Now you must have heard of the 80 – 20 rule where 80% of sales come from 20% of customers and things like that. 80 – 20 — it kind of works in relation to pretty much anything.
And there are many books, Richard Koch has written at least a couple on them and Perry Marshall has got one on sales and marketing.
So this isn’t a specific rule, but what I’m going to suggest is this, spend 20% of your time producing and 80% of your time marketing.
[player]
Why would you say that, Jon? Because some of the things we produce take a lot of effort. Well, let me explain, you know me.
But it’s a good question and thanks for asking, I do appreciate these good questions that you ask, well done.
So, when you produce something fantastic, whether it’s a service, product, it could be huge, you could be Mr. Boeing, you could be making a Boeing dream liner and you’ve just made out whatever they cost 200 $300 million aeroplane.
But if nobody knows you made it, you may as well have not bothered.
If you don’t have a customer, what’s the point of making anything, or producing anything? Because there is no one to buy it.
So go back to chicken or egg, until you have customer number one who has a need for your product, there’s no reason to have a company, there’s no reason to be.
You might say, well, we need staff, we need a company. Do you? You need a customer first, so marketing is paramount.
Marketing Is. . .
Now marketing, remember in my definition, marketing is everything in business before or after asking the customer for their money and taking their money from them.
Everything else is marketing, so this can encompass all aspects of your business.
But I encourage you to blog, to write, to inform your customers, to put out information about who you are, what to do, what’s going on, what you’re up to and things like that, by writing e-mail, blogging etc.
If you create a blog post and you put all your effort in and do that, are you just going to hope that people are going to find your blog posts, just you, little old you, little old just you?
Are you a search engine optimization expert? Do all of your blog posts instantly go to number one in Google in the rankings for all your key search terms? Possibly not.
So you need to tell people you have written it, you need to tell them it exists. How would you do that?
Again, your questions are good today, thank you again.
Social Media
Have you built a social media following of people that have interests in the things you talk about, the things you sell, the things you do, the things you discuss?
That’s when it becomes important that you social media following is of people who are interested in what you have to say.
So you can tweet about it or put it on Facebook, you can tell people you’ve got a new post, people that have shared before.
Have you kept a database, have you tracked people that share your posts and your things often? Because you can rely on them, you can contact them and they can share with their community.
And when I say share by the way, you are then extending your reach, they are putting your information in front of their following, so that extends your reach.
And then if one of their followers share it and then it goes further and further and this is how you get reach.
There are other ways. Has anyone commented on your post before? Do you have commenters? You can let them know, you have e-mail, you can let them know that you got another post about this.
Have you made relationships with PR people, or reporters or journalists? You can let them know, or influencers, people that are going to share.
So, for example, for instance on Wednesday in our expert interview series, when someone is interviewed, it’s done in advance and then when it’s published, no they won’t know when it’s going to be published.
So when it’s published, we tell them and we’ll tell them the results and we’ll tell that person where they can find it.
Now we won’t ask them to do anything, because that’s just rude, because these are top people and to be honest, they know what to do.
But, we will suggest that if they want to look, here it is, they want to check the links, here it is. Now these people, they know and some of them are experts, they will use that to leverage their reach.
The more they put that out, the more I share, the more my followers share, it cuts both ways.
If you made a product, or if you have changed the service, if you’ve updated the sign outside your building, or you’ve bought a new company vehicle, a new van, anything, just you’ve changed anything, you’ve changed your business cards, you’ve changed your leaflets, tell people, let people know.
Use any excuse to contact people and show them what you’re up to.
And don’t just tell them you’ve got a new sign, take a photo with your smart phone and post it somewhere. And if you’re not on Twitter, get someone who is, to post it. But please, you’ve got to be on Twitter, please.
But to just promote, let people know you exist and you’re modern and you are doing things. Update your Google Ad Words to say about an offer, change your Facebook ads to update, all this kind of stuff.
Unless you do that, it’s just going to sit around, nobody is going to notice and you may as well have not bothered.
Remember, 20% of your effort producing 80% of your effort in marketing and promoting . When you do make those marketing efforts , put things into place that you can reuse in the future.
That’s what we teach, that’s what I’m calling a self marketing company, that’s what we teach here at Marketing for Owners.
If you want to know more on things like this, we have a free marketing course that explains the entire gamut of what you can do.
So just go to www.freemarketingcourse.co; how cool is that?
Easy, even I can remember it without looking it up. And that’s the end of that.
Monday Book Recommendation
Today is book of the week. And talking about essential marketing, today we’re going to talk about Greg McKeown’s book Essentialism.
It’s a fascinating book and I’ll tell you what, this is incredibly popular.
According to the back of the book, It’s simply “Replacing the ‘I have to do everything’ with the pursuit of the right thing in the right way at the right time.”
It’s by Greg McKeown; just go to Amazon, look up Essentialism and become an essentialist.
You can guess what that means, it’s in the title, doing the essential work.
This will help, it will inspire and it will improve your business.
I’ll be back tomorrow.