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.
How Mature is Your Marketing?

How Mature is Your Marketing?

by | Oct 24, 2018 | Digital Marketing, Lead Automation, Marketing, Marketing Automation

Three years ago Craig and I sat down and created a download called “The Kickstart Guide to Marketing using Science, Not Magic”, it was basically my bootcamp into the world of marketing. I had always considered myself a “marketing minded designer/developer”, but the truth was I really only understood the basics.

Before I get too deep into my journey into marketing maturity, I’m not going to bury the lede. We’re launching a Marketing Maturity Assessment, and we need some beta testers before we make it live.

Sign up to beta test our maturity tool and we’ll send you an email next week.

You will get the first crack at our marketing maturity assessment, as well as the the first notification about our brand new massive 80+ page download – The NorthIQ Way.

I knew about branding from years of working at Canada’s major media brands (TSN, CTV, Alliance/Atlantis, Bell, and The Globe and Mail). I knew a lot about attracting and building an audience. I had even learned about conversions from Craig and had applied the things I learned at my day job to run some successful side hustles. (more…)

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

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

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

by | Oct 5, 2018 | Marketing, Marketing in London, Ontario

I’m going to give you the secret sauce on how to make a marketing automation system for free. It has all the bells, though none of the whistles of the ridiculously expensive services where you can pay $2500 a month just for the software to run this plan. Most small businesses won’t need the whistles anyhow.

First, let me tell you a quick story.

3 years ago I had the unfortunate experience of getting passed over for a promotion to a marketing director role at the company I worked for. A role that at the time I really believed was what I wanted. It was not a great experience, and was the second time this had happened at this company. Obviously, that particular goal wasn’t ever going to happen.

It was a wake up call.

I didn’t respond how most people do in this circumstance. I did something unusual which looking back on it three years later was a bounce pad for where NorthIQ is at now – a successful and growing business.

I took an entire week off and spent it working with a former colleague (my now-NorthIQ partner Brian Garside) to begin building what is now NorthIQ.

Only we didn’t know it at the time.

That week was exciting because we launched an ebook and sold several copies within the 5 day window we gave ourselves. We hit our goal of building a database of 50, and we also landed a customer who ended up being a significant partner in our growth as an organization.

It was crazy. We barely slept. It was interesting and engaging and unlike anything I did in my 9-5.

If you’re sitting there right now unsure about how a very small change in your life can lead to huge things I will tell you right now it can be astronomical. Life changing. It can be the difference between you hitting your goals and just continuing along where you’re at now.

At the time I’d have loved to be where I am now. It was such an elephant to eat I didn’t really see how it was possible. 

Intermission:

If you just want the How to Create a Free Marketing Automation System go ahead and grab it, but we’d love if you would continue on the story (don’t worry, we’ll remind you about the download below as well).

Back to the story.

We decided let’s just do one small thing at a time. Set the bar so damn low we’d have things to accomplish, over and over.

Brian had already done the brave thing and taken the plunge – he quit his day job to start NorthIQ. He had provided what would be the foundation for what we’d build. I always joke “What took you so long to quit.” but that’s a very brave move to take. We didn’t have the dollars or customers to pay for both our salaries so I went back to work and patiently supported NorthIQ as an evening job.

Another big game changer for us occurred that week, and thinking back on it it’s a funny story.

During day 1 Brian had mentioned to me that he had a prospect who was wanting a new website but also more – a lot of marketing work. At the time it wasn’t his area of expertise but I talked him into providing a proposal. We barely knew how to make proposals of this kind. We weren’t sure how we’d get the work done, since I had a full time job and he was still learning the marketing side.

They accepted. To this day they are a top customer. The impact this company has had on NorthIQ, and the relationships we built from this is vast.

Two seemingly minor things in the space of 2 days that changed our lives.

The simple fact is that just getting out there, doing, executing  is so valuable. You can accomplish anything if you just get in and try.

A lot has happened between now and then. We moved into an office. We have awesome staff. Great customers. During the ride we’ve accomplished so many things that seemed outside my safety zone. I dare say it…we’ve even become (uggghhh) sales people.

No road is too steep for somebody who is determined and patient.

Let’s get back to marketing automation…

I learned marketing automation on Marketo, then Pardot, then Hubspot, then I built my own free version and NorthIQ used that for awhile. Finally, last month we  partnered with Sharpspring and I implemented a full system for us. I have thousands of hours of experience in all the platforms combined.

Automating your marketing is incredibly powerful. Even a simple automated email nurture when somebody fills out your form can prove extremely useful. Add in lead capture forms, lead magnet, lead scoring, lead routing, CRM, sales pipelines, reporting and you get a tool that most companies should really invest in at some point.

When I see the reasons for saying no to using this type of service I am frustrated.

Don’t I need to be a marketer?

The honest truth is that any small or medium business owner needs to wear…not just a lot of hats but every hat. All of the hats need to be worn. Chair falls apart? Fix-it hat. Somebody didn’t get paid? Finance hat. Need more friends (customers)… yeah… marketing hat.

You don’t need to BE a marketer, you just need to act like one long enough.

My company is too small.

Too small to engage and delight future customers so they love you before they even spent a cent?

Isn’t it expensive?

You can build a solid system for free. NorthIQ used it for a couple of years. There are even paid options that fit inside the budgets of small companies. It’s no longer just for big companies. That has ended. The industry has changed and nobody has told the small businesses.

Don’t let the big boys snap up every prospect while you rail against the unfairness of it! You can compete! If anything automation just evens the playing field. It’s enabling David’s everywhere.

We’re already doing good business.

Yeah, that’s awesome. What if you could be doing even better? When you are doing well you likely have more money to invest in ways to make your sales more predictable and take less effort.

It’s complicated! We’ll never be able to take advantage of all the features.

Implement a piece at a time and before you know your system will be humming along.

I don’t have the time.

Of all of the excuses, this one I understand the most. Time is the one resource that none of us seem to have enough of. The thing is, you can start today with a little bit of time, and build it small, piece by piece. Each piece will add incremental improvements, which multiply exponentially. It is amazing how a series of small changes can have major impacts.

The NorthIQ Free Marketing Automation System

I initially figured this out because NorthIQ needed a budget solution for our own business. Then we ran across other companies who also needed a budget system. They were all at a point in growing their business where it would help them grow but the dollars and internal knowledge were not there. They could not afford to pay NorthIQ to implement for them, but we’re really passionate about seeing other companies succeed. That’s why I built this as a free download.

DOWNLOAD THE NORTHIQ FREE MARKETING AUTOMATION SYSTEM

The “How to Build a Free Marketing Automation System” does not give you all the advanced features that a fully paid program gives you but it does give you the most basic ones that a small or medium business will need.

The more important features for a small business:

  • Collect prospect data via forms
  • Automate nurturing emails to those prospects
  • Store prospects in a CRM for optimizing sales funnels

So from very small organizations (I’ve implemented this easily with 1-2 person companies) to medium organizations with limited budget and limited experience this is actually a really good solution. It gives you the basics of a marketing automation platform and is easy to learn.

You’ll get:

  • A free CRM that is actually really good for both sales and marketing
  • An email tool that is as good as the pro tools
  • Automation that is just limited enough to make it easy
  • Forms to collect your leads
  • Simple behavioural based triggers
  • Flexibility in terms of customized properties and values that your
    internal team might require
  • Real time web tracking
  • Reporting for you to understand what’s going on
  • And it’s all free, if you’re smart and careful about the whole thing.

You won’t get:

  • Extremely detailed workflow capabilities
  • Advanced behavioural based triggers
  • A content strategy
  • A large database (if you’re working with more than 2500 leads, this becomes cumbersome)
  • An all-in-one tool
  • Support

Last Paragraph: Let me Put on my Sales Hat

NorthIQ has implemented professional Marketing Automation solutions across many organizations, and works with most of them monthly to generate leads and boost revenue. We’re proud of the work we do and the companies we get to do it with. The companies that we work with have doubled, triple, and even quadruple their revenue in one year of working with us.

If you want to explore having NorthIQ implement this free version for you or a service with more functionality (we offer this at surprisingly reasonable rates) you can book a time to talk to us here. No pressure, no pushy sales promotions, just a chat where we’ll find out a bunch of things about you and tell you if we can help you out.

The NorthIQ Free Marketing Automation System

Get the System
The Psychology of the Lawn Sign

The Psychology of the Lawn Sign

by | Sep 7, 2018 | Marketing

We’re knee deep in a municipal election here in London Ontario, which falls fairly close to a recent Provincial election, and only a couple of years removed from a Federal election. Because of the fairly tight timelines of municipal elections (candidates had to declare themselves formally before the end of August, and voting takes place October 22nd), the signs are out in force.

I’ve talked to a number of people who’s opinions on this years signage varies between interest to annoyance. In my own drive, I pass by between 100 and 200 signs depending on the route I take on my 11 minute commute to the NorthIQ offices. The number varies so widely because the lesser trafficked routes tend to have fewer signs, while large public lots tend to have many more signs, and the university is virtually sign free.

I was thinking about how these signs are a very specific type of marketing, and how many of them have the same benefits, drawbacks, risks, and pitfalls of the marketing we do every day. (more…)