#375 WP-Tonic Show With Special Guest: Simon Lamey

Why Are Your Possible Customers Choosing The Competition, Even When Your Product Or Service Is Clearly Superior?Simon’s approach is methodical, thorough and thoughtful and it does not always follow the status quo. He rigorously handpick the best of marketing thinking that many never get access to and simplify it for small businesses (even if it goes against popular click-bait headlines).

Above all, he make sure that his customers get thinking that comes from his direct experience, working for 214 small and large businesses (including Coca Cola, Honda and Vodafone and Saatchi & Saatchi).

This weeks show is Sponsored By Kinsta Hosting

Jonathon: Welcome back folks to the WP tonic show. It is episode 375. We’ve got a great guest with us. We’ve got Simon Lamey with us. And he has a website called Brain Wheel. I just love the name. Simon, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the listeners and viewers Simon?

Simon: Of course, of course. I’m a typically a marketing guy. I’m really known as a more of a marketing science guy, so that’s sort of a real specialty of mine as well. So I worked in London for a number of years. So I was working in advertising agencies for a while, so I went off and set up my business a while ago and came up with Brain Wheel. And it`s a bit of a nutty idea, isn’t it? But it makes a lot of sense, but it’s generally when people think of buying is very emotional decision. And when we want people to buy stuff, it’s about moving. They’re moving these little cogs in their head towards buying from you, considering you and then going to purchase. So you want to get their brain wheel spinning and best way to do that is through emotion. And that’s what we do. We take people three steps to create more emotion in the customer’s mind, so they’re more likely to buy from me.

Jonathon: That’s great. And I’ve got my great cohost Cindy. Would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers Cindy?

Cindy: Sure. Hi everyone. Cindy Nicholson here from the course whisperer.com and I help entrepreneurs create great content for their courses.

Jonathon: That’s great. So before we go into the main part of the interview folks, I like to talk about one of our major great sponsors and that’s Kinsta Hosting. And what is Kinsta? Kinsta provides a great platform. If you’re looking for quality hosting for your WordPress website. Especially if you’ve got a membership learning management system or e commerce website. Kinsta really are the bee’s knees when it comes to fully hosted word press hosting. And why should you care if your consultant power use of, well basically they use the power of Google cloud hosting. But they provide their own fantastic interface and also they provide fantastic 24/7 support. So it’s a double winner. You get the power of the Google infrastructure, but you get a really personal support system that you can really rely on. And we host the WP tonic website.

Jonathon: We’ve been hosting with them for almost two years now and it’s just superb. So I cannot more recommend them. We wouldn’t host our own site if our fault, they weren’t really fantastic. Go to kinsta.com find out more about them and purchase one of their great hosting packages. Onto the main part of the interview. So Simon, in your introduction, you said buying these emotions. So we all do it. I’ve done it on my own website and I’m a lot of people that have membership sites or trying to sell online courses. They list a long list of functionality or the things that you’re going to get if you do the course. Do you think there’s slightly? I get the impression you might think that they are slightly deluding themselves.

Simon: Oh so you mean in terms of the sales page and things like that. I think those things are incredibly important. Say generally it’s we have, sort of a number of different principles. There are about seven steps I like to take people through in creating connection. Actually the first thing to do, as soon as you land, it’s the more of the emotion needs to really hits you straight away and things like features and benefits. Obviously I think they come lower down the list lower down the page. That is because the most important thing is I would find your foes talking to someone about this the other day. It’s when you first really like a brand or a product, it’s the emotion. It’s a real hard that really comes into play. And then things go into far more of a rational thing.

Simon: And then when the push comes to the sale, by now, 10 paces left or whatever it might be, that’s when the emotion comes back in because risk and scarcity and all these things. The emotion sweeps back in at the end. So the way you were talking about listing out features and benefits, that’s the middle part, the more rational part. And that’s really important because people need to take their time to make a judgment. So you know, especially think with higher involvement and things like courses, it’s very important to list out the features and benefits. And I think personally I’m a huge fan of long sales copy as well. Huge fan, especially with online stuff as well. So I think if you’re selling a perfume, you probably have just a picture, big bold pictures and videos and maybe a word. But when you’re talking about things that take a lot of thought processes and obviously buying courses and things like that, you really need to have them listed out. I think I remember a few years ago, guy had Ramit Sethi.

Simon: I think he writes 20 pages worth of sales content. Because you know, you don’t people scan pages that they read every line and as a bullet point or two or three, that will just catch your attention. And that’s really important. So if it’s not in the customer’s mind and you’re making a high involvement purchase, you need to put it onto the page and let people scan down. It’s a similar process to buy a car and looking at a car ratio. You go and you think, wow, I’m going to buy this Sunday, this test or something like that. You, Oh God, I’d love to have a Tesla. But anyway, that’s another story. And then you go away, you get the brochure and he looked through all, all the way through the brochure. And then suddenly there’s some really cool feature in there. And you tend to really invest in that and then you go into buying any emotion ramps up again as you try and seal the deal and make a purchase. So I don’t know if that answers your question, but I would you need to say very important. Yeah.

Jonathon: Yeah what you are saying is if it is a medium to high ticket course, you need to invest a lot of time and a lot of copy. Is that.

Simon: Yeah, absolutely. I mean I think an answer to that. Yeah. The first thing is invest in it and invest in a lot of copy. Get it. If it’s not in your customers might get it in front of them on the page. And the third thing is realize that they’re going to scan, not read every line and every customer would like something that’s a bit different within each product.

Jonathon: Over to you, Cindy.

Cindy: I think that’s a really good point in terms of starting with the emotion. Then go to the rational part and then end with emotion. I think that’s a really smart way to structure it. Because emotionally you want to get them hooked, but then you want, once you’re emotionally attached, you want to then rationalize your reasons of why you still want to move forward. And so if you provide that content or context that gives them what they need at the point that they’re looking for it. So what are your, some of your suggestions about how to capture the emotion at the beginning. Like if we are talking about a sales page or something like that. What are some strategies to capture the emotion of the potential clients?

Simon: Yeah, absolutely. I mean one of the first things we said, oh we say when, so the brain, we will have this thing called emotional acupuncture, which is kind of what we, the way is the steps we take people through. And so that means like imagine, I’ll answer your question directly in a second. But imaginably with acupuncture you put some needles in somebody and then it makes them, I don’t know, their joints fly up or they get more relaxed with it depends how good your acupuncturist is. But imagine if you had some very nice little needles that you in perceptually person customers’ brains to make them take a different reaction. Well the first one, yeah, to get that real emotion is you had a need to have that connection straight away. The connection is the most important part. When you first learned that and the connections you should problem based.

Simon: I find really nice problem based headline works very well. The reason I choose the problem, when you say you land on the sales page and that headline, it must connect to you, the customer. So generally I mean every sales page on my website is based around one person, one real living person. I’m not huge fan of personas. I mean I’ve worked in agencies my life and I think we need, well not all my life. It’s not so much anymore, but when you go to a persona and it’s just this Frankenstein monster of a person, you’re not able to get that connection that you can create on your sales page. So you need to move beyond the segments of customers, which are thousands to persona, which is a Frankenstein representation of a few people to moving to one person.

Simon: When you sit down and you talk to one person, they just say stuff that you just can’t make up. Especially if you’re a small business owner and everyone have the skills to be an advanced copywriter. So I think that’s really, really important. So you can talk to somebody, get that problem, put it in the sales page, and people can relate to that problem, connect immediately when they land. The most dramatic problem is probably the best one to lead with. I mean, newspapers do it all the time, don’t they? So that’s really nice. The only exception would be is if you’ve got an incredibly unique product. I mean the obvious everyone, cheeses, apple. So I mean if you look at the IPod for example, so however many thousand songs in your pocket they had, that uniqueness will make more of an emotional connection with you as soon as you land versus a problem that people might have with listening with MP3 players. So it’s sensible to have a uniqueness on the headline when you’re landing, if it is truly unique and truly, truly different as well. But otherwise go for the problem because most products aren’t really that different in customer’s minds either.

Cindy: I think two things there. Number one, make sure that it’s addressing a particular problem that your clients or your target clients have. And position it as though you’re talking to one person as opposed to a group of peoples. I think that that says that makes a lot of sense. Jonathon?

Jonathon: The internet, web pages are notoriously called a communication format. Or you just saying it is just the copy and taking copy from one person that you’ve had a conversation around the product or the problem that you’re attempting to solve. Will that deal with this coldness that the internet is?

Simon: Well actually I think he thought that is a massive, massive point. I think you’ve got to, I think this is where brand is far important actually because I think definitely people want to arrive at your sales page already having known you already having trusted you. So for example, say if you had a course from somebody, let’s just pick a Ramit Sethi again that lots of people might know. And we had exactly the same copy on that page as for on a webpage that is from somebody unknown. The copy could be exactly the same, but because you’ve, you know about Ramit Sethi, you’re more likely to scan through them believe and that credibility is going to be there. So for example, what you’re doing, which I don’t do a great job at all, you know, I want to launch a podcast. I don’t have time. My wife’s and two twins, we worked out today very, very soon.

Simon: So we realize time’s going to be immensely short. But doing what you’re doing is fantastic. You know, 300 or plus, 370 or so episodes you’ve done. Now it’s an extraordinary amount and it’s really good because you’ve got, people know, people trust you immediately. So when they land on your site, they’re seeing your copy through different eyes. But if you’ve clicked on it, people don’t know about you and it’s just about people just clicked on a PPC ad and they’ve just clicked through as a whole. It’s a whole different experience. So this is why brand is really important. So I think any channels like, PR, podcasting. I think if you had TV budget that would be good as well. Anything that community build your brand and your profile say that when people click through to your site, they’re far more warm, the better for you.

Simon: And then you know, this is like when I talked right at the beginning about being into sort of marketing science and things like that. I’ve spent a long time looking at not just science, and neuron-psychology. A lot of people do that. But what I mean is the real hard data about what makes people buy. And if you look at the sales figures for when people buy things as well for people who don’t invest in brand, it goes up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, month in, month out. But no real long-term growth when you look at people to invest in brand over three years, even they brand it brand advertising anything you do say it’s a great podcast or TV, I’d say. It doesn’t need to be clear call to action to buy now, but people who see your ad on day one, I end up buying in three years’ time.

Simon: But what you’re doing is you’re getting people to trust and buy into you and if you repeat it continuously, you make longer term sales. And instead of going along like this, up, down, up, down, you go up and after about year one, typically the investment in brand starts to pay off, but not immediately. But if you only go for short term sales activity with no brand, no great podcasts and they great TV, it just doesn’t, it doesn’t pay off and you end up yo-yoing just up and down. So a bit like going on a pogo stick, you really want to be, you really just want to be jumping up into the sky and on a plane and that’s what brand does to you,

Jonathon: That`s great, Cindy.

Cindy: That’s very true. Something that people don’t want to hear in terms of the investment of time that it takes to build that brand awareness before you’ll reap the benefits. So you talked about different reasons why people buy from you. Can you kind of just share some of your other thoughts as to, you know, our sales people that are listening need to really be conscious of when they’re putting their materials together?

Simon: Yeah, absolutely. It really, so for us, the whole business is, set up around people who have a superior product, but they keep seeing that customers go to the competition, emailing their product like way better. So, and that this is where the whole emotional thing, emotional acupuncture comes in. And there are really three main parts to that. It’s getting customers to buy the first one going to sound obvious, but the way he bring them down isn’t so. So what’s your message is the first one, who is your brand is the one other one. And it’s also how you say it. So what you say, how you say it and who says it? What you say the message is so important. So this is where the connection comes in. So when you create great message, it’s got to have a great connection.

Simon: So it does it relate to your problem. That’s a really nice way. So you land on your sales page is that connection there. And then it’s really nice if you can connect, go into maybe show that you empathize with a problem that you have as well. And then you need the results in a lot of results is a second one. So when you connect to the messaging and the connection, he needs the results. So what’s the advantage of me choosing this course? What differences is it going to make in my life? And you need to give them that result straight away or problems. Solution is another way of putting it, but I think connections, nice given the results held in the advantage of the benefit and then really paint that picture of what that result looks like in that in their lives.

Simon: If they were to buy for you, what are all the features and benefits like we talked about earlier on, really important. The third one is given the proof, is it credible? So testimonials, case studies or places featured, something like that. Get expert reviews, star ratings. People really need that proof box. What that does is that it starts to take the risk out of people’s minds about why they should buy from me. So the connection, the results and the proof. So we’re almost there with the message part, but he really needs to, it’s really important to do this. And as I’m going through, so my heads there is obviously you need the push as well, which is this is actually the final one. So when you push people, you get to the end. So typically, you land on a homepage, it’s downloaded my free eBook and submits an email address.

Simon: But if you just ask people to do that are okay. But if you have a bonus, you need some sort of bonus, some sort of urgency. But if you don’t sign up today, you’re really going to miss out on that push is so important. So things like countdown clocks, I know they are kind of tacky a bit, so they’re not quite my thing. But things like limited offer today, they sort of pushed tactics. So they’ve really important thing to have as well. So you are the message you deliver, needs to in some way have something that’s really pushy. And then finally it needs to feel really quite different and special. So what is the most magical and special thing? So those, if you could create a message around that you and you can do that, a headline can do that phenomenally well.

Simon: All of those things all in one message and making a sales page as well. It’s not just a message, it’s a long thing, but you can always use those emotional acupuncture points throughout a sales page. You can condense them into a headline. It’s really beautiful thing actually. So it’s nice. So that’s what you say, which is the densest part. But how you say it is the emotion. So when people are doing emotion, you need to give them the roller coaster, the up and down. You really need to take them places as well. So that rollercoaster is so important. You need to pull people left and right because when you look at how people pay attention to things, you see that when somebody says something really great like my voice is going up, something in their head, switches on and then their attention goes up and there’s a, if you measure it. I’ll try and share a video maybe with the you guys afterwards and you can share it with your community.

Simon: When you look at a video on people’s attention, goes above, and the senses aligned, the memory switches on in your head and it starts to remember stuff. And then it encodes things and when it goes below the line and I start speaking or when people`s attention switch is off. And if you don’t create this up and down rollercoaster effect or anything like that, then and what happens is he speak very boringly and people don’t remember what you’re saying. So you need to have this sort of up and down roller coaster effect. So that, so the way, you know how you say it’s so important that, and we only react to things. We have about eight emotions, joy, sadness, I forget the other ones that frustration and anger and hope. Nut there are only have limited emotions. So what we need to do is we need to make people feel something or positive.

Simon: The better. We need to make them feel it strongly. So that is how that is. That’s how you say it. And then who says it? People always forget, you know, a TV ads, I was reading this the other day that with TV ads is that people often forget to put their brand in there in any particular way. There might be as much wonderful ad with a great story and then suddenly think who is that for? And car ads are really bad at that. Really bad. They will sort of merge into one. And that’s because the brand isn’t presence. I mean you can have a logo typically having a logo at the beginning or just saying that this ad is from having your logo throughout. Maybe it’s on the car badge, maybe it’s the color Palette of the brand is a tagline. It’s a jingle all the way through to the end.

Simon: But the problem with advertising, it is very people misattribute your ad for someone else’s brand. And often you can just be doing something for the competition. So that is why, who says it and making sure you’re present there is really, really important. So that’s why. So that is quite a long explanation of it’s your message is what you say. It’s how you say it with emotion and it is how you say it with a brand. So that’s a bit of a whistle stop tour. I can do an eight week course on this, but.

Cindy: Well it’s interesting because people often just focus on what they say, not all of the other elements that go around it. So it’s important to make sure that all of those other elements are part of your message so that, you hit all areas. So thank you for that. Jonathan.

Jonathon: Yes folks we’re going to go for our break. We will be back with Simon learning more. How to get your brain in the message right for your course. Be back in a free moments folks.

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Jonathon: We are coming back. We’ve had an interesting discussion with Simon from the Brain Wheel. Just love the name. Now Simon what’s the power of video? Cause on my home page there`s actually a video of me. Quite scary really Simon. My conversion rate is not fantastic. But to be serious, do you think having a video on the home page is a good idea? And is it a good idea, especially if you’re selling yourself or your key person of the brand to have you on the home page in a video?

Simon: Yeah, I mean, personally I think it’s really nice if you can execute it in a really nice way as well. So I mean, especially if your one person selling something to people who are trying to market yourself, it gets into buy into. Now I don’t have one simply because I just haven’t had the time to do it yet. But actually I think it’s a really nice idea as well. And it’s not just here’s a podcast I’ve been on, or here’s my own podcast and this and here. You’re sort of there straight away. It’s really nice. It feels a personal touch. So one of my clients has got a, she’s got a dating site, so she’s had a dating website for a few years. And what she’s, her way, she’s really different as she speaks up, sort of the personal touch effects, every single profile that goes to this dating sites.

Simon: Really clever because she wants people to date respectfully and treat each other nicely. So this personal thing is immediate, straight from the start. And she’s got a video of her straight away, and it is really nice, it plays very well. The execution is so important. You know, you can have a great message in the video. Video obviously any data videos, extremely powerful format and are on trend at the moment. But if the video’s and executed in the right way, it can fail a little bit. So I think that’s my only watch out with the videos. So obviously Jonathan, I’ve seen yours as well. It’s really nice. It’s very friendly and it`s very down to, it’s down to down to earth. And do you think I know who this guy is and I can buy into him. So yeah, it’s nice.

Jonathon: Before I throw over back to Cindy what are some of the mistakes people do with these videos? You seem to be hinting to get it right and what some of the things they get wrong?

Simon: Honestly, it’s the homemade part of it. Say in terms of getting it wrong, it’s that typically using a smart phone camera for example. I think what it says is that when you produce a video, it sends a signal about you and your brands. So for example, if you were to produce a video with a smartphone camera and it looked like it’d been edited in a few seconds, banged the logo at the front, it probably doesn’t say great things about you. But if you’re sitting in a room, possibly not like a bedroom here with no lighting. Imagine the signal I would be creating about myself if I had a proper lighting around me or something like that with a great backdrop. And it clearly been edited and there was music in the background.

Simon: Because what it does is it says, I care you the viewer as well. And that’s why I mean on a different note, it doesn’t matter if it’s video on a website, but even TV ads, they send such a great signal about our brands. And the TV is still, it doesn’t matter what other people think that the science is clear. It’s very clear. TV is still the best performing media out there by far. It’s better when you add the other channels on top. But the thing is with TVs could sends a signal your brand, if you had $1 million or pounds to spend, would you rather spend £1 million on a great series of TV ads? Would you rather spend it? I mean in pounds and display advertising? The answer is it should be on TV because it says an awful lot about you and your brand that you care that you’re going to go to the effort of producing a TV ad. And you’re not just going to go into ad words or you’re not going to set up a Google ad that’s just going to sort of there just to drive quick traffic.

Simon: The signal is so important. So video on your website says I really care as long as you execute it in a really nice way and it doesn’t need to be too hard.

Jonathon: That`s great. Over to you Cindy.

Cindy: So Simon has a question for him. I’m sure you have your perspective in terms of being a marketing scientist and all. One of the things my clients struggle with is coming up with a name for their course. In terms of you know, attracting the right people to their course or even just peeking somebody’s interest. Do you have any thoughts based on your expertise as to how, like what, how should people go about coming up with the name of the course are and should there be certain elements that should be in that name? Do you have any thoughts around that Simon?

Simon: Gosh, that’s a very big question. In terms of the name of the course I’ve done personally is the less conceptual, the better because maybe feel better known. It is okay, you can get away with it. But obviously from search perspective as well, it’s nicer to just have a course that just, you know what it is straight away. As examples. So, I mean I’ve taken, I’m trying to think of all the courses I’ve done, they’ve all had, I mean article writing courses, they’ve all been called those information product courses. I’m just trying to think of the ones I’ve done. Marketing effectiveness courses, which is like a big marketing science one? They all have big nays. I just, I think the more opaque he makes it more difficult to understand. I think it’s harder for people to buy into immediately. Cause imagines you need like if people haven’t, don’t know you or don’t know you too well, you’re giving them another hurdle. So I would do that. I think it’s cool for things like brand names to make them sort of buzzy and exciting. But I think if you, it’s too much. Yeah,

Cindy: It’s funny, I agree with you 100% because I have clients who come back to me with these, these different names and, and they’ll give me a name and I’m like, but I don’t know what that does. And you know, you have to think of somebody going online on the computer putting in a search for us. Looking for a solution to their problem. They need to be able to see in the title that it’s going solve their problem, at least to get them to read more. So thank you for confirming that because often want things that they need to be crafty or, or cuter what have you. And I think the more clear you are, I think the better.

Simon: Yeah.

Cindy: Jonathan.

Jonathon: Going back to the video question. What are your views on YouTube? Do you think YouTube especially for people on small to medium budget. YouTube, you could get some of the benefits of traditional television, which you have said are great. Do you think that that is a possibility that a lot of people aren’t taking up and should really look at?

Simon: I think the YouTube thing at the moment is particularly interesting. I think generally with any social media platform, but particularly YouTube, you can get really get a great brand there. I mean I, Google had this lovely model of I’m hearing a hero content hub content and hygiene. Here I being the one off, you might do one amazing, keep video in a year that you put media spend behind. And then you have the hub stuff, which might be once a month or so. And then you have the hygiene, which is like daily Vlog and stuff like that. Now I think if you’re able to stretch across all three of those, that’s, that’s really helpful because what that does is that unlike TV, you don’t just have to wait for the hero piece of contents arrived, you know, which is, which is really impactful. You don’t have to wait.

Simon: You don’t have to spend lots of time doing that. You can still create everyday content, which is a blog or whatever. It might be telling you customers about your daily, your daily journey. It might be creating the course and giving them a little tease into, uh, into what the philosophy of the course is about the pains you go through to create it or whatever it might be. But, I think that’s really nice to have those, those three levels. And what that does is that gives you something that TV doesn’t necessarily do, which is the everyday reach. Because you know, when you look at when you look at the frequency, how important it is to get in front of people. I was, I’ve been on off, I’ve written a presentation the other day looking at the real science behind how often you should contact customers and we’ll have one, you should put an ad in front of customers and there is literally you need to be there continuously on a, at least on a low level that gets far more effects than just turning up for a month, putting money behind some paid advertising and then switching off for three weeks.

Simon: Do It on a lower level continuously. And that’s what’s really nice about producing content a lot of the time. But you do have to pay, you do have to pay for it. Cause when you look at the, the, the growth rates of how much effect it drives your business, when you do owned media and earned media, the growth to a businesses, you know, it’s, it’s okay, it can help stuff. Of course it does. But when you put paid behind it, it just rockets up. Do your, your, your traffic to the sites, you know, people’s awareness of the brand and consideration. It just, it just shoots, it shoots right up. So this is why it paid, owned and earned together. Really important but especially paid because obviously with algorithms nowadays, social media platforms are there to make sure that you that you have to pay for advertising.

Simon: You get an audience if you want to reach, you collect that lovely audience. Like Facebook for so long he was spent, eight is creating fans and they say you can only reach two, 3%, you got 100,000 fans and you think this organic posts way, which a few of them and those are the people you know about me already and the less convincing, well that’s why they force you to pay as my concern with Facebook groups that in the end you’re going to get really nice, a big group of people and they’re going to switch off the group. We’ll make it this far like my, you know, bespoke communities, you know, obviously you guys are more than experts in that. And so it’s just, I think that’s really, really important. So in terms of YouTube, going back to YouTube, it’s great for brands at the moment. There’s obviously clear issue in the news when you look at the ads that people get away with, you know, far right add far right wing ads and you know, really bad poor levels of advertising. And so a big brands I think is it crafts and cabarets and trying to think there’s, those are the names of recently pulled their advertising budget from YouTube because you can’t, you don’t want to associate your brand with very dodgy advertisers. So as a big watcher.

Jonathon: Over to you Cindy.

Cindy: I’m actually interested in going into companies and helping them. Can you tell me a little bit about how you actually work with companies and the process that you go through to help them?

Simon: Absolutely. So I worked with three types of small businesses. I’m incredibly broad about with agencies and I worked with the larger ones as well. So in terms of the process, it’s very much about consulting. You go and you find a pro, you find out what problem they need helping with. And we’ll do that. I also do it, I’ll come onto the process isn’t a bit, but I also do an audit as well. We go in a new audit, People’s marketing channels and you see what’s working and you assess their brands and you do a snapshot and then that might lead to sort of more consultancy. And then for the small business side, I actually have my own community, which is launching on Friday of all things. It is actually called the brainy lounge. So it’s just for businesses that are afraid of these without the sleazy sales pitches.

Simon: Cause you know, like number of communities can be about pushy selling. So it’s all based around one customer I met, it was one of the first to sign up. She’s an early sign up, so it was good. And then I sell, you know, once a one time and audits and things like that. I mean the process I go through with clients, it really is just spoke about them and what the problems they need. Generally an audit is a really nice start because it just says this is where you are now. Its proper strategy is like do a diagnosis, right? Proper basic of any base only strategy do and he do the diagnosis, you say what she wants to do next and then and then you recommend some, some solution at the end. And it’s often that and there’s no businesses are the same

Simon: So I’m working with one client at the moment. He needs products so it’s actually a digital agency. They need products to send and workshops. So I’ve gone in and created, created sales copy and the products three, two or three products with them, which they’re now promoting. And then I’ve got another client who needed a marketing audit to said, where do I stand now? What do you know? Is this working for me? And then I have other clients who just want me to go and work on our campaigns as well. And do events, I meanI’ve got to the stage in my career where I don’t use the term digital anymore in my CV. Everything’s digital TV’s digital, distributed digitally, a lot of outdoor digital is digital radios, digital. I think the words now redundant. So I’ve taken that completely out.

Simon: I think January my approach is that I go and diagnose the problem and you find them problem. It’s really bespoke because you know, I’m offering sort of high end expensive marketing consultancy. Howeverthere is a serious a system that I do use that it is slightly different, the emotional acupuncture one that if somebody needs to grow a brand as well. There’s kind of a five stage model, but essentially it’s people’s brands need lot of refreshing. I find they get quite stale. So we have a five stage five, five stage system that guide clients three ways. First things to do is not talk about the customer at all, is just find out what is your fuel? Why did you go into business in the first place? You know, what is it that really annoys you about the way the competition does things?

Simon: And this is why it’s so important. The fuel is everything. And when I worked with clients that are usually the first place I start because I want to understand them. But when you talk to them about it, you realize how sometimes it can be quite a weak philosophy. They’ve got weak fuel. But when you sort of say why did he go into business, what’s the competition like? What is it you hate about the competition? When you tap into that, people get really angry and they think, I know I can do this better. And then suddenly not only does that help form of philosophy for your homepage, you also got a uniqueness there is like you think, oh this is how I can do it better. And then you can have more of uniqueness and then you can work with them to think, how do we solve a customer’s problem?

Simon: And then we move three product developments and building a website and then how to communicate their business after that and measuring effectiveness and ROI and all that afterwards. Really, is this all about the fuel? It’s got to start there. If you don’t have the fuel, you don’t have the enthusiasm, then you know people don’t care. My thing is I’m really against people being misled marketing advice. I think having spent years with a real, really high quality, high quality best of marketing science and the world institutions, universities, and then I came to this wall business world as well. I thought, man, this some of this, not all by some wonderful people out there, but some of this advice is, is downright wrong and that you can hear it. My voice now caught the people’s attention to probably speaking in there for the line, but it is wrong and I want to right that wrong. I want to show people that there’s far more sensible professional advice out there. For somebody had qualifications in this as well and it’s not some guy who’s grown up in a basement thinking they can wing it with just publishing your knowing content every day as an art and a science.

Cindy: I think that’s a really good place to start in terms of what is it about the competition that bothers you? Because that’s probably one of the reasons why I got into what I’m doing. I was just, there was, it was bothered me what I was seeing up there. So I think that’s a good place to start. Jonathan?

Jonathon: I’ve really been intrigued with some of the things that Simon`s got to say. Simon, how can people find, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what your thoughts and what your company’s up to?

Simon: Sure. Yeah, I mean obviously you can go to the website, which is the brainwheel.com. I love hearing from people by email as well. I love the personal advice. The whole business is built around being small and thoughtful. And I answer every email that I get. And the please just email me at simon@thebrainwheel.com. It’s none salesy, non-pushy. I just like meeting new people and talking and explaining myself.

Jonathon: That’s great. And Cindy, what’s the best way for people that are new to the podcast to find out more about you and what you’re up to?

Cindy: Well they are welcome to visit my website at the coursewhisperer.com. Or say hello to me and reach out on LinkedIn. You can find me there at Cindy Nicholson.

Jonathon: And folks, we’re doing a webinar tomorrow. The day as come, it’s tomorrow folks. And we’re going to be doing this Webinar, the seven things that you really need to know to have a successful course. Your first course and that will be at 9:00 AM pacific standard time. It’s going to be me and Cindy. We got some great advice. Cindy’s done a fantastic job. It’s gonna be just great. And we got some great freebies to handout as well, which you will only be available if you join us live. And how do you do that? It’s quite simple. Go to the WP tonic website, back strike Webinar, and you’d be able to register for our Webinar. And if you’ve been thinking about doing that course and you’re just not done that first step of a 1000 mile journey, as they say. We are going to motivate you to do that first. So hopefully you join us soon. And I’ve just realized that that we will be publishing this after the webinar. We will see you next week folks. Bye.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to WP tonic. The podcast that gives you a spoonful of WordPress medicine twice a week.

 

Every Friday at 8:30am PST we have a great and hard-hitting round-table show with a group of WordPress developers, online business owners and WordPress junkies where we discuss the latest and most interesting WordPress and online articles/stories of the week. You can also watch the show LIVE every Friday at 8:30am PST on our Facebook WP-Tonic Show page. https://www.facebook.com/wptonic/

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