Get More Business: Nothing Succeeds Like Success

This post started as a podcast, so feel free to listen instead… or listen AND read along!

Business & Marketing Success Requires GIVING

I was getting ready to go to the Ukraine to go speak at a B2B conference. It’s kind of interesting because I went to Egypt not long after their revolution and Ukraine just had one, and still there’s some conflict going on in the eastern part of the Ukraine.

There’s this great app called Duolingo that teaches you other languages and I was surprised to discover that, though they don’t have every language, they have Ukrainian, so I’m sitting there learning Ukrainian, which is crazy; the Cyrillic alphabet, you’ve seen those crazy Russian words and stuff. It’s the same. They’re totally different symbols, totally weird. Hard to learn.

If I can just come up with a few words or phrases to say… It makes a big difference to people if a foreign guest speaker can learn their language. That you would care enough to speak their language.

As always, marketing’s about putting yourself in other people’s shoes. Caring what they care about.

That’s a big part of relationships in general and social media, as well.

Can you put yourself in other people’s shoes? Can you make deposits in their emotional bank by being giving and generous and nice? All that stuff comes back to you.

Business & Marketing Success Requires POSITIONING

I’m doing that, getting ready to go speak and working on a course idea with Garrison Wynn to teach experts how to get paid to speak. He and I are both getting a lot of business and a lot of inquiries.

The speaking market is not very good right now, actually. It’s a tough market right now. But Garrison’s a guy that gets 90-100 deals a year. He’s probably one of the most employed speakers there is out there if you look at sheer number of speaking gigs. He’s helped me out a lot in the business. I had more paid gigs this year than ever before.

To succeed in the speaking business you have to focus on positioning. Positioning’s an interesting part of marketing. It’s the competitive part of your branding…

• How does your brand look compared to other brands?
• How do you position it in the marketplace?
• What is it for? What is it compared to other things?
• Who is it for? Who is it NOT for?
• What makes it better than your competitors?

That’s really, really important in speaking. It’s important in any competitive area, and there are a lot of experts that want to get paid to speak.

Business & Marketing Success Requires ATTENTION GRABBING

I love marketing and figuring out what works for different brands and different niches and different industries. It’s always different. Going over to the Ukraine it’s going to be all B2B, business to business. Often you’re dealing with lead generation and boring companies and boring services. How do you make it interesting? How do you convince an audience that although you may not want to use images that include bacons or dogs or cats, even though that would certainly touch a human cord in your prospects?

Content is important because you need to get people’s email for lead gen. Can you give them a white paper or an eBook or something? It’s a gift, basically, in exchange for their email. A lead magnet, right? Can you create an eBook or a video series or a white paper that solves their problem or addresses a pain point, gives them some tips, helps them avoid certain mistakes that you know about, position yourself as an authority? These are all things you want to do in the B2B world.

B2B people want to “remain professional,” right? The problem is that often that’s an excuse to do something really boring that’s easy to ignore.

Hopefully you’ve seen what Marketo did in the past. Jason Miller and Dayna Rothman spearheaded a lot of that stuff, did some really cool things. The Marketing Activity Coloring Book was really cool…

They sent that out to a bunch of people. My face is in there. You could color me if you want. It was pretty cool. They do weird things like that. It’s important to grab people’s attention when you’re marketing and doing weird stuff like that will grab attention. That’s important. We live in the world of Angry Birds, Call of Duty, Game of Thrones, the latest horrible thing the news is talking about, etc. You have to be interesting if you want to compete with all that- if you want any attention at all.

Business & Marketing Success Requires SUCCESS

The thing I really wanted to talk about the most was that we’re getting a lot of new business, we’re getting a lot of new clients for Facebook ads, marketing funnels, helping people get lead gen, setting up email autoresponders (so that after they get the email there’s a series of programmed emails that all do different types of things to condition the prospects, nurture those leads to make them more likely to buy). All those kinds of things. And we’re getting new clients for that and we’re getting speaking inquiries.

We started getting a lot more business back in September of 2015- more than normal. I did five speaking gigs within the space of a month, which is higher than average for me and was pretty intense.

We’re looking for people to hire for Facebook ads that can be really good. We don’t want to do the agency model where we have too many lower quality or less experienced people doing work on our clients. We want to maintain high performance so we’re trying to find really good people we can train to be experts. We’re going to try out a virtual assistant to do even more of our work. We’re scaling up.

And during all of that, we’re telling people about our activities via social media.

One of the reasons I think why we keep getting more work is that people love a winner. Success breeds success.

When I put a post up and say, “Hey, one of our clients is a music cruise company and they got 15 cent leads for a giveaway to promote their new Def Leppard cruise,” people get excited because I’m talking about a client and I’m talking about a success.

Nothing succeeds like success. People love a winner. They want to go with the winning team.

It’s inertia. It’s momentum.

When you’re not moving and you don’t have clients and you have nothing to talk about, it’s difficult.

Business & Marketing Success Requires BRAGGING

Once you do get clients and you do get success, you need to talk about your case studies.

It’s tough because what works to a degree is bragging. A lot of people don’t like to brag. You have to be careful how you do it.

You have to when you’re a personality based business. Obviously I’m out front in my business. When I’m saying…

• “Hey, I’m I’m getting booked to speak.”
• “People are entertained by me.”
• “People laugh at my jokes.”
• “We’re helping people get results.”
• “I’m teaching my audiences to get profits on social media and they love it.”

…It feels weird. You can fear that other people are going to judge you for being a braggart. That’s an uncomfortable part of the business.

Facebook is weird because you go on Facebook and everybody’s talking about their positive things in their lives. A lot of times are not talking about the negative things.

If you go on Facebook in a bad mood and you see all the positive things you’re like, “Gosh, everybody’s doing better than me,” and “I’m not doing well,” or “I don’t feel good,” and you’re comparing your insides to other people’s outsides and that’s always a bad idea.

It’s a weird phenomenon. You’re trying to show your success online.Why? Because we help people, we help businesses, and we want to help more of them.

We can’t help people if people don’t know that we’re able to help them, or how we help others, or how many we help, so we want to post these things and show our successes so that more people know that we could help them.

So do that, but try to do it in a way that’s just factual and specific about the results.

If possible, be humble in an honest way so that you’re not just saying you’re awesome.

Business & Marketing Success Requires FACEBOOK

That’s the main thing I want to talk about. Case studies can be boring. They don’t have to be. You don’t have to give so much information that you bore everyone to death. You can just talk about the high level results. You really don’t have to give a lot of information.

A Facebook post that talks about high level results with a picture is enough to get into somebody’s head.

That’s the thing about a Facebook post, right? You want to be able to impact someone’s brain within 3 seconds, maybe 4 or 5 seconds at the most.

You can just give them super high level information like that and they’ll see your success. That is more likely to get you more business in the future.

All right. That’s mainly what I wanted to talk about: Nothing succeeds like success, so if you’ve got successes make sure that you are shouting them from the rooftops.

1. Put your successes in Facebook posts.
2. Put your successes in blog posts.
3. Then, promote those posts with Facebook ads. If it’s a blog post, talk about your case study in depth but then create an ad that’s real top level about it.
4. Make sure you’re doing that from the Facebook Ad Manager. If you just BOOST post, you might get likes, comments and shares but you’re not going to get a lot of traffic or results on your website. That Facebook ad might be a traffic or a conversion ad, but in the news feed people can like and comment, share if they want, but it will mostly be about driving traffic to your website…
5. …where you’re going to have things like popups so people can sign up to your email list or information about how they work with you, a form, a lead magnet, etc. Once you’ve got them in your domain, then you get them onto your email list, you do your lead nurturing, and you’re converting clients, right?

Nothing succeeds like success, so shout it from the rooftops.

That’s my message for you today and I wish you all the best in business and life.