Behind the Curtain - My Personal Marketing Secrets
People ask me how I actively market my business without paid advertising or spending days doing it, so in the interest of helping you peer behind the magician's curtain, here's five of my top tips.
SEO SEO SEO. I can't say this strongly enough. Being in the top few positions on Google for your search terms (and the top spot or two in Google maps) for your keywords is a gold mine. SEO is all about the other person – working out what the other person is looking for and then helping them find the solution they are looking for. If I only had a limited budget to spend, I would always invest in SEO for organic results rather than any form of paid advertising.
Get your brand right (and then lever the heck out of it). By this I mean, get to know who you are, what you do, the customers you like to work with and what makes you unique. Then include that in every piece of your communication and advertising. You want the one look and feel for your business cards, letterhead, website, blog, Facebook, Twitter and every other area that you want to play with.
The clearer you are, and the clearer you can share your vision and brand, the more customers will put up their hand and say, "hey I'm a match for your brand – can we work together?"
Keep current in your industry & share your knowledge. I love to stay up to date with current industry trends. What I have done is use Google Reader to collect all the RSS feeds of all of my favourite blogs & magazines onto the one page.
I have sorted all of these few hundred feeds into categories (e.g.: neuromarketing, marketing, HR, PR, trends, gurus etc) and then every few days scan the headlines and top sentence or two of each article to work out which ones I want to read in depth. The articles that are particularly interesting I tweet (which then automatically flows into Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo etc). This way I stay current and share what I am learning with people.
I also use Google news to bring me only the news stories related to areas I am interested in. Whether or not Lindsay Lohan is going to jail bores me to tears, yet find me some funky neuroscience research and I am there! Google news is free and you can set up search terms relating to your specific areas of interest.
It is like creating a newspaper just for you, only filled with directly relevant articles from Wall Street Journal, LA times, Financial Review and other leading places. Again – the articles that I am most interested in are shared with people via Twitter or my blog. Don't be an information miser – knowledge is NOT power. Share it freely and help people achieve their best.
Get into words. Writing about your areas of interest and expertise helps reinforce your brand in the minds of your clients (as well as creates Google juice through search engines). I regularly write through my blog and my newsletter (which you will note is on my site and not mailed in full to my list. This is a simple tactic to help draw search engines back to my site).
I then take the information I have written and tweak it to become an article for online article directories, or I submit them to offline print publications. In some cases, I expand on the material to convert it to a book, or adjust it to become a training program.
Never never never write something and only use it once. Once you have some words down on paper, work out what else you can do with it. You will reach more people, touch more lives and make your life easier all at the same time.
Network with a purpose. I network for different purposes – to find new alliance partners (people I can refer my clients to) and to gain emotional contact and validation (it is very easy to live in the writing cave). I never network as a way to get new clients from the networking event. Many people see networking events as a happy hunting ground and people can smell hunters from 10 paces and avoid them like the plague.
I see networking as a place where I can go to find more FOR my clients – more contacts for my clients, more resources for my clients and more ways to help my clients grow. Networking is not about me – it is all about my clients and my clients love that I can refer them to great PR people, electricians and lawyers.
So if I had to put a theme to my marketing approach, it is all about actively finding ways to help other people and in doing so attracting the right people to my business. It is not push push push, but rather it is gentle attraction. It is all about being visible and helping people be the best they can be. It is also about how I can take everything I do, and use it for multiple purposes.
This week I spoke with a HR colleague who works almost exclusively with large development companies. These companies take on multi-million dollar infrastructure projects such as road and tunnel construction, mine development and major public buildings.
And the one HR thing that these companies all invest in are cross team collaboration processes at the beginning of the project. These companies all take time, money and resources to set up each of the teams across different functional units and build trust, and strategies to encourage sharing of ideas and knowledge.
They have found that investing up front means greater success for the project as duplication, delays and overlap (and turf wars) are significantly reduced.
They take the time to plan cross team collaboration, rather than hoping it will happen and punishing teams when it doesn't.
Just like any relationship, if you want it to work, you need to work at it. If things are not working well, you need to take action to fix it. Take a leaf from the big end of town and take a look at your teams to see how you can improve how they work together.
One my all time favourite authors is Malcolm Gladwell. He takes diverse academic research and theories and makes them interesing and accessible. He is one of the most elegant writers I have read - his words just flow like honey, and you are left wanting more of his work.
His work, "Outliers: The Story of Success", looks at what it takes to be successful. He answers the question - why some people achieve so much more in life than others.
In this book he looks at the conditions that led to the Beatles, Bill Gates as well as why professional athletes are the way they are, why Asian people are good at maths and why IQ is not a better predictor of success.
This was one of those "aha" books for me - I could feel the cogs in my mind whirring and realigning while I was reading it. The matter he covers is provocative, challenging and thought provoking.
If you have ever wondered how many hours of practice it takes to master a skill, or why culture impacts on the most obscure things like airline crashes, then grab a copy of "Outliers: The Story of Success".
"You are only as strong as your weakest link". Ever wondered if this holds true for your team? In this post I share some fascinating research on the impact one negative person, slacker or just plain old-fashioned pessimistic person can have on your team.
Legal stuff: This newsletter is intended as only a general guideline for Australian businesses. You should seek specific advice for your situation rather than relying only on this newsletter
Earnings disclaimer. Some of the content may include advertorial information, which means I may receive financial compensation for the products I recommend. But - unless I know and trust the product, I will not recommend it.
Subject: Go further than one bad employee spoils the team
In my last job as chief financial officer of an engineering consultancy we followed Steve Collins book "Good to great" most particularly in looking for great staff.
Steve says 1 great staff member is worth 3 GOOD ones.
Whilst that sounds a bit far fetched, I have now employed it in the company I co-own and I believe it is the reason we are as successful as we are.
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Keep current in your industry & share your knowledge. I love to stay up to date with current industry trends. What I have done is use Google Reader to collect all the RSS feeds of all of my favourite blogs & magazines onto the one page. 
This week I spoke with a HR colleague who works almost exclusively with large development companies. These companies take on multi-million dollar infrastructure projects such as road and tunnel construction, mine development and major public buildings. 
