Online videos are a great way of getting new ideas fast, there’s a brilliant TED talk by Simon Sinek called “Why Great Leaders Inspire Action”. If you’ve never seen TED it’s a great resource of snappy 18 minute or so talks about pretty much any inspiring and educational topics you can think of. Their tag line is “ideas worth spreading” and it’s definitely worth a look, no matter what your interests are. Understanding why you’re in business can have a huge impact on your marketing.
In Simon’s talk he talks about the Golden Circle in which you have three concentric circles, the centre, the middle and the outside. On the outside you have ‘what you do’, in the middle ‘how you do it’, and finally ‘why you do it’ in the inner circle which is your core purpose or belief as a business. Simon explained that all really inspired companies work from the inside out, rather than the traditional model where they work from the outside in, and he gave Apple as a great example.
If Apple was to market itself in the traditional way it would start with ‘what it does’ which would be something like “we make great computers”, and then move on to “we make computers that are user-friendly, beautifully-designed and easy to use, want to buy one?” Now, what Apple actually does is start with their ‘why’, so their marketing message sounds more like “everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo, we believe in thinking differently” before they move into the ‘how’, “the way we challenge the status quo is that everything we do is user-friendly, beautifully-designed, and easy to use”, and then finally moving on to the what which is “we just happen to make great computers, want to buy one?”.
He makes the point that people don’t buy ‘what’ you do but ‘why’ you do it, me for example, I see great people with great product, great services, but if their clinic had a personality to the clinic owner it would be a bully and it really doesn’t have to be that way, nothing gives me greater joy than helping people achieve financial success and if you’ve read my book “The Beautiful Business” that should shine through.
Jim Collins, the renowned author of Good to Great, Great by Choice and Built to Last made a similar point. He studied some of the top companies in the world and compared them to similar businesses within their respective marketplace, who had the same opportunities, but who failed to thrive, do as well, or who – in some cases – actually went out of business.
Jim found that all of the companies that did exceptionally well had a clear vision of what they were doing (their why), a mission statement, and a really strong culture that all of the staff and customers (even if they didn’t fully understand it) took on in terms of what they were trying to achieve.
Now, I’m not saying that you have to be building a £multi-million company, but what I am saying is that people buy people, so knowing your ‘why’ will help your potential customers chose to buy from you.
Also, it’s worth remembering that your current ideal clients that you’re dealing with will have friends, family, and contacts that will also be your ideal clients, because birds of a feather flock together, so it’s important you have some sort of strategy to ask for or get the contact details of these people too.
One extremely effective way is to run some sort of competition. For example, one of the clinics I’m working with decided to use a tombola to get referrals. They spent £2000 on prizes so there were a couple of good ones in there including tablets, a weekend away, and some really nice meals out, plus lots of little prizes to bring the total number up to 250. In exchange for two referrals which gave a specific name, telephone number, and email address, the person could pull one prize out of the tombola. The cost per lead of a potential new client worked out as just £4.00 here, which when you consider the potential lifetime value of a new client was massively good value.
By Alan Adams The Clinic Coach
