and refer those we know, like and trust.”

I know you’ve probably heard me utter those same words many times and it is the ultimate game we engage in – building trust. In fact, I would argue that trust and respect are the definitive measures of a strong and healthy relationship.

Today it’s so easy to talk about the relationship we invest in with our thousands of Twitter followers or our Google+ Circles, but can that scale in any manner that feeds the soul or the bank account?

One of Burg’s greatest contributions to the art of relationship building comes from his relentless pursuit of the notion of giving before getting. Healthy relationships are almost always built on our ability to add value.

Value can be something as simple as “you make me feel better” to something much more business like such as “you help us get more from our current assets,” but the equation remains the same – those that enter into relationships and potential relationships seeking to give value earn trust and respect and that’s how you produce a return on your investment.

I believe you can start to measure the ROI of relationships based on how much you give. Think about that for a minute. You can measure the success of a relationship based on what you give rather than what you get.

What if that was the standard by which you measured how you engaged your world?

What if instead of just looking for ways to engage potential buyers you looked for more ways to do things like introduce others, make referrals, express appreciation, share other people’s content, promote someone else’s dream or understand what a person was lacking.

Although it may at times seem counterintuitive, and it can’t be done with an eye on reciprocation, this is how you measure the ROI of relationships.

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Jan 3 2013
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How to Create a Total Content System

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Marketing podcast with John Jantsch

Content system

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As content becomes increasingly important in the marketing mix, it must take on an elevated place in your strategy and planning. The use of high quality, education based content has become an essential ingredient in creating awareness, building trust, converting leads, serving customers and generating referrals.

I’ve said this many times over the last few years, but marketers these days have a lot in common with publishers and it’s time to embrace this reality fully.

Today I want to outline a complete systematic approach to creating and executing a content plan that borrows heavily from the editorial outlook of a publisher while acknowledging the marketing objectives facing most businesses.

Content creation and production is perhaps the biggest challenge facing marketers today and you must take a very planned and practical approach to getting it all done. Waking up every morning and deciding what you are going to write on your blog does not scale.

A Total Content SystemTM approach allows you to plan, delegate, curate, create, collaborate, repurpose and generally get far more out of every piece of content you produce. Once your system is in place it will build momentum with each passing month and begin to multiply in value to your organization.

The Total Content System goes like this:

  • Create a list of monthly Foundational Content Themes
  • Develop your Content Delivery Platform
  • Integrate your content with Core Business Objectives

(You can also listen to a 13 minute audio overview of this topic above)

Foundational Content Themes

Either through your own knowledge or by using a keyword tool like Google Keyword Tool or Wordtracker, develop a list of core content topics and assign one to each month for the next 12 months.

Each theme should be a substantial topic related to your business or industry and represent an important keyword search term. It might be helpful to think about it like a book. Each month might represent a chapter in what will ultimately make up an important body of work by the end of this year.

You can also designate terms that you know you would like to rank higher for, but currently have little or no content that leads people online or off to you.

I’ll use my organization as an example to help illustrate this point. My business and model may be significantly different than yours, but examples always seem to help fill in the blanks for people.

My editorial themes for 2013:

  • January – Referral Marketing
  • February – Coaching and Consulting
  • March – Sales and Lead Conversion
  • April – Online Integration
  • May – Writing
  • June – Strategic Partners
  • July – Customer Experience
  • Aug – Content Marketing
  • Sept – High Tech, High Touch
  • Oct – Growth Strategies
  • Nov – Analytics and Conversion
  • Dec – Personal Growth

These are all topics that I believe my community is interested in learning more about and that I personally have an interest in developing more content around. (I’m working on a sales book and will be heavy into daily writing on that project in March – all content has a purpose!)

Develop your Content Delivery Platform

Now that I have my list of foundational themes I can organize my Content Delivery Platform components accordingly. Again, this is my model, but many of these elements work for any kind of business and should be considered in your business.

  • Newsletter – I put out a weekly email newsletter. I will add themed content to each issue either through some of my own writing or by finding other people’s content related to the theme and highlighting it.
  • Blog posts – I write a daily blog post and may schedule a post related to the theme on a weekly basis. This still gives me lots of room on topics but helps me focus both from a content and SEO standpoint.
  • Guest posts – We currently run one guest post a week and use our monthly theme to suggest topics to potential guests. (If you would like to submit a guest post see the themes above for guidance and submit your idea here.)
  • Podcast guests – I produce a weekly audio podcast and the monthly theme really gives me guidance in lining up topic experts well in advance.
  • PR Pitches – We use our themes to promote stories and pitches to the media.
  • Sponsored pitches – We receive invitations to write sponsored content and conduct sponsored webinars and use our theme to guide these pitches. We also reach out to organizations that might have a special interest in a particular month’s theme with sponsor opportunities.
  • Webinars – Since we are creating all this rich, topic specific content we host monthly online seminars to deliver the content in a new form.
  • eBook – People really seem to love eBooks and they are an essential element in our list building efforts. Most themes lend themselves nicely to an eBook compilation.
  • Curate a Scoop.it topic – As we are doing the research and preparing all of the ideas for our own content, we bookmark tons of other people’s content, books, experts, tools and the like related to our theme and save the entire collection as a curated topic on Scoop.it. This allows us to attract even more readers and creates a nice library to draw from.
  • Create a content package – The final step is to take all of this content from each month and create a membership or community offering that would allow people interested in the monthly topic to access the entire package in one tidy resource. One of the things I’ve discovered over the years is that while so much content is free and available, people will pay for content that is packaged and delivered in the way they want it. Figure that piece out and you’ll really make your content efforts pay directly.

Integrate your content with Core Business Objectives

Okay, so now you’ve got your themes plotted out and you’ve got a plan for creating, filtering and aggregating all manner and form of content into your delivery system. It’s time map your content plan to your core business objectives.

This step allows you to better understand how to get return on your content investment and how much you should actually invest in creating a certain form or package of content.

For example, if one of your stated annual objectives is to dramatically increase the sale of information products, you would produce content with product creation in mind. Or, if one of your stated objectives for the year is to significantly increase your subscriber list, you would focus on producing, delivering and sharing content that attracts email capture, links and strategic partnering.

One of the most important aspects of a Total Content System plan is that it changes the lens you use to view all the information that comes at you all day long. When you know what your theme is this month and next month all of a sudden books, tools, articles and conversations take on new meaning and seem to somehow organize themselves for the benefit of your ongoing, long-term approach.

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