Strategy With Brutality: Why Marketing Is Like Boxing

Marketing is a bit like boxing. 

Yes I have seen a few people literally coming to blows in the world of marketing agencies over the years, but I mean more in terms of the execution, if you pardon the pun, of marketing campaigns. 

I’m not really a boxing fan but I was quite fascinated by the recent world heavyweight championship fight between the U.K.’s Tyson Fury and the USA's Deontay Wilder.

In one respect I think I was interested in the fight (as were many others) because it was shaping up to be a great story - with both actors in this story having various flaws as well as super powers and both had their own reasons and their "whys" for getting into the ring.

Simon Sinek could have had a field day.

Tyson Fury's story absolutely adheres to the classic format of the Hero's Journey because he has had many troubles and difficulties and problems in his own journey through life so far.  

But he has managed to faces his foes - such as his well-documented struggles with his mental health and related issues - and come out the other side as the winner. 

So Mr Fury is enjoying a story of redemption and renewed success in the classic style.

But what also made me interested were the obvious comparisons to somebody running a business, because Fury's victory was a triumph not only of strategy, but also one of brutality.

Now brutality, unlike strategy, is not often a word you hear mentioned in a business context. 

However the brutality in this case was in the execution of the plan, the single minded way he made it happen. 

The fact is that many successful businesses are quite brutal in their execution - for example businesses who email consistently, regularly and sometimes multiple times in one day could be accused of almost being quite brutal - but they are absolutely executing on what works for them.

You could also say the same about high frequency re-targeting via digital advertising as being a brutal approach. But when done well (e.g. kept fresh with multiple messages and correct sequencing) it too can be very successful. 

And so I do have to commend Tyson Fury on the strategy behind his brutal execution. He got this 100% spot on and he knew what he had to do in order to give himself the best chance of winning by executing his plan.

Sometimes a great strategy with quite poor execution can work well in business, as can a great execution of a relatively poor strategy.

But when a great strategy is mixed with great execution then that is when the ground-breaking results are going to happen.

That is when when we see Strategic Brutality and that's where the magic happens and where great results are the outcome.

I wonder when we'll see a Tyson Fury book on his 'method'? 

Revenue Streams and Building Recurring Revenue Into your Business

Without consistent regular income your business will die or never get started, and so you need to be absolutely clear where your revenue comes from if you want to succeed. And when it comes to revenue streams and revenue generation, the optimal mix depends on the kind of business that you have. 

As examples let's look at two types of business - a retail business and a coaching business.

I think there are a few different types of revenue in any business, so that's important to understand. So for example, if you're a retail business, probably most of your revenue is going to be from retail product sales, typical that sold over the counter and probably some online or mail order aspect too. Whether you're selling shoes, or widgets, or meals, whatever it might be, that's where you'll make most of your money.

But now let's  think about what else you can do to bring additional revenue in. Maybe you could add some kind of coaching or training in using what you sell, perhaps in the form of classes, possibly some kind of craft workshop. 

It could be a wine tasting session or set of classes - perhaps labelled as a "Masterclass" to appeal to your customers who are real enthusiasts about what you sell. If you sell kitchen equipment it could be a set of cookery classes based round one of your popular products, such as a premium Food Mixer for your home baking customers. 

I'll add a personal example to this, when a local Young's Brewery pub did a wine tasting course which lasted for six weeks and it took place at one of their venues. It actually turned out to be one of the most useful things I've ever done, as I had spent all this time in my first few years in London drinking wine and sort of blundering around wine lists hoping to get something good, only knowing that I really liked a few particular varieties and regions, but I didn't know WHY I liked them! 

So that was a that was a really useful thing for me as a customer, and it made me more loyal to that pub, but it was another revenue stream for the brewery and so classes can be a good additional income source. 

And then the other one that I see more and more of now is some kind of recurring income or re-bills added to the retail model. 

That could be a Product of the Month Club, or it could be a monthly discount for regular orders which, if it's for a consumable product, can work very well. That could be for the kind of thing that you see on Amazon a lot now, the 'Subscribe and Save' type products that offer a discount for regular purchases. 

That can be anything from vitamin supplements to even products like toilet roll - you know, you can literally have your toilet roll sent to you as six rolls a month or whatever you might want to have. So that's a massive area now for all kinds of retailers. 

And, talking of Amazon, they've got probably the biggest recurring income service of the lot with Amazon Prime.  I'm sure most people reading this are members of Amazon Prime, as it just makes so much sense to the customer to get all these benefits in one place for a relatively low price. 

And they've got something crazy, like 100 million members in the USA alone and another 15 million in the UK , each paying $99/£79 a year, so the numbers are just astronomical. That is one absolutely brilliant recurring income method.

Another one you are probably aware of is doing affiliate promotions for other people's products and services. A lot of this is carried out more online than face to face due to the tracking possible with online sales, but certainly promoting other people's products (that are typically complementary to what you do) for a cut of the sales price can be a very important income source. When done face to face in retail situations it is more likely to be a less formal "you recommend me and i'll recommend you" kind of arrangement where no money as such changes hands, but will likely lead to more business in the future.

And then anther source of revenue is creating and selling information products, and this is possible even for a retail business, though it may be more relevant a little further down the line as a business becomes more mature. 

If you're a bricks and mortar business it might be more of a B2B sales opportunity related to information on the business that you run and what you do, such as your expertise in building your particular type of business. 

A great example of this was a very successful information product by a guy who had a popular chain of fish and chip shops based in Yorkshire in the UK, and he wrote this

book, or course in reality, on how to make money by running a fish and chip shop. 

Rumour has it that he made more money from the book than he ever did from his Fish & Chip shops! 

But it's no surprise that this kind of book was a success really as when you set up something like this you have to invest a lot of money up front because you have to buy all the equipment, kit out the premises, buy the stock etc. 

You're talking about tens of thousands of pounds, if not six figures, so to then spend a few hundred pounds on some proven information about how you can do it better and minimise your risk of failure, kind of makes a lot of sense. 

So here's a summary of the retail business income streams:

• Product / Retail Sales

• Coaching / training

  –Classes (e.g. craft, wine tasting)

• Recurring income (rebills)

  –Product of the month club

  –Monthly discount for regular order, esp if consumable product

• Affiliate promotions of other people’s products or services

  –Can be mostly digital via email list

• Creating and selling information products

  –the story of your success with your retail business, perhaps further down the line

The other example we will look at is a coaching, or 'expert', type of business where you are remunerated for passing on your skills and knowledge to others.  

This is probably the most common type of "side hustle" for people to start, typically alongside a day job (so could be relevant to a lot of you) simply because it avoids the start up costs of a traditional physical product type of business. 

So for those running a coaching / consulting / training business, where most work is done face-to-face or in small groups, the main 'bread and butter' income will come from those paid for 'sessions' of some form.

But for people working in this area, and where a lot of communication is done digitally or online, affiliate promotions, promoting other people's products and services, can be a really important way of earning extra money.  

Indeed for some people, especially those with a large audience,  affiliate marketing can be a sole source of income because it is totally scale-able and is not limited by your maximum number of weekly billable hours, which is the big limitation of a conventional coaching type of business.

The next income stream here - and one that is very important to me personally - is creating and selling information products. If you are a coach or expert and you are NOT doing this, then you are leaving money on the table.

I went through this with an example in the retail section above, but it is even more crucial here to be packaging your face-to-face training and selling it as digital downloads of PDFs and videos etc because it is a fantastic and scale-able income option for any expert or coach.

Now here i'm leaving the best till last for coaches, and although we have covered it already above, I believe it is the most important of all for this kind of business.

And that fourth element is recurring income, which I'm a massive fan of simply because it is the smartest form of income, and it can come from your own products and services - often in the form of memberships and group coaching. 

And the great thing is that there are benefits on both sides. This is simply because it also usually makes more sense for the clients of coaches to be in a membership, or regular format of coaching, because one off 'hits' of information will rarely achieve change in any field of life, and people need consistency and support for real 'transformation' to happen.

But it's certainly crucial to know where your income comes from, and also any income dependencies. So you need to know what comes first as, for example, you need the shop with its regular customers and footfall of visitors  before you can have the craft classes or the product the Month Club.

But recurring income is a crucial part of any business for its owner. It's quite simply security. It's regular cash coming in. It's a safer foundation.

And therefore it's the key for moving your business from being that "side hustle" or a part time weekend job that you'd like to be full time, and dumping the day job, because that's the biggest thing for people who run expert businesses or are contractors or coaches, it's that business life can be 'feast or famine' sometimes, and so anything that allows more consistency of income is very welcome.

Because you can have a few good months and then you can be scrambling around to pay the bills. I know what that was like. I absolutely understand that and it's not a good place to be.

To summarise the options for coaches and experts:

• Coaching / consulting / training fee income (Face to Face)

• Affiliate promotions of other people’s products or services

  –Ideally including recurring products

• Creating and selling information products

• Recurring income (rebills) from my own products and services

  –Membership

  –Group coaching

If I had my time over again, the first thing I would do is set up recurring income pretty much from day one, or certainly at least in the first few months once I had got the foundation in place. And it's not as hard as you think if you take a systematic approach and examine how best it can work for you as a key part of your ongoing plans.  

The 'Core 4' Roles For An Entrepreneur

I know that you are doing too much in your business.

Trust me, I know :-)

If you have a leadership role, especially in an SME, there are just 4 tasks that you should be focusing on.

1. Ideas

Increasingly the currency of 21st century business, it’s a key skill which feeds into all commercial areas.

Keep abreast of markets AND marketing - it is your key job to know your customer and the market in terms of market sophistication stage, tech developments, competitor NPD etc.

You need to know what sells and why.

You must embrace ‘Thought Leadership’ in your market, especially as content is one of the big outputs from your ideas

2. Key communications

Largely come from your Ideas role - training, reading, consuming the right media and monitoring your market

Comms are important as they are needed for two reasons - 1. to give instructions to your team and to motivate them 2. In some markets you may be the voice of your business and send out the regular marketing comms yourself.

Email is still the most potent selling weapon online so it may be something that is worth your time spent on

Don’t forget to multi-purpose that content and turn e.g. emails into FB posts, blog posts, Medium posts, as Tweets etc

3. Your Core Offers & Funnels

The key to automation and sales, good funnels are predictable business systems.

Funnel metrics are key – how much is the average value of every visitor going through the funnel? Funnels can - and should - be evergreen as much as possible but can also wear out and need updating.

Funnels can be simple and on cold traffic should be very simple.

Get complex later once trust is built and remember data capture should always be an objective.

4. Finance

Nobody else should get involved in this unless you appoint an FD or accountant. Core business metrics are best kept to the core team.

Also guard your valuable assets such as mailing lists, and be careful with access to web sites and marketing properties.

You also need to know the ‘marketing money numbers’ from your funnels.

In summary…

Basically you ‘Decide and Delegate’.

You strategize and create concepts, offers and business models

You must not DO too much.

Just focus on the 4 key strategic tasks outlined here.

This “Two Hours A Week Test" Could Really Change Your Working Life

We've all seen stories about shorter working hours and a number of companies worldwide have been making the news by adopting a 4 day week on the same salary and conditions.

I was recently asked a very interesting question, as per the scenario below:

"If I was bed-bound in hospital, could only think and speak, and I was only able to communicate for 2 hours a week, how would I maintain and grow my business, or continue in my current role?"

So what would you do if you could only work 2 hours a week?

I’m sure the initial reaction is that its impossible, but it actually makes you think about where you REALLY ADD VALUE.

What can ONLY you do?

What could you delegate? What standard operating procedures do you need to add to add to your business? What software could you buy to automate things better? Where could you add an additional employee?

The interesting things is that the question becomes what SHOULD only you do?

So ask yourself the question. Spend a few minutes on the answer.

Your brain will start working and I think you will be surprised immediately how you think of things that you could and should stop doing.

Welcome to The Publishing Tips Blog.

You are lucky enough to be here at the best time in the history of the world for online writers, publishers, product developers - and entrepreneurs in general.

Websites. Digital Products. eBooks.

Whatever you publish, you can enjoy The Freedom Of The Publisher’s Life.

We find ourselves in a wonderful situation where content is king, the bad old days of unfair and restrictive publishing deals with low % cuts are fading, and you can promote to an audience of millions for pennies.

And it has never been easier to build a website or sales funnel with amazing free tools such as WordPress and its wonderful array of themes and plugins and online tools such as 1MinuteSites.

The market for digital courses is another growth area. With marketplaces like Udemy, the sharing of detailed knowledge via video has never been easier while services like Amazon S3 and YouTube have made storage and hosting accessible to almost all. The rise of high quality digital video cameras on smart phones has also helped the production of these courses become so much easier, and combined with screen capture software such as Camtasia the ability to produce high quality training is open to everyone.

And these tools combined with the publishing / writing business model has made the possibility of living a location independent life a reality for many. You can publish from Peru or Patagonia as easily as Portland or Paris and enjoy a far higher standard of living for the same money.

But I urge you all to think about a life of ‘publishing’ and not just ‘writing’. Don’t just just end up with another 40 (plus) hour a week writing job. Instead you can buy your freedom with the right tools to run your business and some affordable outsourced staff.