The Subtle Art of Giving a F*

The Subtle Art of Giving a F*

by | Oct 23, 2019 | Content Marketing, General, Marketing, Marketing in London, Ontario

Mark Manson’s popular book “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***” is marketed as a “A dose of raw, refreshing, honest truth that is sorely lacking today”, it doesn’t literally mean to not give any F*’s, it’s just a ballsy way of repeating other self help books like “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff”.

A caveat before we get started, I know that neither of these books is about shortcuts, in fact they’re about helping people see the big picture, and understanding what is important, and what isn’t. They’re also about living your best life, your authentic self, and generally being true to yourself.  These are all good things.

The scary part about messages like that is that some people have taken this to mean that you can just do a surface level skim coat and call it “good enough”. If I shouldn’t sweat the small stuff, why do you care that the thumbnail for your news story grabs the right part of the image?

Sometimes we need to give a F***, sometimes we need to give all of the F***’s, and borrow a cup of F***’s from a neighbour to add some extra F***’s to your awesome sauce, otherwise you’ll just end up with a big lump of “adequate sauce”.

Hey, maybe adequate sauce is exactly what you need on your Corporate Chain Pizza of life.

Then again, maybe you need to give a f***.

What is the “Subtle art of giving a F***”?

The Subtle Art of Giving a F*** is more than just “sweating the small stuff” and in fact it’s a lot about big picture thinking, and how small details add up to the big picture.

Let’s start with a website. You can tell within 30 seconds of looking at a website how the company is going to treat you.

  • How does it look? Is the site old and tired, or is it fairly modern?
  • Does the navigation make sense?
  • Is it obvious what you should do? Is it simple to find the thing you’re looking for?
  • Is it easy to get in touch with them?
  • When you want to get in touch with them, do they require a whole bunch of seemingly irrelevant information?

Sometimes it’s the little things. Maybe they have a really intricate logo, but the thing is so small that it loses all context – it was likely designed for print, not for a 300px phone screen, where 87% of your potential customers initiate their first contact. Maybe it’s the fact that a captcha form takes seven attempts to get through.

You can tell very quickly when thought hasn’t been given to who is using the website, and what they’re doing with it.

When the basics are taken care of, then the difference is in how an experience can delight you. The little things can take something from 90% or “good enough” to 125% – “Wow, this is great”

Sometimes it’s about doing something that only you will care about.

The other day I spent over an hour on a single image for a blog post.  The post itself probably took me another hour. I doubt anyone will even notice the difference between my picture and the default. The post was – How to Survive the Retail Paradigm Shift over on my Manage Comics blog.

Comic book store before and after

For those of you wondering, I went in and added actual comic books to the book covers, so that the picture was actually reflective of the source material. This may not seem like a huge deal, but it felt important to me at the time. It was fun, I flexed some Photoshop muscles I don’t normally use, and it lends some extra context to the post.

It’s also the kind of thing that a detail oriented person might notice, and since this particular post was going in front of hundreds of thousands of eyes that’s the kind of detail that matters.

For that post I also recorded a video, it took me 14 minutes to record the video, and another three revisions of the thumbnail image to make sure it was exactly right.

3 Versions, Paradigm Shift

In the first version, I realized that at certain screen sizes, the sides were being cut off, so I resized the caption and moved the logo a bit.  However reading it I realized that the title needed some juice to make it more relevant, so I revised it again. Each revision only took a few minutes, but they were important.

In short, I did sweat the small stuff, and I gave a F***.

Don’t miss the forest for the trees

The little things gave me a sense of accomplishment. However, I worked on the things that I thought would make an impact, I did things quickly and efficiently, and I only worked on these little things after I had the big picture covered.

The video I did was recorded quickly, and without fuss. The idea behind the videos I am making right now is that I want to do things that have a low barrier to entry, that don’t take me a ton of time, but that can hit an adjacent audience to the text.

I recorded the video twice, the first time I hemmed and hawed quite a bit, but the second time I managed to get through the entire thing with only one minor screw up (I couldn’t remember the name “Geek Easy” no matter how hard I tried).  Now I could have done a quick edit and fixed that up, but after watching it, I liked the raw energy of the unedited video.

What was important was that I got it up, that it enhanced the original post, and that it didn’t take a whole ton of time to do.

The Takeaway

I’m a big fan of the term “Appropriate Effort”, meaning that you don’t spend a ton of time on things you know very few people will ever see, but you do put a lot of effort into the details on things that many people would see.  I can’t imagine myself spending an hour on a graphic for a blog post just for Manage Comics, but when I’m going to draw in a much bigger audience, it makes a ton of sense.

  1. Cover the big picture, make sure your message is consistent.
  2. Don’t kill yourself over the little details that aren’t important.
  3. Work fast, work well, do things you enjoy.
  4. Give a F***, and make it matter.
Generate More Higher Quality Leads in 3 Steps

Generate More Higher Quality Leads in 3 Steps

by | Oct 10, 2019 | Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, General, Lead Automation, Lead Generation, Marketing Automation

Quite often we’ll hear from a business that their website just doesn’t work for lead generation. Either it doesn’t generate leads or if it does they are just plain bad. They tell me they’d rather stick to referrals, or cold calls. They also usually complain that growing their sales is difficult.

The truth is the problem here is not the medium but the execution. Your website should be your BEST driver for generating quality leads. If it’s not there is usually something wrong.

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Interesting Things – SEO, Facebook, and saving a company with content marketing

Interesting Things – SEO, Facebook, and saving a company with content marketing

by | Mar 12, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing

I’ve got a confession to make. I’m not a marketer. I’ve never had any formal training, I’ve never worked in a marketing department formally, and I’ve never been a classic “marketing person”.

However, everything I have ever done has had marketing involved in it. From the online comic shop that I ran, and that I still consult for, to the online invoicing program I ran, to the SAAS for comic shops that I run today.  I’ve always been involved in marketing.

Because of that, I read a LOT of marketing related content. I also listen to a fair number of marketing focused podcasts.

This post will be part of a semi-regular feature that I’ll be hosting, where I post some interesting things I’ve learned.

Before I get started, if you’re not already using Flipboard on your mobile device, make sure you’re using it and that you’ve subscribed to the NorthIQ Megazine on Flipboard!

SEO Quick Wins You Can Try – SEO is a big, dark, scary prospect, but if you just make your website better, you’ll find that you also end up doing a bunch of things that search engines appreciate!

Why You Need Keyword Benchmarking in Your SEO Strategy – Search engine optimization is really just optimizing your site and its content to cater to the intent of someone searching for your businesses offerings. Optimizing your website for Grommets when you really sell Widgets will just bring a bunch of people looking for grommets to your site. This is why you need to monitor the keywords you are trying to rank for, and making sure that you’re adjusting to it.

Automated Marketing and CRM for an Effective Business – Running a business is hard, but some parts of your business can be built once and re-used many times.  Creating simple rules in a CRM like we do with our Sharpspring clients, will help you run an entire segment of your business automatically.

Generating Leads with Facebook Ads – This is a great step-by-step podcast on running your first Facebook ad campaign, what to do, how to do it, and why you should do each step.

The Most Persuasive Sales Emails Always Follow These Strategic Copywriting Tips – Five great tips on writing better sales emails. This is a really simple list that will improve your emails tenfold instantly.

13 Practical Tips to Increase Your Email Response Rate by 320 Percent – This is such a great post on improving emails, and it focuses on the most important things first all the way to the least important. So many people start out trying to get their email design right thinking it is the reason they’re not getting opens…but if nobody is opening your email, they’re certainly not seeing your design!

3 Ways Content Brought My Company Back From Bankruptcy – This article has some great tactics on how to produce better content. Content is one of the most powerful marketing tactics that there is, but you need to make sure that you’re delivering content that people have a meaningful reason to use.

How Your Company Can Use Both Outsourced and In-House Marketing – Why not hire everyone internally?  There are some skills that you don’t need to have all of the time, and there are some people you simply won’t be able to hire full time. Both Craig and I are pretty specialized at this point in our careers, and we can add a ton of value to a company without you needing to bear the burden of our salaries full time.

Our best posts of 2018

Our best posts of 2018

by | Jan 8, 2019 | Building a Business, Content Marketing, Marketing in London, Ontario

We’re reflecting on what we did in 2018, and later this week we’ll be planning out 2019. As part of our reflections, we’re looking at what we did well in 2018.

One of the things we are most proud of is our blog posts, this year we’ve been publishing things that we believe in, and we’ve been building out stories that mean a lot to us.

How losing a promotion was the best thing that happened to me

In the fall of 2015, Craig was looking to get a promotion at work. He had worked hard, he had been in the company for nearly a decade, and he had fundamentally changed the way that marketing was done in the organization. When he was denied a promotion, he realized that he needed to take matters into his own hands. He sat down with Brian for a week and created a product called “The Kickstart Guide to Marketing”. This post outlined that process, and launched a brand new product called How to Create a Free Marketing Automation System.

Measuring Your Website: What You Should be Looking For

In 2018 we launched “Hot Buzz”, and in our first episode we talked about effective ways of measuring your website. For the follow up blog post, we went in depth on what you should be measuring, and how you know that your website is effective.

The NorthIQ 3i Formula

In 2018 we changed the focus of our business. We realized the thing that we do better than anyone else is find new leads and nurture them to sales ready status. To do this, we use a formula that we call the 3i formula, and in this blog post we broke it down in depth.

Five Signs You Need Marketing Automation

As we got more comfortable with our value proposition, we started noticing patterns with our clients. Not everybody needs a marketing automation system, but there are very clear markers when you do. This blog post outlined five signs that will give you some pretty big indicators that you need to invest in some marketing automation.

4 Simple Behaviours That Will Make Your Digital Marketing Better

Want to know a secret? Most marketing doesn’t work, in this post we looked at 4 simple behaviours that will make your digital marketing instantly better.

The 5 Basics of a Successful Digital Content Strategy

Our marketing automation systems work like magic, but they need content. We looked at what we were doing with our real life clients and how the journey maps out. Our biggest insight is that our automation systems are an engine, and content is the fuel to that engine. Making sure that the content fits the buyer’s journey, and continually answers questions makes the entire system better.

Hot Buzz Episode 4 – Adrian Biljan of Sensus Crypto

In 2018 we launched “Hot Buzz”, which is our show about marketing and chicken wings.  Through the four episodes of our first year we talked with a number of different people about a variety of things. Every episode got a little bit better, but we think our fourth one was the best one so far.

Manage Comics Featured in London Inc

My personal favourite post of 2018 was the announcement that we are featured in London Inc. Earlier in the year Craig told me to go “Make a Ruckus”, so I reached out to a number of local news outlets. Now that we have this one piece under our belt, I’m going to continue reaching out to other news outlets to get even more coverage for the cool things that we are doing.

Five Signs You Need Marketing Automation

Five Signs You Need Marketing Automation

by | Oct 18, 2018 | Content Marketing, Lead Automation, Marketing, Marketing Automation

We recently launched our Free Marketing Automation System, it’s a simplified version of the system that we provide for our clients. One question we got was “Who is this intended for?”, while a couple of other people asked “How do I know I need it?”.

Let’s start with who needs marketing automation. I think the basic answer is “anybody who is looking for leads”.  In its simplest form, a lead is someone who is going to get in touch with you about a product or service that you offer. The thing about leads is that not all leads are created equal.

The “Buyer’s Journey” says that people go through stages when they are making a decision. Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.  First, they need to be aware that they have a problem, and that there are solutions to that problem. Then they look at who can provide the solution. Finally they come to a decision on who will solve their problem.

The buyer’s journey can take minutes, or it can take years depending on the type of purchase they are making. The thing is, you need to be able to contact the buyer at the right point in the journey.

If you introduce yourself after they’ve bought something else, you’re too late. If you make an incredible offer before they’re considering buying, you’re too early.

This is what marketing automation is good at. It pairs up the buyer with the right information at the point of the buyer’s journey they are currently in.

How will you know that you need marketing automation? Here’s five warning signs.

1: You frequently hear “Website Leads Suck” from sales people

Website leads should be the “Glengarry Leads”, and if the sales team isn’t treating website leads as gold, then there is a major problem.

We can learn more about someone who comes to a website than we do on literally any other source. If you’re hearing from your sales people that they are talking to people who aren’t ready to buy, or if your sales people are dealing with far too many leads, this is where automation can really help.

With a good marketing automation program, you can deliver the right information to potential customers at the right time, and help them to make key decisions.

In some cases these people will decide you’re not the right solution for them, that’s actually a really good thing. If we give them the information that helps them they’re not the right fit for your product or service it doesn’t waste any more of their time, and you’re not trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

In other cases, the key information will help them realize that there is a good match there, and they will raise their hand, asking to further the conversation.

Businesses who nurture leads make 50% more sales at a cost 33% less than non-nurtured prospects. (Strategic IC, 2017)

2: You don’t send out regular emails because even when you send them out, it doesn’t seem to change anything

Consider how you interact with people on a daily basis in your real life. Chances are you have different conversations with your co-workers than you do with your partner, your children, your friends, or the barista who made your latte this morning.

If you were to greet everyone with the same message, they would look at you like you’re an alien. Go ahead, try talking to your co-workers as if they were your significant other the next time that you want to spend an afternoon with the lovely folks in HR (say hi to Julie for me).

Your marketing is the same way. You can’t treat everyone the same, and you can’t deliver the same messaging to the person who just met you, as you would to the person who has been doing their research on your company for the last year and are ready to make a decision.

You need to be sending out the right information, at the right time, to the right people. To do this, you need to identify your audience, put them into groups, and deliver them tailored email to exactly where they are in the buying cycle.

This is called segmentation, and it will have a massive impact on your email campaigns.

Recipients are 75% more likely to click on emails from segmented campaigns than non-segmented campaigns. (MailChimp, 2017)

3: Sales growth isn’t as fast as you’d like

There are only so many levers you can pull to increase sales, one of them is investing more in marketing.

We often caution against companies throwing money at ads, the websites we work with regularly convert organic traffic at a rate of 5-7% across the entire site!

We find often that incremental improvements to the way that the website is being crawled by search engines, improving inbound links with media outreach, and building a strong lead generation capabilities show better, faster, and more impressive results than chucking a bunch of money at some ads.

Once you have leads in your system though, what are you doing with them? Are you throwing them directly over the fence to Sales? Is the sales team burning through leads? Do you have insight into what is happening with those leads?

Marketing automation can really help boost sales by engaging prospects and turn them into excited potential buyers with your nurturing programs. It also helps identify the very best leads and enables you to route them very quickly to your sales team. Gone are the days of slogging through cold calls all day long.

Businesses who nurture leads make 50% more sales at a cost 33% less than non-nurtured prospects. (Strategic IC, 2017)

4: You don’t know what’s working and what’s not

You have 20,000 followers on Facebook. Your InstaTweet post from last week got five hundred upvotes. You were recently featured on that hot new YouTube show by that super cool lady who does the thing with the stuff.

Then what happened? Are your 20,000 followers in your target demographic? Does InstaTweet success equal more prospects in your funnel? Do your Facebook followers actually buy your product or service? Are you paying to promote posts or running a contest that is boosting your follower count but actually reducing the number of people who are seeing your messaging?

You need end-to-end insight into the entire marketing funnel and sales pipeline if you’re going to affect any meaningful change. We often find that closely held assumptions end up being false. For many companies, a large follower count has no bearing on the quality of the leads they are generating.  Likewise, many websites have incredible Google page ranks, but they are unable to translate that page rank into leads. Many lead sources you initially thought were great can turn out to be under-performing (and vice versa).

You need a solid digital strategy, and good tools that will help you gain insight into what a good prospect looks like, vs someone who is just a dreamer.

With good analytics tools (like those provided by a good marketing automation tool), you will know where your best leads come from, the behaviors that end up converting them into customers, and how to create a repeatable process to develop more sales ready leads in the future. You need to establish a direct correlation between leads in the door and actual revenue.

48% of consumers start mobile research with a search engine. (Smart Insights, 2016) 

5: You are losing sales to the competition

Here’s the scary, dark secret. Look around your industry at your competitors. If you’re not taking advantage of marketing automation, the chances are that one of your competitors are…and if they’re not right now, they will be in the next 12-18 months as marketing automation is one of the biggest trends in marketing right now.  If you are ahead of the curve, you will beat your competition.

In the next two years, an additional 21% of marketing leaders plan to use a marketing automation platform. (Salesforce, 2017)

Marketing Automation is Not Scary, Not Doing it is Downright Terrifying

Marketing automation doesn’t have to be expensive. The software that will allow you automate your lead nurturing is incredibly affordable, and will make significant changes to your business.

Things that cost more than One Year of Marketing Automation Services

  • Coffee for a 100 person office for 1 year
  • A company Christmas party for 50 people
  • A golf tournament for a company of 40 people
  • Losing one sale for a product with an average sales price of $9,000
  • A 2 month Adwords Campaign that generates 100 leads/month at an average lead cost of $45/lead

We are here to help. Check out our free download – How to Create a Free Marketing Automation System, and discover how you can get something set up today that will start you down the path to better leads, and more sales.

Free Download: How to Create a Free Marketing Automation System

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