I’d like to get to know you a little better.
What is your main goal this year?
Hit reply, I’d love to know where you’re at.
Marketing Advisor, Mentor, & Educator
Kevin C. Whelan
I’d like to get to know you a little better.
What is your main goal this year?
Hit reply, I’d love to know where you’re at.
I was listening to Zig Ziglar’s audio book, Secrets of Closing the Sales. It’s a fun listen, albeit a little old school.
One thing in the book that stood out was when it he talks about three factors that lead to lasting sales impact in business:
1. Frequency: how often people are reminded of you and your services.
2. Recency: how recently people were reminded of you and your services.
3. Potency: the level of impact your appearances make on people.
Daily publishing is great because it keeps a high degree of frequency and recency.
These alone give you an advantage.
There are even cognitive biases toward preferring the most frequent and recent things we encounter. But let’s leave that aside for now.
Furthermore, if you’re skilled or lucky enough, daily publishing will also make a reasonable dent on the potency scale.
Not every time you publish, granted, but the total experience should make a reasonable impact.
So if you plan to publish less frequently, it will also affect your recency advantages. Which means your potency better be high to make up for it.
In other words, you better make a decent impact to have similar advantages to more frequent publishing schedules.
There’s no single way to succeed and a trade-off to every strategy.
Harry Dry, creator of Marketing Examples, just released a new section of his already-great website highlighting examples of strong copywriting in use.
When you hover over the examples, it gives you a bite-sized explainer of what makes it interesting, with underlines and highlights to call out the lessons. It’s a fun way to learn some new ideas without a lot of mental work.
If you haven’t already heard of Marketing Examples, the site features case studies and examples of good marketing of all kinds. I highly recommend subscribing to the newsletter to keep your tactical thinking sharp.
If you’re into copywriting—as all good marketers should be—you’ll love this new section of his site.
Check it out here and let me know if any examples stand out to you.
All of my recurring advisory services—whether consulting, private coaching, group coaching, or even memberships to Mindshare Pro—come with “unlimited” access to me for questions.
Unlimited access might seen like a scary proposition. But does it really need to concern you?
Personally, I don’t think so. Clients are also generally respectful of your time. But it still helps to have systems in place to make it easy for everyone.
Below are a few of the features that help limit the “risk” of offering unlimited access to my brain.
I typically do weekly calls for the first month in my 1:1 programs to get up to speed quickly on things, then phase into less frequent calls as the work evens out.
For group coaching, I do an initial 1:1 kick-off call for each client to get things going smoothly before they join the group component, giving them the attention they need to get a few things moving right away.
These practices keep my clients from twiddling their thumbs after our first call or having to rely on a high volume of questions to get value in the first few weeks.
I promise a 24 business-hour response time for my clients’ questions, though I aim to respond in a few hours if I can.
This buffer window makes it easier to keep conversations at a steady and sustainable pace.
I also limit who in the company has access to me, which prevents me from fielding questions from an entire organization. It might be one person, or two people, or just the marketing department and key participants.
This practice helps a lot, especially for the lower-priced tiers of service.
Most importantly, I keep recurring, deep-dive calls on the calendar to allow my clients to gather these questions and knock them out together in real time.
Most clients prefer it this way, too. It’s a lot easier to tackle things in bulk vs. trickling it over email or piecemealing conversations via Slack.
These scheduled calls handle the bulk of my weekly activity.
I also allow short calls to be scheduled between our regular calls, but they rarely get used unless something unusual is going on.
As a result of these features, my work is generally calm, stable, and evenly distributed throughout the weeks and months.
Onboarding can be a little more intensive, but otherwise things tend to smooth out, making unlimited advisory services a sustainable and desirable aspect to my business model.
Do you offer advisory services? Hit reply and let me know if it’s ever been an issue for you.
General feedback is hard to give and usually isn’t helpful to receive.
That’s why when people ask me for general feedback on something, I try to probe deeper into their specific questions and what they are trying to accomplish before giving a response.
Am I critiquing the design? The language? The content? The order of things? The idea itself? Where do I even begin?
It’s impossible to know where to draw the line with general feedback. Sure, you have ideas, but where do you begin? Where do you end?
So if you want good feedback on something, ask specific questions. Show where your head is at. List where you’re unsure or need extra attention.
And if you’re in the advisor seat, take pause before giving general feedback. It will be laborious for you and it often won’t give people the answers they really need.
There will still be general feedback given with a specific lens applied. But at least it will be easier to deliver and more valuable to receive.
This is a preview episode of the private podcast that comes with a free Mindshare Community membership. Join today for more members-only content and community.
As I wrote about the other day, one of the most critical aspects of scaling a consulting business without hiring a team is to generate assets from your ideas and expertise.
In this episode, I break down how and why you should aim to document all your ideas and processes in your business to help you create leverage and grow without working harder.
If you’re reading this via email, click here to listen to this episode on the web or join Mindshare to listen to more episodes of the private podcast.
One of my favourite marketing podcasts has just started a new (11th) season. It’s called Under the Influence.
It features marketing stories about companies, typically told through the lens of a specific form of marketing, such as bottle caps, trading cards, online reviews, and a wide range of other niche topics.
It’s definitely worth adding to your podcast player.
The host is Terry O’Rielly, a former copywriter and radio ad producer who has been in the business for decades. His stories, style, and lessons are highly engaging and each episode is a joy to listen to.
He also wrote a great book, which is a must-read (or listen, as I like to do). It’s called This I Know. It’s highly strategic, funny, and gets your wheels turning every time you read it.
The audio format is narrated by him and it’s excellent for the same reasons as the podcast. If you like audio, that’s the one to get.
Enjoy!
Every piece of content you create has the potential to be come an asset that works for you in your business.
By documenting your knowledge and processes, you can share your expertise once and have it teach people for a long time, creating more consistent and predictable results in the process.
This is how you create leverage as a consultant. It’s the difference between owning a business and selling your time.
Here are three ways to turn your content into assets that will work for you:
1. Your content attracts clients for a long time. Podcast episodes, blog posts, social media posts, and other forms of content can live a long life, working for you long after you publish them—especially if you re-purpose and bring the good stuff back to the surface from time to time.
2. Your knowledge can be turned into products, memberships, and training, allowing you to sell your ideas without your direct involvement each time. This is the key to creating scale as an advisor and educator.
3. They can be used to make your consulting work more efficient. By having a library of training, explanations, and documented processes, you can more efficiently guide your clients using these assets and allow them to download your full thinking without having to repeat yourself every time.
So, every time you create a piece of content, think about how you can re-use, re-purpose, and re-sell it.
Organize it. Put it in a community or learning management software. Spin off resources. Keep it up to date.
Doing this is the key to greater financial upside, more consistent results, and less effort per engagement.
Once you get busy, it’s the best way to expand without hiring.
Yesterday, I wrote about the US military’s WWI “overwhelm the problem” strategy.
I got an enlightening response from reader, Frank McLung. With his permission, I’m sharing in case you find it valuable, too.
Carl vo Clausewitz Principles of War is where this “overwhelm” strategy come from. Specifically the principle of mass: concentrating combat power at the decisive place and time to overwhelm the objective.
All of his principles are valuable and have marketing applications.
In 2022, I’m going to employ mass, economy of force, and simplicity in my consulting to refocus. That will include cutting out my newsletter, increasing tweets, and not taking on any new clients.
We’ll see how that goes!
While I hate to hear your newsletter is meeting the chopping block (email is my favourite channel by far), I do love that you’re making strategic bets that involve very real trade-offs.
Let us know how this works out for you!
And definitely visit the page linked in Frank’s response. The ideas Frank plans to employ make a lot of sense in a marketing context.
Lately, I’ve been watching a Netflix documentary lately called WWII in Color. It has been an eye-opening experience.
Something about colourising the black and white film makes it feel even more present and real. A stark reminder of the atrocities of war.
Anyway, one of the things I found interesting was the American battle strategy during that time.
There was a quote by the narrator along the lines of how ‘the Americans don’t solve problems, they overwhelm them.’
He was referring to the sheer volume of machinery and manpower they threw at the enemy forces. If x was needed to complete the mission, they sent x^10.
I’m no war strategist. I’m not even a fan of war strategy. But I do find history fascinating. And I like strategy.
So it got me thinking about how this applies to marketing strategy. Are there any correlations that could be made?
I think there are. Here are some applicable examples:
I’m not saying this is a good strategy, or even that it’s a true example of strategy.
But it is an example of a simple, intuitive, and logical bet on an insight that doing significantly more than necessary will overwhelm the resistance between you and your goals.
Maybe it will work in some scenarios for you. Maybe it won’t. That’s not the point.
My point is that it’s a strategy. It’s simple and places a big bet that could actually work.
So if you don’t have a formal strategy, what big bets are you making this year?