We went out to dinner for my wife’s birthday last night.

Got all gussied up. Drove downtown to a new Italian place she’s been wanting to try.

The food was really good. I’m still full from all the pizza, pasta, and gelato.

The service was really good too. So was the ambiance of the place.

Overall it was great. But it wasn’t the BEST Italian restaurant I’ve been to by any means.

In fact, with so many restaurants popping up, moving, and shutting down, I probably would have forgotten the name of it in six months…

If it weren’t for the free glasses of prosecco they brought out to celebrate my wife’s birthday.

You should have seen how Alejandra’s face lit up at that!

I was thinking about that our entire drive home. How that small (but meaningful) gesture tipped the restaurant from a probable one-time thing we would eventually forget about… into a place where we’ll visit again and recommend to friends.

THAT, my friend, is the margin between victory and defeat in such a competitive environment.

A great product is just the starting point. It’s these little touches — these creative ways to surprise and delight — that get people to choose you instead of everyone else.

So, in case you haven’t thought about it lately, let me ask you:

What’s your equivalent of a free glass of birthday prosecco?

It might be your prices, loyalty program, or packaging. Maybe it’s the funny newsletters you send, or the handwritten thank-you notes you send to new customers.

WHAT you choose is limited by only your imagination. But whatever it is, it must be SOMETHING.

Once you broaden your perspective from “getting as many freaking customers as possible” to “finding ways to make customers feel special,” amazing things start to happen.

The word gets out. Customer loyalty skyrockets. Your reputation builds. All the while, you increase your average customer value and revenue while reminding them just how pleasant doing business with someone can be.

Sound good?

Go here to find out more. I’ll bring the bubbly.

Have you heard this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.”

It sounds great, right?

And in a just world, it WOULD be. Entrepreneurs could put everything they had into dreaming up the coolest products, never shaving any corners, demanding the absolute highest quality.

Except things just don’t work that way.

Nikola Tesla was one of the most brilliant scientists and thinkers to ever live. But it’s Thomas Edison we read about more often in textbooks. He knew how to hire the right people and pull the right strings. He knew about marketing.

I tried the build a better mousetrap strategy my first six months in business. Read (and re-read) copywriting books from Ogilvy, Halbert, and Collier. I even set aside time every day to copy out some of the most successful sales letters by hand — just like Gary Halbert recommended.

What happened?

Not a whole lot.

I was learning a ton about copywriting and blogging, sure. But I wasn’t doing enough to let people know about it. I trusted that, if I just kept focusing on building skills, quality would shine through eventually.

(Things changed when I started hustling on writing boards and pitching editors for guest posts on some of the top marketing blogs.)

My conclusion:

A kickass mousetrap is NECESSARY, but not SUFFICIENT for success.

Spending every waking moment on your products might have worked better when you lived in a small village five hundred years back. It didn’t take much for word to spread quickly.

But now? Your audience is living in a world of limitless options. Your competitors can keep making more content and websites. Yet your audience can’t make more time. It takes top-notch products *and* savvy marketing to connect with them and drive business.

So, by all means, build a better mousetrap!

But don’t stop there. Don’t wait for the world to beat a path to your door. Set aside time every day to get the word out there, try new things, look at the data, and tweak your strategies accordingly.

Get started here.

Stoicism saved my life.

Normally I’m not one to dive into a ton of details about personal struggles in business (or life in general.)

But I came across this ancient philosophy at the perfect time. I was insecure, afraid, and depressed. None of the newer “think positive” type self-help books helped…

The answer, it turned out, was going back to the wisdom of great people in history. To read how Emperor Marcus Aurelius navigated strife within the empire. Or how an influential statesman (Seneca) was able to turn himself into one of the richest men in Rome.

Stoicism is an old philosophy — and more complex than it first appears. But the major tenets are:

• Focus only on what you can control
• Stop seeing events as good or bad. It’s your interpretation of them, not the events themselves, where the problem lies
• Don’t overreact to triumph or disasters. Everything is temporary
• Practice misfortune and preparing for hard times

As I’ve reflected on this philosophy and tried to weave it into my life, I’ve also seen it creep into my marketing.

“Stoic marketing” isn’t sexy…

It’s all about sticking to the fundamentals, and doing them well. Finding people likely to buy what you sell. Building relationships with them that last.

Platforms and channels come and go. They can make what you’re doing more effective. But they’re no replacement for the fundamentals.

Does your marketing embody this philosophy as well?

It all begins by accepting that NO marketing tactics are guaranteed to pay off. If your offer isn’t great or you’re targeting the wrong people, no doubt. Great marketing adds fuel to the fire, but it must already be burning (with people wanting to sit around it, so to speak.)

Stop obsessed over whether your latest campaign was good or bad. Instead, focus on the feedback and data. Ask yourself “What can I learn from this?” It’s amazing how many wrong avenues lead to new ideas for products, a better understanding of your audience, and even new business models.

Don’t overreact. When your marketing is kicking butt, it’s easy to start neglecting it because you get so busy with customers. But that will just cause your pipeline to dry up several months down the road. Build a consistent, repeatable system that plants seeds and grows them for the years to come. Leave the world of “feast or famine” for the amateurs. Go pro!

Finally, practice preparing for the hard times. Running through thought experiments will help. Imagine you had to half your marketing budget, the time you could spend on it, or both. What would you keep? What would you cut? You might find yourself with new ideas to be more efficient moving forward.

The Stoics approve. Not that their approval should matter to you, anyway, because it’s outside your control 🙂

Don’t know where to start?

Get in touch here.

“Stop thinking about hitting the ball. Swing right through it instead.”

These words from my dad were one of the first lessons I ever got in golf.

I didn’t understand them at all. Wasn’t HE hitting the ball? What was I doing wrong?

It was only after a summer of practice that they started to click into place.

Your natural inclination, if you haven’t played much, is to just walk up there and whack at the ball…

But that moment of contact is just a FRACTION of what a good swing is.

There’s the coiling, and the shifting of weight onto your rear leg during the backswing. There’s the acceleration when you let your wrists turn over on the downswing and the momentum carrying you into a photo-worthy follow through.

Great golfers understand this. The ball just gets in the way of the movement. Go up there and just try to “hit the ball,” and you’ll slap at it and lose all momentum.

In a lot of ways, amateur marketers have similar thinking:

They’re so obsessed with reaching new eyeballs that they forget about the other parts of the process.

Good marketing is like a good golf swing:

• You need a “backswing” to showcase your credibility, competence, and prime interested visitors to become leads
• You need a “downswing” that captures interest, overcomes potential objections, and nurtures leads
• You need a “follow-through” that continues to build relationships, up-sell, cross-sell, and boost customer loyalty

Getting the customer (making impact with the ball in our analogy) just happens. It’s seamless. And if one shot doesn’t work out, you’re always tweaking different parts of the swing to become more consistent.

New customers are great. But focusing so much on them — at the expense of other elements of marketing — gives you tunnel vision. Those costly PPC campaigns or mass cold emails might work from time to time. But they’re inefficient, unpredictable, and unsustainable.

Wouldn’t it be better to build a system that reaches new people, builds relationships, and closes deals from end to end?

Maybe it’s time to stop trying to hit the ball.

Maybe it’s time to start swinging.

See how I can help you here.

People are shallow.

(No, not just the orange-colored Botox queens from Miami or Beverly Hills…)

I’m not excluding myself from this observation either. “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is timeless advice, but it’s hard to follow with so many shiny objects competing for limited attention.

You could bemoan the lack of depth and nuance in today’s cultural landscape…

Or accept the fact and use it to your advantage.

Your target customers are already judging you with this superficial analysis. They don’t have time to put their days on hold while they dig around your website looking for clues that you’re a great fit.

More often than not, they’ll find a competitor with more compelling presentation and give them a shot instead.

“Judging books by their covers” is a natural defense mechanism. Our time is limited. We might spend more of it analyzing a few options in more depth… but ONLY after they pass the cool cover analysis.

That’s not to say that substance doesn’t matter. If your brand is all flash, you WILL get found out. It’s not a matter of if, but when.

But a little style — at least enough to catch those busy browsers and get them to slow down — is the initial threshold you must cross.

If your brand doesn’t look valuable, competent and relevant, you’ll never get more than a few precious seconds before people move on to someone else. Even if it IS all of those things.

Whether you’re brand new in business or a seasoned veteran, appearances are critical. We’re judging those book covers, remember? Looking like you know what you’re doing is the first step to getting opportunities to prove it.

There are lots of sensible things you can do to get your foot in the door:

• About Us page. Instead of hiding anonymously behind the computer screen, being willing to share your name, face, and origin story.
• Marketing system. Whether it’s content, social media, PPC, email, or all of the above, this system exposes your brand to more eyeballs and builds relationships.
• Professional website. With a top-level (.com, .org., .net, etc.) domain, a clean layout, and navigation that makes sense.
• Social proof. A track record of proven results. Testimonials from happy customers. Logos of companies you’ve helped. Publication credits on influential magazines and blogs.
• USP. Are you, clearly and succinctly, conveying: 1) whom you serve; 2) the benefits you provide; and 3) the unique value that makes you a better choice than anyone else?

These seem like such simple things, and they are. But it’s amazing how many people try to shortcut them. Without the fundamentals, you’re relying on people to forget about their hectic schedules and dig around like a detective from a film noir mystery for clues that you’re competent.

Fat chance.

Do you look like you know what you’re doing?

That is the first key hurdle you must clear.

Go here to see how I can help.