Take Your Spammy Seven-Figure Business Plan And Shove It

By Brooke B. Sellas, {grow} Contributing Columnist

Am I the only one being inundated with Facebook ads and emails about “winning with my totally proven and definitely in no way made up seven-figure business plan”?

Advertising strategists and business “influencers” are the new used car salesman. And they’re worse than ever.

Take this post (literally plucked from dozens when I open my Facebook Feed):

[Insert run-of-the-mill video of twenty-something using a bunch of jargon here]

Why am I sharing this?

Because I know that YOU as an entrepreneur and business owner also are working on something you’re passionate about, and you have GOALS that you want to hit.

Whether it’s to go from 6 figures to 7, or from 7 to 8… I want you to know it is DO-ABLE, and I’ve helped others DO BOTH.

So, if you want to hit the goals you set for yourself at the beginning of the year, send me a message and we can let you know about our different services, and setup a time to talk more on the phone if you like what we have to offer.

We’ll chat about your business, deliver some value, and see if we’re a good fit to work together.

We can’t wait to help you scale your business!

[Name removed to protect the not-so-innocent]

Excuse me, WHAT?

I’m not even sure what this message is saying. Or who he’s targeting.

And sadly, this isn’t the worst of them.

Guilt Trip Galore

One of my favorite tactics of the seven-figure business slingers is the guilt trip they take you on when you don’t reply to one of their 4,673 emails.

I get it. Sales is not a one-and-done process. Personally, I follow up a total of three times after our free consultation. I do not send cold emails or make cold calls. I’m sure I’ll get flack for this!

[Image Source]

Studies have salespeople thinking that sales require at least five follow-ups. That doesn’t sound far off.

Call me crazy, but I like to have some sort of warm connection or lead before I start sending you information on my company or services.

And I find it appalling to connect with someone on LinkedIn and then immediately start pitching them on my services.

Perhaps worse, where did the seven-figure business plan pushers get these scripts for guilting you into thinking you’re a horrible person for not responding to their incessant emails?

Damn, Dan, That’s Cold.

Below is a sequence of emails I got from “Dan” about growing and scaling my business.

These are cold, canned emails. And is it me, or is Dan is insinuating that I don’t already know how to do things like delegate or produce results?

On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 04:57 PM, Dan wrote:

Hey Brooke,

Saw your profile on Linkedin & noticed you work in the digital marketing industry.

My name is Daniel [removed] & I specialize in helping digital agency owners like you in growing and scaling their business.

We do this by:

• Building effective systems that streamline company operations
• Helping you hire incredible talent
• Structuring your business to run without you

Bottom line: we’ve helped a bunch of entrepreneurs increase their revenue (and profit) in the 3x – 5x range…..

Beyond growing revenue….our goal is for you take back your time, stop “hustling” for every dollar, & truly act as a real CEO in your business.

I know that sounds like a lot to promise so here is the story of one of the entrepreneurs in our program (he took his agency from $21k to $50k MRR in less than 90 days) [link removed].

If you are curious to hear a bit more about the process we share with entrepreneurs that produces these kinds of results, shoot me a quick reply!

Thanks,

Daniel

On Sat, Mar 30, 2019 at 05:01 PM, Dan wrote:

Hey Brooke,

Was checking out a bit of your past work….

…and it reminded me of a lot of Stevie [last name removed]

(He was the guy in the video from the last email I sent)

He & his team did amazing work for their clients……but he felt like he was chained to his computer day & night

(not to mention that he wasn’t personally earning anywhere near enough to justify how much of his time, life, and energy he was giving….)

I offered Stevie a few solutions that completely transformed the way he ran his business.

He began delegating more and more of the tasks he was previously convinced that he had to do. He empowered + elevated a few of his team members (which allowed Stevie to focus on the things that actually grew the business + was in his “zone of genius”)

There were a few other key things I coached him on as well. If you want a full overview of the kinds of things I help entrepreneurs with, let me know & I can send over a few times for a call.

In my experience – – just hearing about the common struggles & seeing a path to overcome them can be powerful and valuable, even if our relationship begins and ends with just that call.

Daniel

On Wed, Apr 17, 2019 at 12:00 AM, Dan wrote:

Hey Brooke,

Being a tad persistent here because what I want to share with you is incredibly powerful + valuable for digital agency owners.

I wouldn’t take the time to follow up a couple times if there wasn’t something of real substance to share on the other side of it.

If you want to grow your agency faster (while also creating more personal freedom for yourself), let me know when is a good time for you to discuss this on a quick 10-minute call. Do any of these times work?

>> Book A Call Here [link removed]

Daniel

On Fri, Apr 19, 2019 at 4:00 AM, Dan wrote:

Hey Brooke,

Guessing you are fully busy running your business & as a result haven’t had the space to take a breath (let alone strategize how to work on your business’ foundations so it can scale)

At this point I’m going to assume that now is not the right time for you to explore scaling, delegating and systemizing your business.

If you ever do feel you have a little bit of time to discuss the above, please feel free to reach out to me.

Thanks,

Daniel [last name removed]

>> Book A Call Here [link removed]

Take Your Seven-Figure Business Plan & Shove It

Who Are These People?! Why do they think this type of selling works?!

Even if they had a lovely seven-figure business plan that was all nice and laid out, it may not work for me and my business.

When did business and marketing start being about scripts and snake oil and less about business relationships?

Perhaps Mark was right when he wrote a post called, Is it time to eliminate the sales function?

Marketing and sales are about creating demand, and I fail to see how these silly seven-figure business plan gurus are doing that. How are they doing anything beyond annoying us to death?!

I know I’m being extra rant-y. But tell the truth, have ANY of you actually replied to one of these people? Have any of you bought a seven-figure business plan and made seven figures?

I’m genuinely curious. Let me know in the comments section below.

Brooke B. Sellas is the CEO & Founder of B Squared Media, an award-winning done-for-you social media management and advertising agency. Recently, she joined Mark Schaefer as the Co-host of the Marketing Companion Podcast. Brooke’s marketing mantra is “Think Conversation, Not Campaign” so be sure to give her a shout on Twitter!

The post Take Your Spammy Seven-Figure Business Plan And Shove It appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

       

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12 Incredibly easy ways to create content with emotional impact

By Mark Schaefer

One of the more shocking revelations in my book Marketing Rebellion is that loyalty has disappeared. Fully 87% of our customers “shop around” now.

As a marketing professional for more than 30 years, this sort of information is hard to take. It’s my job to make people loyal. I like loyalty!

But now that I’m aware of the true nature of our world, this sort of data seems to be hitting us from all sides a new study from Meaningful Brands reports:

• Seventy-seven percent of brands could disappear and no one would care, according to the findings. The number is 3% higher than the 2017 report and the highest since the research began in 2008.
• Brands viewed as meaningful have seen their wallet share multiply by 9X, and see a 24-point greater purchase intent.
• Nine out of ten consumers expect brands to deliver content, but consumers think 58% of content from brands is irrelevant.
• Most interesting — The report revealed a 72% correlation between content effectiveness and a brand’s impact on personal well-being.

The report should be cause for some concern for marketers, as it reveals that consumers are underwhelmed by most brands and their content.

Research by McKinsey and other show the reason people feel disconnected or even distrustful of brands is because there is a lack of emotional connection with the company and its products.

Content is an area where most marketers are failing, according to the report. Consumers expect relevant, personal content from their favorite brands, but brands are missing the opportunity to engage them in a meaningful way that builds loyalty.

Re-inventing corporate content

What does that mean? How should brands be improving the emotional impact of their content?  I believe we can take some steps forward by implementing a few simple ideas.

1. In most company content, I don’t know who is producing it. Where is the author? I want to see a human face.
2. Stop using stock photos. Show real people and their smiles. When you use stock photos, the message you convey is “even we don’t care.”
3. Nobody cares about the arc of your story. Content that connects in an emotional way must put the customer at the center. Make the customer the hero.
4. Most corporate content isn’t native to a normal content stream. For example, you can almost always spot a sponsored post on Instagram because they just don’t fit in. Take care to craft content that appears natural and native to the social stream.
5. Even company content must be in a human voice. Not a legally-approved human voice. A REAL human voice.
6. Humans are friendly, approachable and even vulnerable. How about your content? Oh yes, our human friends admit it when they make a mistake.
7. Brands should be exploring new ways to tell stories. A blog is a blog is a blog. How do you tell a story in a way where the format is as conversational as the content?
8. Stop selling. Start helping.
9. If somebody came to your store, would you ask for their email address before they enter? Treat people online like you would treat them offline. That includes ending pop-up ads. Stop doing what people hate.
10. The economic value of content that is not seen and shared is zero. Are you developing a competency in content transmission? Content must enter the conversation to work.
11. There is a difference between personalization and personal. Personalization is an expectation. Personal creates emotional impact.
12. Content should be viewed with the same esteem as your company’s products. It’s not just sales propaganda. It should be good enough to be a stand-alone product that customers look forward to receiving. If you can’t meet that standard of quality, you’ll certainly fail in this era of overwhelming information density.

What simple ideas would you add to add emotion to your content?

Mark Schaefer is the chief blogger for this site, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and the author of several best-selling digital marketing books. He is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant.  The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak to your company event or conference soon.

The post 12 Incredibly easy ways to create content with emotional impact appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

       

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Big brands struggling to connect to the Marketing Rebellion

By Mark Schaefer

I was reading an article covering one of the panels at the South by Southwest conference — “The New Consumer-Centric Approach to Insights.” It illustrated how smaller, more nimble companies have the marketing momentum right now.

It read like a narrative right out of my new book Marketing Rebellion. The customers are in control, they are seeking more meaning from brands … and these large companies are having trouble with a response to this change.

Here are a few insights from Pepsico and Mars-Wrigley executives:

• “Consumers are able to exert enormous influence. They’re looking for brands that are super authentic, consistent from inside out, and have a meaningful, profound role in their lives — otherwise there’s another brand out there.”
• “Our ability to react quickly is not great, and that’s not going away. How do we work differently to meet expectations?”
• “People haven’t changed. Technology has changed people’s expectations of what they can and should get from brands … It’s not the what — it’s the where and how.”
• “People under 24 are more likely to trust a rating, review or a peer than a brand or advertising. How many of us take that into account?”
• “It doesn’t matter if you have the most money or most resources … Bigger brands can’t just be the big kids at school. We also have to be fast and offer what customers want. Small brands are quickly moving on consumer insights and giving them what they want. They’re not encumbered by massive assets or ways of thinking.”

We’re in a new world. The customers are in control. And there has never been a more fun time to be in marketing!

Mark Schaefer is the chief blogger for this site, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and the author of several best-selling digital marketing books. He is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant.  The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak to your company event or conference soon.

The post Big brands struggling to connect to the Marketing Rebellion appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

       

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Social media shakeout: Why the future of social media is hazy

By Mark Schaefer

It took me a long time to figure out my talent.

I wasn’t a gifted athlete or singer like some other kids in school. But sometime in my early 30s I noticed that I had an instinct for knowing what comes next. While my business co-workers were obsessed with responding to some current trend, I could see how those trends projected into the future. I could connect the dots and see where we needed to be next.

If you’ve followed my blog over the years, you’ve seen how this plays out. I’ve had a pretty good track record predicting what is going to be next — or what is not going to be next — and why. Sometimes my predictions have shaken people up, but in the end, I’m usually correct.

This gift has come naturally to me — until now. For the life of me, I have no idea where social media is heading over the next 3-5 years. I have some clues, but the absolute future of social media is hazy to me (to everybody?) because there are too many mega-trends occurring at the same time:

Artificial Intelligence

The way we interact with social media is still largely … manual. But that is going to change dramatically. Computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and instantaneous translation will upend traditional social media.

5G

5G technology is rolling out throughout the world, city by city. I’m convinced this is going to mean more than faster speeds. It is going to enable entirely new content-driven business models.

Augmented/virtual reality

Last year, Facebook introduced Spaces, a format that merged social media and virtual reality:

Since its introduction, the platform has gone absolutely nowhere. Do you know ANYBODY who uses it? And yet, somehow AR and VR seem to be an inevitable fit in the social space.

How cool would it be to become a Game of Thrones character and sit around The Wall talking about the news of the day?

Influence of Gen Z

What is the most downloaded social media app of the year? I’ll bet you a shiny nickel that you don’t know. It’s TikTok. As Snapchat is to under-30s, TikTok is to under 20s. It is their new cool space of funny super-short videos. What is Gen Z’s hottest chat app? I’ll bet you don’t know this one either. It’s Google Docs.

The point is, Gen Z is pushing and pulling online social interaction into some surprising new nooks and crannies. There is an inevitable change to our marketing future happening there.

Gaming

Fortnite

On average, there are 8.3 million people concurrently hanging out with their friends on Fortnite. I could argue that this game platform is the world’s largest social network. But it’s not even mentioned in the same breath as Facebook and YouTube.

At the recent Social Media Marketing World, there was not a single talk or workshop devoted to gaming and the commercial implications for social media. It’s time to explode the idea of what social media is today. One thing for sure, increasingly it’s NOT Facebook — unless you’re over 55.

Tencent

Tencent is the largest and most successful social media company in the world. They are not a household name because they operate primarily in China. But something remarkable occurred last year — Tencent acquired 12 percent of Snapchat, becoming that social media channel’s largest shareholder.

Tencent’s technology and scope of offerings blows away anything we have in the US or Europe. As Snapchat struggles, could Tencent use this channel to build their own offering in the Western World? It’s exciting to think of the possibilities of a serious new player in the field. This would literally transform social media as we know it.

Regulation

The biggest wildcard might be future regulation. Normally, putting the words “internet” and “regulation” together would cause people to break into hives. But today, even Silicon Valley leaders are calling for some kind of regulation because these tech giants have no moral compass and simply can’t regulate themselves.

European nations are aggressively taking action against Facebook, Amazon, and Google … steps that will reverberate to all parts of the world.

Beyond regulation, some US political leaders have called for breaking up the tech giants. Nothing will happen until after the 2020 elections, but there is certainly an anti-monopoly narrative developing across party lines.

Consolidation

We can’t dismiss Facebook when it comes to a coming social media shake-out. They have the financial and technical resources to transform their company to meet these emerging trends, too. It’s unlikely that Twitter and Snap can make it on their own as independent companies long-term. I’m not sure LinkedIn is meeting Microsoft’s expectations. Even TikTok could be an acquisition target. Could these channels become part of a new Tencent play to take on Facebook in the US? How will Facebook respond to beat back the threat?

The social media shakeout

Now, perhaps you see why the future of social media is so hazy to me. All of these mega-trends are coming together to create something bold and new. Three years from now, we won’t even recognize what “social media” means compared to what we have today. Certainly we’ll all be challenged to open our eyes and redefine what it means to be in social media marketing.

Which is precisely what Brooke Sellas and I discuss in the new edition of The Marketing Companion podcast!

We begin the show with a discussion of “belonging” as a marketing priority and then move into a lively discussion of some of this social media shakeout. And most important, there is an explanation of this:

You won’t want to miss this fun and enlightening discussion! Click here to join the fun!

 

Click on this link to listen to Episode 151

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Many thanks to our friend Scott Monty for the awesome show intro. Be sure to check out his amazing newsletter The Full Monty and his new podcast available here: fullmontyshow.com.

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