RonTester, Author at Do This Not That Marketing

June 4, 2018 by RonTester 1 Comment

The Best Marketing Plan Starts with You

“How’s business?”

That used to be the question I dreaded most. I had a different answer every day.

“Great!”

“Terrible!”

“I’m too busy to know for sure.”

I was trying everything I knew to grow my company. I had a great staff but I needed more clients. So I bought ads in newspapers, magazines, on television, billboards, etc. I didn’t have a coherent marketing message or strategy. If a salesperson suggested something, I was likely to take a chance on it.

Some people responded to our ads, but not enough to pay for all that advertising. That was super painful.

In retrospect, I understand why that sort of advertising didn’t work for us at that time. The fact was, I was getting the word out, but I hadn’t built a system that allowed me to share who I was and who we were in an authentic way.

I had an epiphany one day when a brave friend told me, “Your advertising is so generic, it doesn’t feel like there’s any substance to it. I can’t tell if you can really help me or not.”

Ouch. That was a painful lesson, but one I took to heart. I started to look at our advertising messages through the eyes of my potential customer and I had to agree. Generic. Boring. And I was embarrassed. Because the truth is, our marketing messages didn’t reflect who I was, who we were, or how we were committed to serving our clients. Instead, I was trying to play it safe.

Here’s what I know now: generic feels “safe” because you’re not likely to offend or alienate anyone. But generic isn’t safe because your customers don’t really get to see or know the real you, and they sense that something isn’t right. They may not be able to articulate why they’re put off, but they are. So they don’t call, come by, or buy.

Here’s what I recommend instead of trying to play it safe.

Start with you. Who are you? Who are you really? Beyond being an accountant, a physical therapist or a [fill in the blank]? How did you come to do what you do for a living? What’s your passion? What energizes you? What’s your story?

When you share your story, it will resonate with the people you’re meant to serve. Your humanity will shine through, and that will help people to know, like and trust you. And people do business with people they know, like and trust.

When a potential customer becomes aware of you or your company, they will probably check you out. They may check your company website, your company Facebook page, or your LinkedIn profile. And when they do, they’ll be asking “Do I have a good feeling about this person/company? Do I believe this person/this company can help me solve my problem?” If you tell your story, sharing yourself and your mission to serve others authentically, then people are much more likely to have a good feeling about you.

And if the answer is “Yes, I think they might be able to help me,” they will likely give you and your company more time and attention, an opportunity to earn their trust and their business.

But what if you share your story and some people don’t resonate with it? What if they don’t like your story? Then don’t worry about them. They’re not your people. If you’re doing business right, there will be others that you will be able to serve, and they will be the right ones for you.

So here’s your homework:

Check out your current marketing materials/messages. Do they reflect you and your mission, or are they generic?
Take a look at your website, company’s Facebook page, and/or your LinkedIn profile. If you replaced your name/info with your competition’s name/info, would it make any difference?
Share your story authentically. Why you? What energizes you? What are you excited about? Why do you choose to serve those you do? What specific success stories can you share with your audience?

I know this may be a lot to take in, and it may be helpful to talk to someone about how you present yourself to the world and where you might need to tweak things. If that’s the case, please email me ron@rontester.com . Let’s set up a time to talk. I’d love to be of service to you.

Last but not least, if you’d like to read more about authentic marketing, I recommend this article by Brittni Kinney or this article by Stephen Zoeller.

April 25, 2018 by RonTester Leave a Comment

What to Say When You’re Turning Your Hobby Into a Business

What to say when you turn your hobby into a business Are you thinking about turning your hobby into a business?

If you’re good at what you do so people really benefit/find value in your products or services, you might have a viable business.

One challenge?

Getting comfortable as conversations transition to business. It’s uncomfortable. Not just for some people, for most of us. Especially if you’re mission-driven and want to help everybody (or almost everybody).

So how do you get comfortable?

Sadly, there’s no magic bullet.

For most people, the answer is powering through, experimenting with what works, what feels right. Seeing how people respond. Learning, growing, habituating until it no longer feels awkward.

Here’s one way you can jump start the process of getting comfortable:

0. Think of 5-10 different ways you could have the sales conversation, introducing them to the idea that this is the kind of work that you do as a business now. Write them down. These don’t have to be long—a few sentences will usually suffice.
1. Get together with a small group of people you know and trust who will give you honest feedback. Ideally this group would have 2-5 people.
2. Tell them that you’re struggling with having a sales conversation and you have some ideas you’d like to run past them for their feedback.
3. Share 5-10 different ways of approaching the subject.
4. Get feedback/suggestions about what worked well, what fell flat.
5. Practice the ones that work so they roll easily out of your mouth. Believe it or not, practicing those phrases out loud will make it easier to say it when you’re talking to people who might be your prospects/ideal clients. You might even practice in front of a mirror. Sounds silly, I know, but it helps.

Here’s the bottom line: if you’re going to turn your hobby into a business, you’ve got to be brave. And the more you prepare and practice, the braver you’ll be.

If you need help turning your hobby into a business, let’s talk. You can email me ron@rontester.com and let me know what you need help with. I may not be the right person to help you, but we’ll never know unless you’re brave enough to raise your hand and ask for what you want.

If you’re looking for a great place to learn more about marketing for small business, check out the course I teach with Connie Ragen Green called How to Market for Small Business. You can find out more by clicking here.

April 23, 2018 by RonTester Leave a Comment

How Scaling Affects Content Creation

Improved Idea Generation

Scaling content forces you to give each piece of content a lot more thought and consideration and planning ahead. With the additional planning and reimaging of the content, you will come up with more ideas because you aren’t thinking of each piece of content as one thing in isolation anymore.

Instead, each piece of content becomes not just a blog post, but research for future pieces of content such as an eCourse, or a video education series, or a podcast. Now that you can look at content differently you’ll be able to bring more creativity to all the content ideas that you generate.

Get More Bang for Your Buck

By strategic rewriting, reformatting, and reusing the content that you have spent a lot of time, money and effort creating, you’ll actually get a lot more bang for your buck.

If you can create a certain number of pieces of content each month, based off your product funnel and the information you want to impart on your audience, and then each of these pieces of content are recreated into other formats, and each new creation is shared multiple times on social media, via email marketing and via your affiliates, how much more will you be able to grow your business from each piece of content?

Get Your Ideas to More People

When you spend time reproducing your content into many different forms, and even languages, and sharing it often through social media, email marketing, and other means, you’re going to get your ideas to more people than you did before.

The more people who see your information, the more leads you’re going to get, and the more credibility you will get for the work that you do. Strategic content creation, curation, and sharing across multiple networks will work in concert with your overall marketing plan.

Develop Thought Leadership

One of the ways in which you become a sought-after person in business is to become a thought leader. Scaled content allows you to become a thought leader by helping you make the most of the content you are creating, plus the content other people have created through curation.

By showing others your expertise through sharing your thoughts on other people’s content, and choosing the right content to share with your audience from other authors, you will become known as a thought leader within your community. This can boost your credibility exponentially among your audience members.

Make Competitors Allies

A great way to turn competitors into friends is to start curating their content. Share their content with your audience with your commentary and thoughts. You can use as much as 50 percent of your content as curated content as long as you add in your own thoughts, link to and provide attribution to the original creators of the content.

Now competitors will see what you’ve done and they may be encouraged to comment on what you said, or bring you into a cross-blog conversation that can bring you brand new traffic from their audience. Plus it turns your website or blog into a hub for information revolving around your niche, a one-stop shop for your audience to find the information of the day about your topic.

Multiply Your Message

Once you’ve developed a piece of content in any format, you can immediately multiply the message by reproducing it into new formats. You don’t want to copy and paste the information into a new format; you want instead to use the work as research, and reimagine it into a new format.

The blog post becomes a slideshare, and the slideshare becomes a YouTube video, and so forth. Use some creativity when moving content to a new format. You want to consider the personality of the network that your content will be pushed out to when crafting the new format. Also, give the new format some of its own personality and creative changes to ensure that it’s not cookie cutter.

Become a Global Brand

Most people read content or use content only in their own language. If you want to reach other audiences in other languages, you can duplicate your content into new languages by having it translated into entirely new websites. This will attract the audience you want to promote your products and services to.

Don’t just use the same content in a different language, but also be sure to consider the values and personalities of the audience that speaks that language. You may need to change more than just the words to make it work. However, adding more languages can boost your selling potential and your reach. Consider English, Spanish, French, German, and any language that has freedom of use and purchasing power on the internet.

Empower Brand Ambassadors

Affiliates, employees, contractors, friends, colleagues…they all need to feel as if they can share the work that you do without concern. Make it easy for them to share your content in their own words on their social media accounts, blogs, and among their contacts.

Push out content that can be edited by your colleagues, affiliates, employees and contractors to make it original yet still carry the message you want to get out. Teach them how to use the information to make the most of it.

Ask for Help

At first, content creation was a mystery to me. And it was hard enough to come up with any content, let alone scale it. But when you get used to scaling your content, using one thing to create another, then another, then another, you’ll find that the work gets even more interesting and enjoyable.

Do you need some help strategizing about what sort of content you should be creating and how you can scale it? If so, please ask someone. You can always email me Ron [at] rontester.com. And if we’re not a good fit, I know other people that might be able to help. What you absolutely don’t want to do is go it alone and suffer. Life is too short to suffer.