dean jackson

The power of Silence for Focusing on your business

Focus, Marketing, peak Performance, Productivity, single target market, Uncategorized

For a lot of people who follow Buddhism , today is an auspicious occasion since it Lord Buddha’s birthday. One of the things linked to Buddhism and the overall philosophy of religions that originated in the Indian Sub-Continent is the practice of “Dhyan” and Yoga. While there are a lot of people who follow and practice Yoga across the world “Dhyan” is something that is missing in our lives. “Dhyan” involves sitting in pin drop silence and just focusing all your energy to think.

We all (me included) are so busy running after deadlines all day that we don’t give our brains the bandwidth to actually do what it can do best – which is THINK. When you get into the “Dhyan” stage you are able to connect a lot of the dots which otherwise seem impossible to connect.

I have many times earlier, mentioned a practice by Dean Jackson called the focus finder. Its a very practical way to do a brain dump and then get on to the activity of Thinking.

Today I was a little frustrated that I was not being able to figure out a solution for identifying a Single Target Market. I keep giving you folks a lot of inputs on why you should go about identifying the Single Target Market and the incredible benefits it can have in your marketing.

But today I had a mind block and I was not able to think through on what would be my STM. After lazing around mindlessly and watching un-necessary web series for about an hour, I decided to just sit down with my notebook and pencil and started jotting down thoughts as they came to me about my “bullseye ” (the STM)

While doing this my brain also kept throwing up additional items that I could include. But I had to make my STM as sharply defined as possible. So I kept listing down, all the people whom I would not be able to help.

Automatically I ended up putting a lot of AND statements to ensure that there were as little possibilities as possible for some additional markets creeping in.

Once this was done I went two steps further, I even identified the the markets, one variable away and two variables away. This would help me, in case, the STM I have defined is not viable economically and I have to expand it a little bit.

While I spent close to 2 hours dilly – dalling, I was able to achieve all this in a matter of about 45 minutes, when there was pin drop silence and I was only focusing on this activity. These 45 minutes were more precious because of the immense productivity I got.

If feasible I would suggest everyone to regularly do these focus exercises, they can increase productivity levels dramatically and because you take out everything from your brain and put it on paper, there’s no chance of missing things.

Till next then.

Carpe Diem!!!

The actual nuance of a identifying a Single Target Market

Marketing, segmentation, single target market

I keep writing a lot about the SIngle Target Market. Its a term I learned from Dean Jackson. I have known about segmenting and niching but breaking down a market by usage was something which appealed to me.

Now why is it important to drill down to a Single Target Market . Once you have been able to figure that part out, you can then work on the different media you can use to engage this person and then work on what is the message you will send through the different media.

To show a practical example. We were targeting companies for selling our services. Now you can choose partners in different ways. We first did a segmentation by OEMs. If they were selling a specific OEM’s product, then we thought we could make them a partner to sell add on services from us – but these partners could be in different states, they could be of different sizes – single person companies, large companies and everything in-between. They could be owned by men, women, public listed or private. So we decided to put the limit on minimum number of employees and maximum number of employees to segment further.

As we kept on going deeper we found even more characteristics that we had not even noticed when we did the general rule partners of OEMs.

So one rule of thumb that I have figured out , to identify a single target market , is to figure what other attribute exists that could make this data set smaller till it can’t be made any smaller. Then figure out how you can combine based on the usage and expand from there once you see success with one usage area.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

What does success mean for you

Lifestyle, success

Have you clearly identified what are the parameters based on which you will be able to say that I am successful.

For some it could be a house, for some it could be travel to foreign land. For some it could be aspirational – as in – not having to go about life against a clock – its for me – though I haven’t been able to achieve it yet.

I used to have and still have this problem, that my line for defining success keeps changing on a lot of parameters. Which is where my problems start. Due to this I feel inadequate sometimes with respect to people who have more material things than me and keeping up with the Joneses becomes a problem.

On a lot of things, I think I have achieved success when I look back. Where I have come from, there’s a reason to smile. But when I keep looking at the ever moving horizon as I move forward, it does get me a little introspective and low. That’s when I follow Dan Sullivan’s advice – always look back at where you started from and how much you have covered, rather than thinking about what you have not covered. Then make a plan and take action for the next steps.

But defining what success means for you can actually help you in prioritising your life better. I had these visions of taking my family to certain countries on a vacation. Due to that I took a lot of decisions, where I had to hold back on spending on some items which were not aligned with this criteria.

Dean Jackson has actually designed his whole life around this principle. I am still a long way. But I would think you should also start defining what success would mean for you so that you know when you achieve it. Otherwise you will be running after the wrong things. Let me know what you think in the comments section below, would love to hear from you.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Lead magnets…..different medium….different possibilities

campaign, digital, lead generation, Marketing, Sales

Marketing is applied psychology. So you need to figure out the strengths of each medium and blend it with human psychology to help you get leads.

In my earlier posts I have written about different physical and electronic media for generating leads. Today we will limit to seeing how you can utilize electronic media.

One of the key things about Google (including YouTube) paid search and to some extent Facebook paid search is the fact that if you can master them, you can can have the equivalent of thousands of sales people working for you, whenever someone is searching for something similar to what you offer.

So while you might show up because of the PPC, how do you ensure that people click on your advertisement first and then leave their email id, so that you can keep marketing to them in the future.

This is where the challenge starts. With PPC, if you have some smart people, you can get your advertisement to show up at a reasonable cost. But there’s no point if they come to your site and leave without giving you their email address. Then your advertisement has been wasted.

One simple way which I have tested after listening to Joe Polish and Dean Jackson on thir Ilovemarketing.com podcast is offering relevant reports. Why this works is that human beings are gatherers/ collectors. So when you are offering something which the person can collect right now and consume whenever they want, they tend to give their email ids.

Right now I have seen that offering this lead magnet using this psychology has worked on getting about 10 email ids a week. I am now working on seeing how to scale it up to see if I can take it to a about a hundred a week….Will keep you posted.

I would suggest mean time if you’ll can also try and give me feedback, in the comments section below, on your success or failure with this.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!