The truth is, most people can create a wildly successful marketing plan. It ain’t rocket science. Even if you’re not creative at all. Even if you’ve never been to business school.

Everything I know about marketing has been a process of trial and error. In all that experimenting, one process for creating marketing plans stands head-and-shoulders above the rest. I’ve used this method with dozens of clients, from itty bitty service businesses to offices with 100+ employees, and every time I end up with a thrilled client doing great business.

The Discovery Phase

The first piece of any marketing plan is checking in with yourself. This part is fun because you ask yourself a lot of really tough questions! (Okay, maybe it’s just me.)

Get your people together, or unplug and lock yourself in a room, and ask yourself these three things:

• What do you honestly think are your company’s strengths? What is it you do amazingly well?
• What are your company’s weaknesses? Where do you fall short in serving your clients?
• What do you think makes you different from all the other businesses that do what you do?

There are no wrong answers, but honesty is important. Be real with yourself.

The Research Phase

In the research phase, you’re going to ask your clients the same questions you asked yourself.

Remember in high school when your teacher made you pass your pop quiz to the person in front of you to grade? They did it because a) they were lazy, let’s be real, but also because b) other people are better judges of your strengths and weaknesses.

Don’t use a survey or another impersonal data collector at this stage! Give your clients a call instead. When you’re able to hear your client’s tone and ask them follow up questions, you’ll get way more from your research.

Some of you might be tempted to visit your clients in person. Don’t. A little bit of distance will make them feel more comfortable being honest. It’s hard for a client to tell you to your face they’re not satisfied, but if they’re not satisfied you really need to hear what they have to say.

The Direction Phase

Alright, so you asked yourself some tough questions, you asked your clients, now it’s the moment of truth. Your direction. When people talk about how to write a marketing plan, this is usually what they mean. Most businesses don’t bother with the discovery and research phases, so their direction is based on little more than a hunch. You’ve done the work, which makes the difference between an okay marketing plan and a wildly successful one.

The first thing to do to figure out your direction is identify the gaps. Gaps exist wherever there’s a mismatch between what you think and what your clients think.

How Gaps Work

Let me show you what I mean. Suppose you run a graphic design business, and you offer a 24-hour turnaround. Here are some gaps you might discover:

• You thought clients valued your 24-hour turnaround, but most of your clients don’t need things that fast.
• You deliver two designs for every job, which your clients say makes you different and valued. You don’t mention it in your sales process.
• You thought timely response to requests was your greatest strength, but clients have had spotty experiences.

In this phase, you’re starting to form the story of what your business is. In our example of the furiously fast designer, you’d put more emphasis on delivering multiple designs, fix your response time issues and probably do away with 24-hour turnaround.

Some of this doesn’t sound like marketing, exactly, but can you imagine trying to sell super fast design to a crowd that doesn’t care? No matter how great your pitch is, your audience is going to go “eh, whatever.” And what about your inconsistent response time? If your client’s experience doesn’t match what your promise, you just lost them (and their trust).

The direction phase is all about finding the things that trip you up, making a plan to fix them, and discovering what your clients value most.

The Tactical Phase

The tactical phase is the actual Doing Stuff part of your plan, where your direction turns into action. We’ve been building a solid foundation, and now it’s time to put up the house.

First of all, don’t bother with advertising.

I know, you’ve been lead to believe that ads are Very Important (by people who sell ads). But service businesses are just different. Your client is (hopefully) paying more than $29.99 for your work. You have to convince people to trust you, because “oh, shiny!” won’t close a sale for services. You’re really marketing your or your team’s capabilities, and to do that there are just three tactics you need to perfect. Ready? Let’s do this.

Touchpoint Analysis

A touchpoint analysis is an audit of all your marketing efforts and your operations. Does every piece of communication show your value? Do your actions live up to your promises? Map out your full sales and service process from your client’s perspective –  from first contact to final invoice – and see where you can fill some gaps.

Thought Leadership

Thought leadership is essentially getting your expertise out in front of people, however you choose to do that. There are lots of options, from digital (think blog posts, podcasts and video) to hands-on (like hosting workshops or giving a talk at a conference.)

If you’re thinking I don’t have any expertise or I don’t know what to share, there’s a free guide to choosing a thought leadership topic in this blog post.

Events

I’m no event planner, but hosting your own events is a time-tested method to get new client leads and build a reputation as an expert. (See #2, thought leadership. I love when things check two boxes.)

“Event” doesn’t have to mean “catered dinner for 200 and a TED talk style presentation”. It could be as simple as a lunch and learn session on a topic you know well, where you invite your current clients and let them bring a colleague or their own client.

How to Write a Marketing Plan: Bonus Round

I know you can do this. You’re definitely not alone! “How to write a marketing plan” is in the Google search history of every entrepreneur I’ve ever spoken to.

In fact, so many people have asked me about it that I’m creating a course on how to write a marketing plan the wildly successful way. The doors open for the first time in April 2017. Click here to be the first to know when it’s live!

Learn more about the Screw Advertising course!

This post is part of my series for service businesses, Screw Advertising. You can find Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.

The post How to Create a Wildly Successful Marketing Plan for Your Service Business appeared first on Yes That Jill Marketing.

That can seem an impossible task. Sure, you know who your current clients are. Should you model your key client on that? Or a vision you have of what they should be?

The answer is, a bit of both. Here’s a quick and dirty guide to figuring out your ideal client.

Accept that you can’t sell to everyone.

Plenty of businesses get hung up here before the key client train has even left the station. Most of my first meetings with a new client go like this:

Me: So who are you targeting to buy this?
Them: Everyone!
Me: Well, what are your existing clients like?
Them: Oh they’re just anybody! We have clients from these 40 different streams – and we have to mention all 40 in everything we do. That’s very important.

Here’s your problem with that: you don’t have that kind of budget. You know who can afford to sell to “everyone”? Wal-Mart. Coca Cola. Their ad budgets approach literal billions.

And I know it kills you to hear it, but not everyone is interested in buying what you’re selling, like ever. There are some people who, no matter how many billboards they see, would never buy from you. Know this in your heart and let go of the idea that “everyone” is something you need to aim for.

Identify your low-hanging fruit.

Forget about building a key client persona in the vein of Lucy is 32 and drives a two-door BMW sedan… (Unless you own a BMW dealership, in which case, fine.)

When you think about the clients who a) generate the most profit for you, b) are easiest to work with and c) appreciate your value, who comes to mind? That’s your low-hanging fruit right there.

These clients are dreams to work with because they’re deeply appreciative of what you offer and write you the kind of cheque you deserve for your work without blinking an eye. Not working with anyone like that yet? No problem, I have an alternative strategy for you.

Cherry-pick your clients’ best traits and build your ideal.

Maybe you don’t have any clients who meet the bar for “low-hanging fruit” exactly. In that case, think about the pros column for every client you have (ignore any problems for now).

Who pays what you’re worth? Who is easy to work with? Who respects your advice and values you? Hopefully you have at least one client for each of these categories.

If you threw those clients in a blender right now, and only their good traits came out, what would that look like? This is a picture of your “low-hanging fruit”, even if you don’t have a current client that fits the whole bill.

Go easy on the demographics.

Demographics are things you can measure, like age, location, number of children, number of employees, income. You certainly need a few demographics to bring your key client into focus. A word of caution here though: only define the characteristics that matter.

For example, maybe you only serve local clients, so “within 50 km of My City” is a fair demographic limit. But don’t start defining how many kids they have if you sell bulldozers. It doesn’t matter.

Make sure you truly understand the psychographics.

Psychographics are difficult-to-measure qualities like a person’s attitude, communication style, and beliefs.

Some psychographics of your key client will be quite obvious because of the way you do business. For example, I’m what you could kindly call a straight-shooter. People who appreciate no-BS advice love me. There’s also a bunch of people who go HARUMPH when I refer to my blog series as Screw Advertising. But I’m not about to get a personality transplant to run my business, which would be inauthentic at best, so I know I need to target my people: the no-BS advice people.

Other psychographics you’ll have to dig deeper on. Ask your clients why they choose you over others. Find out what they value. Then use that to build your key client profile.

There’s no perfect answer.

Your key client is an idea, not a mandate. Not all of your clients will look like your key client – in fact, most of them won’t be exactly like you’d imagined. But if you concentrate on creating the ideal business for your key client, many of the clients you get will fit the mold.

Which means you’ll have a client base that’s easy to work with, values you, and pays what you’re worth. Not a bad deal.

The post The Quick and Dirty Guide to Figuring Out Your Key Client appeared first on Yes That Jill Marketing.

Every year on New Year’s Day, we swear to our friends and ourselves we’re going to lose weight, stop smoking, spend less time on our phones, reconnect with our spouses, and make our first million.

There’s this thing about New Year’s resolutions, maybe you’ve heard it before. Like a graph on a fancy calculator, the number of New Year’s resolutions completed every year is approaching zero. (That was a high school math joke. Ahem.)

And okay, part of that is because we just love cake and cigarettes and our iPhones.

But a big part is because we’ve set goals, but we have no objectives.

Maybe you’ve also heard that a goal with no plan is a dream. An objective bridges the gap between your goals and your plans.

So let’s talk about what really happens when you have a world of objectives, just objectives:

You have hyper-specific direction on what you want to achieve.

A good objective is very specific. Not “I want to lose weight” or “I want to make more money”, but “I want to make $50,000 ” or “I want to increase my product sales by 10%”. (Those are two very different outcomes!)

You’ll know when you get there.

Unlike a goal, an objective is measurable. That means if you don’t or can’t track it, you can’t set an objective for it. Seems simple, right? AND YET. Maybe you have an old computer system that can’t narrow down sales by specific products. Maybe you’ve never kept records on how many email subscribers or Facebook fans you’ve had year-over-year.

Whatever it is, if you want your business to change, find a way to track that change. No excuses.

You can actually take practical steps toward it.

This is where I love the difference between goals and objectives even more. Goals tend to be a bit wishy-washy and deal in generalities. But an objective has a clear action associated with it. Consider this contrast:

• Goal: Improve customer experience.
• Objective: Increase customer satisfaction rate to 85% by Dec 31, 2017.

Alright, so right off the bat you know a) you need a way to track customer satisfaction (if you haven’t been) and b) you need to come up with a list of tasks that will improve customer satisfaction. There are clear next steps.

You’re firmly rooted in real life.

More than anything, objectives are realistic. Because you’re attaching numbers and measurable metrics to them, you can’t pick anything that’s wildly out of the realm of possibility.

I want to become a millionaire this year! is a great goal, but what was your revenue last year? $50,000? You might be dreaming. $900,000? Looks very possible. An objective forces you to do the math and take a good, long look in the mirror about what you can reasonably achieve.

Here’s the millionaire goal, in objective form, for someone making $50,000.

Objective: Increase my income by $950,000 or 2,000% in 2017.

If you are a reasonable person, you’re going to look at that and have serious doubts about how achievable it is. And I’m sorry to say there are no “overnight successes” that haven’t been five or ten years in the making.

Your objective expires if you don’t get it done.

Short-term objectives are more meaningful to move things forward than long-term goals. I know, it sounds like the opposite of everything you’ve been taught about life goals and creating strategy. Of course you need a long-term vision, but that vision can’t take you anywhere. It’s a dream.

Objectives break down that dream into manageable, timely parts. A month. A year. A deadline. So not only are they realistic; you get to break down the baby steps to get to your grand vision. Consider this vision which I stole from Life is Good, a t-shirt company with a social cause angle.

To spread the power of optimism.

But there’s an important question the vision doesn’t help with: how?

When you’re framing the how, you need the specificity of a deadline. There’s no metric where you can tick off “successfully spread the power of optimism”.

So what are you going to do today, tomorrow and next month to move you closer to your vision? Find out. And make it a deadline. 

The post What Really Happens When You Stop Setting Goals (And Get an Objective) appeared first on Yes That Jill Marketing.

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When that happens, it’s easy to get sucked into throwing ideas at a wall and seeing what sticks. The trouble is, the “something will work” strategy is the only thing guaranteed not to work. (Or at least, not before you waste a lot of time, effort and money.) Still, many business owners keep bouncing around without a marketing strategy, not doing as well as they could, because they believe one or more of The Big Dumb Marketing Strategy Myths.

Myth #1: Marketing strategies are just fluff with no practical next steps.

This myth is understandable because a lot of strategies we’ve seen are fluff. You’ve probably worked for a place where the strategy came down from on high, Ten Commandments style, and splattered you with a lot of buzzwords before disappearing into the void. But that’s not the way things are supposed to be.

It’s infuriating, because how are you supposed to do something about “Our Company shalt synergize with those that doth align twixt the Company Values.” You can’t. It’s nonsense.

A marketing strategy in the true sense of creating direction has both guiding principles and a set of practical next steps. The purpose of a marketing strategy is to solve the problem of what to do with your marketing. If it doesn’t do that, it’s not a strategy.

Click here to sign up for my FREE cheat sheet –  “4 Keys to Unlock a Winning Marketing Strategy”

Myth #2: A good salesperson is all you need to grow your business.

Salespeople are fantastic. How can you argue with someone who nabs business for you? It seems like a sweet deal because it is.

Perhaps, though, you’ve had the oh-so-fun experience of getting debriefed by the salesperson, walking confidently into your first client meeting, and finding out the client is on a totally different page. I once walked into a meeting expecting to talk about marketing planning, and left tasked with creating a print package. It included a bunch of brochures based on what the employees at the company thought was important, not what customers wanted to see. My questions about whether this was a good idea did not go over well. They didn’t see me as an advisor, they just wanted their brochures (and speed it up, will you??)

If you don’t know who your key client is, or your key value, or how to communicate your value, you can’t expect your salesperson to pull it out of thin air. You’ll end up with a high percentage of bad fit clients who don’t appreciate what you do and take a lot of energy to keep.

Myth #3: My niche is too specific for marketing strategy to work.

Maybe you’ve seen one of those job ads asking for 10 years of experience working in a specific industry, only to scroll further and realize the main duties are filing and data entry. These employers are convinced their industry is so special you couldn’t possibly apply experience from any other realm. “Filing papers is different here!” their ads insist.

Besides not being any fun at parties, people who insist they are business unicorns are just wrong. The principles of marketing work whether you sell toilet paper or engineer aeronautics equipment. There’s no magical niche so unique that good marketing doesn’t apply.

Myth #4: I don’t have time to do a marketing strategy.

Look, you’re the boss of your life. I just don’t believe you. The model I use takes about 12 hours of actual time, spaced out in tiny pieces over 30 days. Need more than 30 days? Take it. Who cares? You make the rules.

So if you’re thinking you need to spend hours a day in meetings, having Big Thoughts or brainstorming, you don’t. You can do your own marketing strategy in less time than it takes to binge-watch a season of Game of Thrones.

So what are you waiting for?

Now that you know the marketing strategy myths that were deviously holding you back, it’s time to kick your marketing into gear. I’ve created a FREE, detailed cheat sheet on the 4 Keys to Unlock a Winning Marketing Strategy to help you get started.

I made this cheat sheet because I’ve had the feeling of staring at the screen, willing a marketing strategy to appear. I don’t want you to get hung up on where to start and quit because you’re frustrated. So I’ve laid out the four key elements you need to set your marketing strategy on the perfect path for your business. Once you’ve got a handle on these, the rest of your plan takes shapes SO much more easily.

Click the giant yellow button to download it!

Click here to sign up for my FREE cheat sheet –  “4 Keys to Unlock a Winning Marketing Strategy”

The post 4 Myths About Marketing Strategy That Are Ruining Your Business appeared first on Yes That Jill Marketing.

But you know how the rest of that meeting goes. Everyone makes noises about how on-strategy or not the project is. Most if not all of them last saw the strategy the day it was published, if ever.

I call this “binder strategy”. Binder strategy is a company-wide disease, and you must eradicate it.

How do you know if you have “binder strategy”?

You have binder strategy if:

• You ask 10 people in your organization why you exist, and get 10 different answers.
• You ask 10 customers the same question and get 10 different answers. (Bonus  points if your customers incorrectly identify your industry or main product line.)
• You can’t remember the main points of your strategy.
• You never knew the main points of your strategy because it’s over 100 pages of dense text and who has time for that.
• Actually, if your strategy is more than five pages long.
• This is the first time you’ve considered your strategy in over a month.

If you have binder strategy, I’m going to propose something a little crazy.

Throw your strategy in the garbage.

You aren’t living your strategy. Your employees aren’t living your strategy. You care about it so little, in fact, that it’s collecting dust in a corner of your office or a folder on your computer.

Binder strategy is fatal. Maybe not today, or a year from now, but your company is slowly dying of neglect. This is not me being dramatic. Your strategy is the captain of the ship, and if it’s locked up in a box somewhere, you are going to hit an iceberg eventually.

Don’t let the door hit its…you know.

You have absolutely zero to lose, except maybe the binder. Okay, donate the binder to a program for underprivileged kids’ school supplies. Problem solved.

Uh, so, what now?

We’ll get to that. Watch for the next Yes That Jill Guide.

Rest assured, you don’t need a backup plan just yet. The first step is knowing you have a problem, and ruthlessly throwing that problem in the garbage, then setting the garbage can on fire. I’ll help you work out what to do once it’s gone in the coming weeks.

The post How to Cure Your Case of Binder Strategy appeared first on Yes That Jill Marketing.

“Yes,” I replied. “Mine would actually be good.”

Unsurprisingly, he didn’t write back. But his question reminded me of many conversations I’d had with clients boiling down to “why should I hire a copywriter?”

There’s always some spoken or unspoken alternative option. Instead of a content farm where I can get 800 words for $5. Instead of writing it myself. Instead of getting my intern to write it.

The fact is, anyone can write some content. If your goal is to have words on paper (or the internet), there are a thousand cheap ways to accomplish that. You don’t need a copywriter to generate a block of the English language.

So when do you need a copywriter?

First of all, a copywriter is a professional writer, usually with a marketing and advertising background (and often a journalism or public relations one as well). There are three key scenarios where you need that expertise:

A good copywriter can make a complicated subject relatable. Consider this example from a recent client of mine:

“Strategy augmentations need to include early failure detection, failure mitigation and post failure cleanup. Copywriting Client Inc. elements set a new industry standard for controlling ferrous contaminants.”

These sentences make perfect sense to the people who wrote them and mean nothing to almost anyone else. When you’re close to the work, it becomes almost impossible to look at your words objectively.

My client’s new website describes the same service this way: “Equipment with a custom-designed Copywriting Client system spends more time operational and needs fewer, less expensive repairs than a regular piece of machinery.”

This happens across industries and there’s a very good chance what you write about your business is Greek to people on the outside. A copywriter helps you communicate clearly to Joe Average what you actually do.

Anyone can write words. Not just anyone can write words inspiring action.

Doing nothing is your customer’s default mode. You have to convince them it’s worth their while to do something. Whether you want them to call, buy, or share on social media, having a copywriter craft the message is mission critical.

Remember the last time you were motivated to donate to a cause, or make a purchase, or share a blog post with your networks. It wasn’t an accident. You were driven to act by words – the donation pitch, the ‘buy now’ button, or the blogger’s wisdom.

Copywriters inject a backbone of marketing strategy into every word. They know what your customer needs to hear to move them past their default “do nothing” mode.

Not all persuasion needs to end in a purchase. Often in the process of running a business, you develop stakeholders who aren’t customers (and may never be.) Nevertheless, they influence your customers and you need them on your side.

Politicians have speechwriters to win hearts and minds. Organizations have copywriters.

Think of a land developer trying to build community support for a condo development. People in the community probably won’t buy a condo down the street. But if they heavily oppose the project, the developer could get a reputation for dividing communities – not a great look for people who market building them.

You can probably think of examples in your own business where a non-customer impacts your bottom line. A relationship that important deserves a copywriter’s powers of persuasion.

That’s it.

 
Those are the three main situations where you need to hire a copywriter. Next time you run into one of them, before you tackle the keyboard, give your local copywriter a call.

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