Post Category → People & Outsourcing

Marketing Scams Revealed

Marketing scamsIn this article I want to talk a little bit about marketing scams.

Having run an offline manufacturing business myself for 12 months, I know what it is like to have to find someone trustworthy to outsource marketing jobs to because there are plenty of untrustworthy agencies in the marketplace – these are the pirates of commerce!  They are out to ‘steal’ your marketing budget i.e. deliver a lot less value than you could otherwise get if you had some insider knowledge.

I have recently been reminded of this fact by my son, who has started a marketing job with a company that sells higher-end accounting software.  They have put out for two marketing quotes:

  • to restyle and vectorise their logo – they were quoted and paid £285
  • to create a survey of their customers – they have been quoted £6,000

These are jobs that I could gave got done for $19 within one hour for the logo restyling with unlimited revisions and in the latter case I could have either set this up for free using Google Forms or, if they wanted a more sophisticated job,  for around £200 plus a couple of hours of my time bearing in mind that the survey questions will be created by my son’s firm anyway!

These are just two examples of marketing agencies leveraging the ignorance of their customer to quote outrageous fees. My son is learning fast that he needs to be very careful in shark infested waters!

I would say that 90% of websites created for offline businesses are marketing scams – most of them receive next to no visitors and even if they did would not convert prospects into customers and certainly they could not measure a return on investment.

This terrible scam has undermined the trust and confidence that many businesses have in online marketing which is a great pity.

I have had to bootstrap my business and, as a consequence, have uncovered many fast and cheap ways to get things done – I could make a very good business out of arbitrage i.e. being the middleman and taking a commission out of outsourcing marketing jobs but at rates that would severely undercut these agency sharks.

There is even software available that enables you to identify people seeking marketing help on Craigslist and then matching these request with gigs on Fiverr.com so that you can quote a competitive fee to the customer.

In the info-marketing world, the scammers are characterised by people using false income claims and lying or telling half-truths about how to earn an income online.  There are more of these than you would suspect.  In fact any small achievement or success is often blown out all proportion by the marketer in an effort to sell his/her product.

You can only implement what you are taught and then get the experience and data you get from taking action – until you have tested it for yourself you must not believe anything you are told!

However, if you have a little marketing knowledge, it can certainly be turned into a good income if you can help businesses to find cheaper and faster solutions than those being offered by outright marketing scammers who are the pirates of our trade.

In the meantime, every business needs to proceed with caution because there are plenty of marketing scams to catch out the unwary.  If you are aware of any, please post it in the comments below and share it with your fellow entrepreneurs because we need to expose these marketing scams!

Daniel Pink & The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Daniel PinkThe video below features Daniel Pink who is talking about the surprising truth about what motivates us.

He talks about how the traditional ‘carrot and stick’ incentives don’t work for any task that requires even rudimentary cognitive or creative skills.  If the task is purely mechanical then the carrot and stick incentive scheme will work.

He goes on to talk about what does work for cognitive jobs and tasks – basically you have to treat people like people which means that they are driven by 3 basic drivers or needs:

  1. A desire for autonomy i.e. to be self-directed
  2. A desire for mastery i.e. to be making progress in their job
  3. A desire for purpose i.e. to be part of something larger than ourselves.

I can totally relate to this because this is partly why I left banking in 2001.

  • we lost a good deal of autonomy at branch level when computerisation enabled Head Office to monitor precisely what we were doing and started to interfere in everything we were doing at branch level.  Yes there are risks with autonomy but on the whole I think the majority of us had much greater job satisfaction when we could say that these were the results we created without Head Office looking over our shoulders all the time and constantly raining a shower of rules and regulations down upon us.  They wanted staff compliance and thereby they lost staff engagement.
  • the job changed from having a mastery of risk management and customer service to wanting us to master sales and achievement of sales targets – these two skills are to some extent conflicting with each other because there were many occasions that it would have been better to walk away from a transaction but staff were driven forward to do things that weren’t good business by the need to achieve a sales target.
  • and I do believe that we lost a sense of purpose.  My purpose was always to help my customers to become better and bigger businesses that served the community over the long term. I didn’t share the new purpose of maximising short term profits by selling banking services. I simply couldn’t get on board with a purpose that didn’t align with my own and hence I decided to leave because it simply became too stressful to buck the system.

I now compare my banking job with internet marketing:

  • I am totally self-directed with the freedom to choose my own business model and strategy and to acquire new skills in areas that interest me.
  • I love the challenge of trying to master internet marketing which, whilst simple at one level, is also a highly complex area where the sands are constantly shifting through the shear creativity of our online marketing community.
  • and my purpose is to help my customers to make money online by serving and improving the lives of other people through the provision of information, training and software and thereby to provide for our families.  (It is very important to articulate your purpose clearly if you want other people to be energised and inspired by that purpose.)

The video below is good use of 40 minutes of your time as it will make you think about how you motivate yourself and other people in future. This is just one of the 325 videos that is part of the upsell package to Productivity Made Simple which we are launching on 22nd September 2014 for a surprisingly low price.

The Importance of Relationships in Business

When I left banking in 2001, I was reminded about the importance of relationships.

I was surprised and touched by the number of customers who asked me not to leave banking and who told me how much they valued their relationship with me.  (It was only a pity that they had not told me earlier before I had made the decision to leave!)

Looking back, I can now identify the reason that I had to leave banking.  The bank was asking me to do things that meant that I could not properly honour the relationship that I had built up with my customers.

How could I sell them products and services that I would never buy myself?  I simply couldn’t do it and live with myself.  (But it seems plenty did and hence all the mis-selling scandals we have seen in the UK.)

I started a business consultancy immediately after leaving the Bank and for the next 5 or 6 years attracted new business to my consultancy principally from those former banking customers.

Today, I’m trying to drum into my daughter and son-in-law, who are both working long hours in the city of London,  the risks they are taking by leaving their two young children in the hands of nannies.  They are seriously under-estimating the importance of their relationship with their children and the impact it will have on all their lives.

The older I get, the more and more importance I attach to relationships.  Whilst we may be poor in money terms,  if we are rich in relationships then we are rich indeed.  (I admire the Asian community for the way in which family, friends and community support each other, particularly in business – it is one of their great strengths in my opinion.)

Surveys have shown that many poor people in the under-developed countries are actually happier than more wealthy people because of their relationships within their community, family and friends.

Having too many possessions can actually be a huge burden because they need maintaining, securing, storing, insuring etc  Do people like you because of who you are or what you own?

On the other hand, you can never have too many genuine relationships.

I have been considering the role that relationships play in internet marketing.  It seems to me that most relationships are pretty superficial:

  • take ‘friends’ on Facebook for example – are they really friends or just people you want to exploit or who want to exploit you in some way?
  • how about subscribers to your list – do you genuinely care for them and their success or are they just a source of cash?
  • how about our relationship as internet marketers with local businesses – are we simply preying on their ignorance rather than offering genuine value to those business owners?  I have seen plenty of so-called web designers that have produced websites that will never earn a return on their customers investment.

In business, the strength of your relationships will generally be based on your ability to improve the life of your customer (and very occasionally will develop into something stronger and more personal.)  It seems to me that you cannot go too far wrong if you concentrate and focus on helping to improve the lives of other people.

In order to do that you need to know who they are, what they are interested in and what they might want and need.  Without that you are shooting in the breeze (which is what most internet marketers do which is why they end up in my spam folder).

You can mitigate that a bit by segmenting your lists but it takes a lot of work to communicate ‘personally’ with each list.  One strategy is to automate your follow-up sequence for each list so that those emails address the immediate reason the joined that particular list.  So your first 7 days emails are directly relevant to what they opted into.  After 7 days you might then address other problems that are commonly encountered in their niche.

You also need to acquire the skills to be able to improve another persons life.

Simply calling yourself a ‘coach’ without having any coaching skills is asking for trouble because your customers will eventually discover the truth of what you can deliver and potentially your reputation in the marketplace will never recover.  As the banks will discover, once lost, reputation and trust takes an awfully long time to recover.

But how do you stand out from the crowd of marketers that are filling your prospect/customers email inbox with their communications?

Here are a few things that you might consider:

  • make your communications fun and entertaining – become an expert at telling stories
  • be authentic, genuine and open – tell them the good, the bad and the ugly i.e. about your failures as well as your successes, the pros and the cons, your weaknesses as well as your strengths.  Only promote from a position of personal knowledge of a product or service (rather than obligation or being motivated by money) i.e. be worthy of trust
  • have a personal opinion – even if it risks alienating some people with contrary beliefs i.e. stand up for what you believe in
  • ask for your customers feedback and respond to it e.g. surveys
  • offer free value or bonuses together with your promotions – this is called an ethical bribe.
  • be approachable – give them your direct contact details
  • communicate in face-to-face videos – let them see who you really are and show them that you have an attractive personality.
  • show them your depth rather than your surface – most of us only reveal ‘the tip of a very large iceberg’.  How can we expect people to know, like and trust us if we only reveal a carefully doctored image of ourselves?
  • respond promptly to requests for help and assistance.
  • treat them as you would wish to be treated by others – no tricks, lies or deceit.  (Turn away customers that you cannot help, or refer them elsewhere, rather than trying to deliver the undeliverable.)

Please let me know in the comments below how you develop relationships with your prospects and customers?

Do you agree with my comments about the importance of relationships or do you prefer the strategy of burning your list by hitting them with offers right from the outset?