The 7 Big Marketing Mindset Shifts to Start Your Year Off in Prosperity
Were you able to listen to our introductory teleclass on January 13th? I hope so. My guest was Joe Metzger from Metzgers Printing + Mailing. Joe and I had a great time and gave some valuable information that can absolutely help you jumpstart your marketing this year.
For those of you who missed the call or would just like a recap, the call content is the subject of this post: “The 7 Big Marketing Mindset Shifts to Start Your New Year Off in Prosperity.”
If you’d like to listen to a recording of the call, we’ve made an MP3 download available. You really need to listen to get all of the insights and great advice from both Joe and me, as well as the marketing tips and true stories from others’ experiences as well as our own.
Why mindset?
Getting your mindset tuned up is one of the most important things you can do at the beginning of the year - more important than planning campaigns, tactics, or techniques. If your “inner house” isn’t in order, if you have self doubt, if you don’t know you have people, resources, and systems to support you, the best of strategies can fail.
Check that you have these 7 elements in place and you’ll be off to a great start.
1. You are responsible for your current results
It sounds so simple. You may think, of course I’m in charge of my life. Or do you really think the economy is in charge of your life, or your company, or the government?
There is a huge shift in our country away from truly being responsible for ourselves, and we’re all guilty of it to some degree.
We see it on the news all the time. Many in our country expect the government, their employers, their parents, and others to take care of them. This didn’t start until the Industrial Revolution when people started working for companies, and the companies started taking care of employees.
Before that, if you needed food, you went out and plowed a field. If you needed money, you sold a horse, or did a project for a neighbor. Think about that for a minute. Are we all just a bit too willing to wait for an answer today from someone else rather than to go out and plow the field like our great-grandparents did?
What does this have to do with marketing? A lot.
It’s tough to market now, there’s no doubt about it. A lot of people, and companies, have tightened their buying. But you are in charge. You may have to find a different field to plow, or a different tool to use. But you are still in charge.
Marketing isn’t always about advertising, or direct mail, or spending lots of money. Sometimes it’s about getting close to your customers in different ways.
One way might be to give more personal attention at a time when many companies are pulling back - Let your customers know they’re buying from real people. Be authentic, be helpful. Now’s the time to come out from behind the counter and really be personal with your customers - they’re not getting that everywhere, and they’ll come back to you if you give it to them.
2. Make careful choices, and choose differently than others
We make hundreds of choices every day, many of them unconscious. You brush your teeth without thinking about it, you choose what you’ll eat for breakfast. In your personal life, it’s easy to let life just pull you along - to just drift along on autopilot.
The same thing can happen with your marketing, and you just do the same things over and over. It’s time to make some new and different choices.
Don’t unconsciously follow the crowd, because your decisions determine your results.
You might want to check out Michael Port’s new book, The Contrarian Effect: Why it Pays Big to Take Typical Sales Advice and Do the Opposite. In it, Port discusses why the typical old sales tactics we’re all familiar with no longer work. He advises finding newer approaches to building client relationships and closing more sales by doing the exact opposite that conventional sales advice dictates.
Another way to make different choices is to look outside your market, and not just do what your competitors and others in your industry are doing, what’s always been done.
Sometimes a tactic that’s well known in one market is totally unknown in another, and can work very well.
3. Get out of your comfort zone
We’re always told to be cautious. “Don’t reach too high, you may fail.” How many times have you heard that, or “You can’t do that, something may go wrong”?
Anything I’ve ever done that was worth doing was out of my comfort zone.
Learning how to catch a mooring point in extremely high winds after blowing out the main sail in the British Virgin Islands was out of my comfort zone. The first time I got up in front of a large group to give a branding presentation was out of my comfort zone.
Starting my business in a city where I knew very few people was definitely out of my comfort zone.
I remember my dad telling me that I could be anything I wanted to be, and I believed him - and I didn’t want to let him down. So I kept reaching. Now, if I don’t feel a little bit scared by something, I figure I’m not growing.
We all need to get out of our marketing comfort zones, too. We need to keep our marketing growing, to keep taking some risks. I love the story about Richard Branson, when he first started his commercial airline company, Virgin Airlines. The way the story goes, Branson didn’t even have a plane when he made his first flight. He sold tickets to passengers, but he didn’t even have a plane. He rented a plane, and slapped a “Virgin” logo on it. I’ll bet Branson was out of his marketing comfort zone on that one.
4. Surround yourself with people who are where you want to be
We’ve all heard that we are the sum of the five people we hang around with the most. Well, you can become the sum of the five companies that you admire the most if you study the marketing they do. Check out and comment on their blogs, follow their executives on Twitter, study their websites and print literature, read their press.
Learn how organizations where you want to be market themselves, get under their skin, and their “marketing” will rub off on you.
Bringing this down to you personally, there’s no better way to surround yourself with people who are where you want to be than to join or form a mastermind group. One of the most famous mastermind groups of all time included Henry Ford, Thomas Edison Harvey Firestone, John Burroughs, and Luther Burbank. These men, all leaders in their fields, would get together often to share ideas and encourage each other. Each of them found the group to be pivotal in their growth.
5. Not everyone will like what you do
Your marketing has to be authentic to your organization - you can’t please everyone. If you try to, your marketing will be very bland. It’s important to remember that not every customer is right for you - you need to find those that align with you, that are a good fit for you.
This has to a lot to do with positioning - when you choose a position, when you decide to put a stake in the ground, it naturally excludes some things and some people.
With positioning, you’re saying “This is what I am,” or “This is what my organization is,” which in effect, also says “This is what I am not.” A lot of organizations have a problem with this, don’t want to exclude anyone or any segment in their marketing. But doing so can be one of the most powerful marketing stances you can take.
And when you do take a position, and you start to have success, there will be nay sayers, and detractors, who will criticize you. Expect it. It’s going to happen. Don’t let it sway you or make you second guess your direction. Not everyone is going to like what you do or support your success.
6. Learn to make decisions quickly
If you want a “safe” position, move slowly and keep going around and around on the same carousel, thinking and planning, thinking and planning. But if you want some “rockets” in your life, in your business, in your marketing, learn to trust your intuition, and don’t beat things to death.
One of my favorite books is an old one, Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. Andrew Carnegie, listed as the second richest man in history by Forbes as of mid 2008, had a theory that it was not luck or special talents that got him where he was, but that there were qualities he possessed that could be duplicated by anyone, with the same results. Carnegie arranged for Hill, a reporter, to interview 500 of the world’s most successful men over a period of 20 years, to uncover the similarities that led these men to success. Hill’s book is about those 15 similarities, including imagination, faith, desire, persistence, organized planning, and decision. Almost without exception, Hill’s successful subjects made decisions quickly, and changed them slowly, if at all. People who failed to be successful, Hill found, made decisions slowly, and changed them quickly and often.
Here’s another story I like about Richard Branson. Apparently he’s extremely dyslexic. You can imagine that dyslexia might be a problem when running $25 billion worth of companies. But because he has trouble with the detail in reading and studying contracts and the amount of paperwork involved in his businesses, Branson learned to study body language and facial expressions and uses his intuition to make decisions, and to make them quickly. Our intuition is a gift. We should all learn to use it more effectively.
7. Set up systems to support you
Are the systems you’re using still useful? Do the things you’ve been doing for awhile still serve you? Ask yourself, “Does this need to be done at all?” And if it does, ask, “Does it need to be done by me?” and “Is there a system that can do this?” When things slow down in business, people organize drawers, clean files, and get to things they haven’t had time to get to when busy. And that’s fine, but don’t get stuck there. You need more time to be creative, to be entrepreneurial, even within your organization, so don’t get hung up in the admin, in the tasks. Get out there and talk to people, make connections, start thinking differently, and use systems to support you.
Here’s an example: It wasn’t that long ago that we didn’t have email - that constant intrusion on our lives. Would we allow people to interrupt us that often in person, a constant barrage of questions and requests at our door? Or even on the phone? No! Sometimes you need to close the door on email and messaging, too, and not be interrupted. Tim Ferris, in his book The 4-Hour Work Week, recommends checking email twice a day. If that makes you swallow hard as it did me, you’re definitely addicted. Ferris has an auto responder set on his email program that tells people he’s checking his email at 11 am and 3 pm (or whenever) in order to be more productive, and if they have an urgent need in between, they should give him a call. I love the idea and am working towards it, but I have to confess, I’m not there yet.
That’s it. Those are our 7 Marketing Mindset Shifts. I’d love to know what you think, and would appreciate links to this post. And don’t forget to get the recording.
Tags:comfort zone, marketing mindset, mastermind, Mindset, mindset shifts, positioning