SHOWNOTES
Our guest today has been on the show before, but I had to have him back because there was so much we needed to talk about!
Rich Brooks is the founder and president of Flyte New Media, a digital agency in Portland, Maine, and is a nationally recognized speaker on entrepreneurship, digital marketing, and social media.
Today, we’re talking about our own remarkability.
In this episode, Rich shares:
🤩 Why so many businesses/entrepreneurs struggle with digital marketing
🤩 What we can do to uncover our own remarkability
🤩 How to stand out online
🤩 What makes you remarkable
🤩 The Remarkability Formula
🤩 Four lenses of the Remarkability Formula
🤩 How to leverage the things that make you remarkable in your marketing
🤩 Why remarkability is in the eye of the beholder
Don’t miss this episode and let me know your thoughts after you listen. I always love hearing from you.
RESOURCES
https://www.theagentsofchange.com
https://www.fastforwardmaine.com
** AND...If you take a few minutes to leave a 5-star review for the Front Row Entrepreneur Podcast, and send me a screenshot with your mailing address, I will send you a free copy of Rich’s book - “The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital”
I always love hearing from you. Let me know your thoughts after you listen in the comments below.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:04.010] - Gary Vee Hey, guys, it's Gary Vaynerchuk. And you're listening to the Front Row Entrepreneur Podcast with our girl Jen.
[00:12.210] - Jen Lehner Our guest today is founder and President of Flyte New Media, a digital agency in Portland, Maine, that's been in business for over 24 years. He is a nationally recognized speaker on entrepreneurship, digital marketing, and social media. He founded The Agents of Change, which is an awesome annual conference that I've attended twice and a weekly podcast that focuses on search, social and mobile marketing. He recently co-founded Fast Forward Maine, which is a podcast and workshop series for growing Maine businesses.
[00:46.590] - Jen Lehner He's the author of The Lead Machine, The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing, a book that helps entrepreneurs and marketers reach more of their ideal customers online. And he has appeared in Inc. Magazine, The Huffington Post, Fast Company, CNN, the Social Media Examiner, and many other news sources for stories on digital marketing. He's also the tech guru on the evening news Show 207, which airs on the NBC affiliates in Maine. Welcome to The Front Row Entrepreneur Podcast Rich Brooks.
[01:19.910] - Rich Brooks Jen, it is so nice to be reconnected with you. Thanks so much for having me on the show.
Read more...
[01:24.170] - Jen Lehner Yes. This is your second time on the show, and I love talking to you because, well, you're just a wealth of information. And as I've said before, you've got that Winnie the Poo voice, which makes it like extra nice to listen to. So let's just jump right in. My first question for you, Rich, is, why do so many businesses and entrepreneurs struggle with digital marketing?
[01:47.010] - Rich Brooks Wow. Well, that would open up a can of worms. There's probably thousands of reasons, individual reasons why they struggle with it. Some people just don't understand it, don't believe in it, don't make the investment they need to. But I think one of the biggest issues is these days, even when people do understand, they understand the benefits of Facebook ads or SEO, or whatever the case may be is they don't have a real reason why people should be doing business with them. So they're spending their money on Facebook ads, they're writing new blog content, they start a podcast, but they have nothing to say that hasn't been said before or that people need to hear.
[02:28.140] - Rich Brooks So part of it is a matter of is the content you want to share, something that people are really going to connect with.
[02:36.390] - Jen Lehner But how do we know, for example, I'm a marketer, all marketers say the same thing. There's just certain fundamentals for marketers that we need to share with our audience. So how do we uncover, I guess, our own remarkability and stand out?
[02:56.070] - Rich Brooks Well, first of all, I'd say a couple of things. One is, yes, you and I are both marketers, and there's hundreds of thousands of marketers out there. But we do have our own way of sharing that content. And so part of it may just be in our voice. But I do believe in remarkability. I know that's why you wanted me to talk about on the show. And so I do want to delve into that. The fact is, what we need to do is figure out how to stand out online and uncover or unleash our own remarkability, so that then we can put it into all of our marketing channels.
[03:30.970] - Rich Brooks And I know that seems like something kind of intimidating like when I say to people, like, what makes you remarkable? Most people just freeze like a deer in the headlamps. But this is not a new concept. The bottom line is we are always attracted to something that's new or different. It's just part of our human nature to be that way. People have talked about this for a long time. I mean, Seth Godin has the purple cow, there's the blue ocean strategy. There is unique selling or value proposition.
[04:02.110] - Rich Brooks So my word for it is what makes you remarkable. And so what I was trying to do is trying to figure out why some people struggle so much is help them uncover what makes them remarkable. And basically coming up with a formula that anybody can use on themselves to kind of uncover or create their own remarkability. And so I think that's the work that a lot of business owners and a lot of marketers need to be doing right now is to kind of go through that process and figure out what they need to do to kind of lean into their own remarkability.
[04:37.590] - Jen Lehner Okay. I love a formula. I can rock a template, a roadmap, a checklist. Can we dig into your formula and just walk through each part of it? Okay.
[04:48.710] - Rich Brooks Absolutely. And so a lot of this is based on me. Like you said, I've been in business for almost 25 years and just having people come to me for digital marketing. But really, they haven't even done the basic steps of understanding who they are, who they serve, any of that sort of stuff. So when I'm working with a client and trying to figure out how are we going to position them, how are we going to set up their marketing? I use this idea called the remarkability formula.
[05:16.960] - Rich Brooks And there are four lenses to that formula. Four lenses that you should use on yourself that will help you start to understand what makes you stand out, what makes you different than anybody else. And I'll tell them to you. And then I'd love to dive into each one one at a time. So it's find, focus, fashion and frame. So those are the four lenses that I use when I'm trying to work with somebody to kind of uncover what they should be focusing on when it comes to their business and their marketing.
[05:46.590] - Jen Lehner Okay. Cool. All right. So find, focus, fashion, and fame. All right. So what's find?
[05:54.330] - Rich Brooks So find is where I like to start, because it's the easiest. The bottom line is you're already doing something remarkable. And therefore you don't have to change anything. Maybe you just have to promote it more. Maybe you need to lean into it a little bit more, but it already exists. So what I would ask people is, why are people choosing you now, if you've been in business for a little while, is there something why people are choosing you? And the bottom line is there could be a lot of reasons, and some of them may not be all that remarkable.
[06:24.670] - Rich Brooks But what we're really looking for is what makes you stand out and what would be difficult for somebody to replicate. So one good example of this, when I first bought my first house, it was in dire need of a paint job. And so what we did is we started to do some outreach to find some house painters. And you might be saying to yourself, what could be remarkable about house painting? Well, for me, the idea of getting a house painted was a little bit intimidating because I just had these visions of people coming to the house and setting up shop there and just making a mess in my house for days or weeks on end.
[07:01.600] - Rich Brooks And not really the experience I wanted to have when I was first moving into my first home, one of the guys we talked to said, I can get the whole thing done in two days. I'm like, you're hired. So what happened is on the first day he shows up with his crew. His crew is like four vans and 20 guys, and they come pouring out almost like a clown car pouring out of these four bands. And they basically hit the house. They set up the ladders.
[07:25.890] - Rich Brooks They may have been singing Sea Shanties. I don't really remember. Maybe I'm just remembering that wrong. But anyway, they're all done. By the time the sun goes down, and then two days later, they show up and they do the second coat. I mean, it was really a phenomenal experience. And every one of my neighbors noticed this. They noticed this huge team coming and attacking my home before and after that, they saw there. And that's a great example of somebody doing something remarkable. Nobody else was doing it.
[07:53.960] - Rich Brooks Nobody else had a team that big. It's not easy to replicate, especially in today's job market. But even back then, it's hard for a painting company, especially in Maine, where it might be seasonal to keep 20 people on the payroll. So that's a good example of somebody who already had something remarkable going on in their business. And it's just a matter are they leveraging it enough when it comes to their marketing and to their outreach and to their advertisements?
[08:19.650] - Jen Lehner Yeah. And you know, what I was thinking is like, well, I think if you're in a boring industry, the people in it don't think it's boring. But I would think accounting is boring. I would think insurance is boring because that stuff is boring to me. Right. And then maybe you ask yourself like, Well, what in the world what could I say is remarkable. But then I was thinking about, oh, I can't remember the example. It was like some beer company a long time ago said, oh, I know what it was.
[08:54.450] - Jen Lehner We used the XYZ cleansing process, like hygiene process to make sure that our beer is not only super great tasting, but also very hygienic, it was the gist of it. But what was clever was that every beer company did that. It was like, industry standard, like, you had to do that. But they pulled it out. I guess it's a way. Also, a lot of brands will say, like, gluten free, but they were always gluten free.
[09:23.830] - Rich Brooks It's potato chips. Of course it's gluten free.
[09:26.150] - Jen Lehner Right. So maybe if you're an insurance and you can't think of, like, I don't know. I can't even think of one single thing that would be remarkable about insurance. But unless I buy you lunch every time or I don't know. But maybe you pull something out that is industry-required. But everybody doesn't know about it, right?
[09:53.250] - Rich Brooks I don't know that I would put that remarkable because everybody's doing it. But I understand from a marketing or advertising side of things. And I've heard those stories before where you just start talking about it in a way. And everybody's like, oh, my God, that's fantastic. And everybody in the industry is like, but we've always been doing that. But then it's very easy to replicate. Somebody else can come out and say, yes, we've been doing it. And we've been doing it longer than they have. And I'm not saying that that's not a great idea to do.
[10:19.450] - Rich Brooks But I'm saying that if you really want to uncover something that's remarkable. And the goal here is that when you do uncover this and you really step into it and own it, you're going to find that you attract more of the right type of clients, not the wrong type of clients. And there are the wrong type of clients that it is very difficult to compete with you, because whatever this thing is, it's not easy to replicate. And if everybody in your industry is already doing it, then it's certainly easier to replicate.
[10:44.190] - Rich Brooks And once you're able to do that, then your marketing becomes much more effective and much easier to do. And that's really the challenge that I found is a lot of people, no matter how much money they were throwing at their digital marketing agencies, they weren't getting any kind of return on their investment because nobody cared. That's the whole thing. It's like people have to care. And yes, in the example, you just gave people care. But once they are educated, they may not care anymore because they realize, Well, I'm getting that from every single beer.
[11:12.090] - Jen Lehner Okay. So sorry to stick on this one thing, but I think this is very tough for people who feel like they're doing something that is kind of vanilla or everybody else is doing it, and they're pretty much doing it the way everybody is doing it. But then I was thinking, okay, let's look at your Agents of Change conference. I think one of the unique things about your conference in Maine is that it's more intimate than most. But the caliber of the people who come are every bit as good, if not better than most every other marketing conference.
[11:47.030] - Jen Lehner So you appeal to small business owners locally and then well beyond Maine, because people feel like they could get a hands-on on experience. They can actually talk with the experts and workshop with the experts and that sort of thing. So would that be an example of something that you would use for remarkability for your conference?
[12:12.660] - Rich Brooks So it's interesting. I've never really thought about it. I do talk about the Agents of Change conference when I'm talking about remarkability, but I actually use it in a later section. So let's hold off on that. I understand what you're saying. A lot of people don't know what's remarkable about their own business, and there may not be anything yet that is remarkable. A couple other examples of find, though, because you could have a very boring business or boring industry. But there may be something that's remarkable in the way that you do it.
[12:41.890] - Rich Brooks So one example is price now just lowering your price. Not remarkable at all. Could be actually a terrible business decision. But going to the extremes on price could be really fascinating or remarkable. So as an example, you and I probably both remember Columbia Record House, right? Eleven records for one Penny. That is remarkable. Not only that, I didn't even have to go down to my local record store because they send me a catalog every month. So that's kind of an example of remarkable pricing. It got people talking about it on the other side.
[13:14.760] - Rich Brooks You might decide to have something that your prices are so high. It's remarkable. And then a good example of that is Grey Goose Vodka. When it first came to market, it could have competed as a premium vodka and sold for about $17 a bottle, which is what it was going for right then, or maybe a couple of dollars less. Instead, they're like, we are actually a super premium vodka, and it's $30 a bottle. And suddenly everybody had to have this right because it was remarkable. It told a story, told the story about the quality of the drink.
[13:46.830] - Rich Brooks It told a story about how wealthy and affluent I am because I can have it on display. So that's an example. Or if you can't be the least expensive or the most expensive. Look at Radiohead. Radiohead decided to release an album on the Internet and said, Pay what you think it's worth. And that was amazing. And although it was a little controversial at the time, they ended up in the first, I think it was three months. They released it three months just digitally pay what you want model. That three months generated more revenue for them than their previous album had sold totally.
[14:22.560] - Rich Brooks And then when they actually took the exact same song list, same songs and put it out as a CD, people bought so many copies of the CD that it actually entered the Billboard 100 at number one. So that's a pretty remarkable pricing structure, too. So it could be your pricing. It could be your delivery system is something remarkable. It could be the people. I'm not just saying that you have good people working for you, but there's something remarkable about the people that work for you, something that you can't just necessarily teach in a customer service class.
[14:53.450] - Rich Brooks But people just love that or like you, they're a thought leader. So people want to work with them because they're out there and they're explaining things in a new way. They're up on stage, they're presenting. And so that will often help attract new types of business to it. So there's a lot of things that you can find that are already going on your business that may make you remarkable. And the point of this whole exercise, and the four lenses is to find not one thing that's remarkable, but go into each one of these four lenses and see if there's something.
[15:25.960] - Rich Brooks There's not always something in every category, but there's usually at least one or two in the four categories in the four lenses and start to see how you can layer those on top of themselves. So even if something's maybe not fully remarkable when you actually combine it with something else from another lens, now it is remarkable. Now you really stand alone.
[15:44.150] - Jen Lehner Got it. Okay. And then one last thing, would it be a good idea? And I know I did this early on in my business when I didn't really even know what direction I was going in to just send that email out that says I'm exploring a new direction of my business. Or I'm curious, what do you think of how does it go? It's like you ask people basically like what their favorite things are about your business, what stands out to them about your business? You don't have to do your whole email list, but just a focus group sort of.
[16:18.490] - Rich Brooks Actually. I'm glad you brought that up, because that is something I often talk about. If you already are in business and you have a community of customers that you can reach out to. Do a survey with them, send out a survey or pick up the phone and talk to them, depending on the size of your audience. That may depend whether you want to go with a big survey or whether you want to get one on one phone calls with people. But absolutely, because very often there may be a reason people choose you that you didn't even think was really a compelling argument.
[16:47.050] - Rich Brooks And all of a sudden, you hear that from two or three people I'm like, oh, yeah. I know. I told you because you're the only person who would deliver my newspaper by boat. I have no idea. But whatever it is.
[16:58.190] - Jen Lehner Yeah.
[16:59.250] - Rich Brooks So absolutely. If you have a client base, you should be talking to them for a million different reasons. But specifically now for uncovering what may already be remarkable in your business.
[17:10.930] - Jen Lehner Okay. Awesome. All right. Now let's move on to focus.
[17:14.560] - Rich Brooks What's that up? So focus is a powerful one. And this is really just about niching down. So it's about serving a smaller audience. And that actually gets most entrepreneurs. Most business owners really nervous because they just want more and more and more business. And so they try to cast a wider and wider net. And I'm actually suggesting the opposite may be in your best interest. The whole idea here is just what can you do to serve a smaller audience? And by doing so, it actually will increase your value to that audience.
[17:47.670] - Rich Brooks That audience will feel served, especially if it was an underserved community in the past, in some way. So that could mean different things to different people. And before I give some examples, I just want to say, any one of the things I might mention right now could be good or bad for your business. I'm not necessarily saying any of these ideas are good or bad. This is about just narrowing the focus is about the remarkability formula. For example, one way that you could become more remarkable is by narrowing the delivery of your services.
[18:20.970] - Rich Brooks And you might say, Well, wouldn't it be better if I just expanded my service area? Yeah, it could be. But if you said, I'm only going to serve people in this neighborhood or this geographic territory, it does a lot of things to your business. First of all, those people feel special, but also, it could save you money. When I first moved into my newest house, I called up the people who had the cheapest oil prices around, and they said, I'm sorry you're out of our territory.
[18:47.460] - Rich Brooks I was out of their territory by one block, and they would not go the extra block for me. And to be honest, because I was doing this kind of work. I was like, Kudos to you because they probably know we can be more cost-efficient, and we keep our prices down because we won't drive more than this distance to make an oil delivery.
[19:05.170] - Jen Lehner Okay, what kind of oil? Like oil?
[19:07.670] - Rich Brooks Just house oil, like heating oil.
[19:09.570] - Jen Lehner What is house oil? Okay. I have no idea. We have your house. We have a boiler which is heated by water.
[19:18.810] - Rich Brooks How does the water get heated, though?
[19:21.390] - Jen Lehner I have no idea.
[19:22.460] - Rich Brooks Propane oil delivery electric.
[19:25.590] - Jen Lehner We don't have oil delivered well.
[19:28.280] - Rich Brooks In Maine, it's very popular to have oil delivered. So these giant oil trucks show up, and there's a hole sticking out of your house, and they put their hose into that hole, and they fill up these giant oil tanks 250 gallons in my basement once a month. And that's how we keep from freezing to death. So there you go. Learn something new on the show today.
[19:47.030] - Jen Lehner I tell you, don't light a match in the basement, though. It sounds super dangerous.
[19:50.340] - Rich Brooks It's very safe.
[19:52.800] - Jen Lehner Okay. All right. So what ended up happening?
[19:56.550] - Rich Brooks I had to go to another dealer, which was fine. But the point is here, it's like, think about who you serve. And is there a way of narrowing that down? So maybe if you have a bakery, you're only going to do gluten-free. And all of a sudden, a lot of people won't want that because they're not looking for gluten-free. But you're going to find that community of gluten-free doughnut lovers that suddenly it's like you're the answer to all their problems. And so they're going to seek you out.
[20:23.160] - Rich Brooks And what's interesting about focus is people are much more willing to pay a higher price for a company or person that serves a smaller audience. So when I was doing my research into this, I discovered that I think it was in 2019, the average in America, the average primary care physician made a pretty respectable $247,000 a year. However, the average specialist made $399,000 in that same year. So a doctor who actually literally knows less and is less likely to be able to help you made almost twice as much made $150,000 more than the doctor who knows a little bit of everything.
[21:04.020] - Rich Brooks Because if we have a problem with our knee, we're going to go see a knee doctor, and we recognize that specialist. This is all they know. They've gotten so good at it. So we're willing to pay more. Or at least our insurance companies are willing to pay more for that. So this is another benefit of really narrowing your focus when you serve a smaller audience that can in and of itself make you more remarkable, at least to that audience.
[21:28.050] - Jen Lehner Yes, I've always wanted to do that, but I've been scared. I remember seeing a cat vet. Is that a thing like in Maine? Like I saw a cat vet?
[21:35.670] - Rich Brooks There is actually a cat veterinarian that I used to pass on my way to work. So yeah, absolutely.
[21:41.370] - Jen Lehner And I always thought that was a good idea. If cats are your thing.
[21:46.370] - Rich Brooks As long as there's enough cats in the community to keep you busy, then yes, every cat owner is going to be like, well, this vet only treats cats. They're not wasting their time on dogs and hamsters. So bottom line is he or she must be the best cat vet. But there is. So of course I'm going to go there, and I'm happy to pay a premium for that. Right.
[22:05.350] - Jen Lehner Okay. All right. So focus. We've got find. We've got focus, fashion?
[22:12.150] - Rich Brooks This one is a little bit tougher for people to wrap their heads around. And usually when I'm doing some of these consults, this is the one where they have to go off and then come back to me at a later date to kind of talk about this. So maybe you feel that there's nothing remarkable yet in your business and that there's no way to focus narrow your focus niche down any further. So fashion becomes something that is not we're not talking David Bowie fashion. We're not talking catwalk fashion.
[22:39.790] - Rich Brooks We're talking about fashion in terms of making something fashioning something. So the idea here is, what can you fashion what is not intrinsic to your core offering, but maybe is in alignment with your mission, vision or values. So this is where I want to bring up the Agents of Change conference. So you mentioned this earlier. This was not the original point of the Agents of Change conference was to fashion something remarkable. It really just came out of I wanted to put on digital marketing conferences that were like the ones I was attending out of state, but I wanted to host it right here in Maine.
[23:13.390] - Rich Brooks So that's where the idea came from. But it ended up being a really remarkable thing for Flight New Media, my digital agency, because what happened is you don't have to attend the Agents of Change to hire Flight new Media, nor do you need to work with Flight new Media to attend the Agents of Change. The Agents of Change is all about search, social, and mobile marketing, and it's really kind of an inspirational brand or a Do-It-Yourself brand. And then Flight new Media is about the same exact thing, but it's more like the done for you approach.
[23:45.240] - Rich Brooks So Agents of Change is definitely in alignment with Flight New Media's mission statement. So I put on these conferences, we get, like, 300 to 400 people in the audience. I stand up on stage and everybody sees me as the emcee of Agents of Change. But they also see me as the President of Flight. And what happened is, of course, when people businesses come to me and they say, we need a website, we need SEO, we need social media. Of course, at some point I ask them, how did you hear of us?
[24:11.350] - Rich Brooks And what often is the response is, I've been going to Agents to Change for years, but I'm finally ready to have a new website or I'm finally ready to optimize my site for search. And it was because we put on this conference that all of a sudden we're getting this business. So we fashion something. We created something that was not intrinsic to the actual offering of us building you a website. But because of this, we were able to capitalize and grow our business. And there's a lot of other examples of this out there.
[24:40.640] - Rich Brooks One example that I absolutely adore is Barilla Pasta. Barilla Pasta is a popular pasta brand. And I'm sure everybody who's listening right now has had the experience of they put pasta on to boil and they get distracted. They get a phone call, something happens, and suddenly they've got very mushy pasta. And so what Barilla did is they set up Spotify playlists for each one of their pasta types. So there's, like, a Boom Bap Fusilli playlist. And then there's, like, one for spaghetti. Or there's actually two for spaghetti and all these different playlists that they have.
[25:16.220] - Rich Brooks They're the exact length to Cook your pasta. Al dente.
[25:20.470] - Jen Lehner That's genius.
[25:21.430] - Rich Brooks It's genius. And people may say, but you could just ask, I won't say the real name, but Lexi to set a timer for you. Right. Or you might just say, Siri, set a timer for me. Or you might have a like, yes, I get it. It's not essential to the whole experience. But first of all, it gets people talking. Secondly, these things have been favorited and downloaded or listened to tens of thousands of times on Spotify. And of course, then people talk about them and they link to them.
[25:49.030] - Rich Brooks And every album has Italian covers of popular songs. And the artwork for the playlist is done by Italian artists. And it all plays into this idea of Barilla saying cooking is art. All of those things come together perfectly in this Spotify playlist, which then everybody loves the idea of it, and they share it with their friends. And that's remarkable.
[26:12.810] - Jen Lehner Okay, so not to put you on the spot because I hate when people do this to me, and I'm not feeling creative. Okay. So if you don't have an example, it's fine. But I'm trying to think of an example for, like, an online coach or consultant for fashioning, something like that. Can you think of something?
[26:30.980] - Rich Brooks Well, stealing from my own idea, putting on some sort of conference or event that doesn't require people to necessarily work with you is a tried and true method of doing something like this. Although I would try and make the event something special, like Agents of Change is not a lunch and learn. We're not competing with lunch and learn. We put on, like you said, kind of a world-class event with a small, intimate audience. But we've got some of the biggest speakers in digital marketing coming to of all places, Portland, Maine, to do this.
[26:59.300] - Rich Brooks So I'm not talking about just putting on a lunch and learn at the Chamber of Commerce. I'm talking about doing something special. Another thing that you might take a look at is if you had a specialty in your coaching, maybe you only coach women. Maybe you only coach people with disabilities. Maybe you only coach people at a certain level of their career, whatever it is, there's a reason you probably chose that audience. Maybe there's something in there for you, something that from your past that you really want to serve this audience.
[27:28.780] - Rich Brooks What else could you do to serve this audience? So in other words, maybe you could do some sort of scholarship. So if you book a coaching, a six month coaching session with me, I am going to coach a woman who's just been released from prison for three months for free. You are going to be giving this woman three months of life coaching because you chose from it. So that's just something off the top of my head. I'm sure there are problems with that issue, but whatever might be your level of passion, or maybe it's serving an underserved community.
[27:58.150] - Rich Brooks If you work with me on this project, I'm going to set up a scholarship. It's going to fund the scholarship. So that would be something where it would be something you're fashioning, something you're creating kind of out of thin air, but it's in alignment with your mission and vision and values and also is not required for people to do work with you.
[28:18.330] - Jen Lehner I love that. Okay. All right. So now we're moving on to frame. What do you mean by frame?
[28:24.930] - Rich Brooks Yeah. So this is another one. We saved all the tough ones for the end. So frame is another. It's kind of another way of looking at things. So we're talking about reframing what we already offer. And the best way for me to explain this is to actually give an example. This example comes from I always blank on this guy's name. It'll come back to me. He wrote The Introvert's Edge, Matthew. I'm blanking on the last name, but he was a business coach, and he was excellent in helping people reframe their business.
[28:55.680] - Rich Brooks So this woman came to him, and she had been teaching Mandarin in the San Francisco area for years and years and years, very successful business. And then all of a sudden, with the advent of the Internet, she all of a sudden has all these low-priced priced competitors who are just getting into the market, charging significantly less than she is. And she's also getting people from China who are able to use new technologies to actually and they're charging so much less. She could never compete with them.
[29:22.400] - Rich Brooks And she starts to lose all of her business. She's not sure what's going to happen. She ends up working with this guy, Matthew, and he starts asking about some of her current clients. And a couple of her clients were actually business people who had just gotten a transfer order from their company and were moving to China with their families. And so she was saying that not only was she teaching those people Mandarin, but she was also teaching them business etiquette and different things to expect and how to handle certain situations that might come up in a business setting.
[29:53.200] - Rich Brooks And she was also helping by teaching their spouses and children Chinese or Mandarin as well, because one of the biggest problems had been that somebody would go over there with their family. Their family would basically have such a horrible integration experience that the whole thing would fall apart, and the executive would demand to move home, and all that money and effort and time was wasted. And he's like, oh, so you kind of help people succeed in China. She's like, well, yeah, I guess I do. He goes, from now on, you're the China success coach, and you're only going to take on clients who are being transferred to China, and you're going to give them all these additional services, what she was already doing.
[30:35.830] - Rich Brooks He just reframed it for her. And then the other thing that they did, which I thought was interesting, is they went and they marketed this service to the recruitment officers who were responsible for getting that process moving to move people to China because they knew that they knew all the people who were going to be transferred. So what they did is they took that idea of frame, but they also combined it with a little bit of focus in terms of who they were speaking to. And that's what made that business truly remarkable.
[31:03.050] - Rich Brooks And from that point on, the business just took off because she was no longer competing with the intro level Mandarin speakers or the Chinese nationals who are just using this technology. She was serving a very specific audience in a way that they couldn't compete with that.
[31:23.310] - Jen Lehner I love it. Well, we need one more example, though. I like to fully see this.
[31:30.210] - Rich Brooks You're asking me to be creative.
[31:31.570] - Jen Lehner Yeah, I'm sorry, but can we bring it back to, like, a coaching, consulting kind of a person? Okay, well, here's one that you just tell me. I'll just think out loud here. So I have a client who she had a program, and it was called Chordography. And it was kind of like, what color is your parachute? And it was a really good program, really good. And the people who took the program had good things to say about it. But just sitting there as chordography. It was just kind of sitting there.
[32:11.590] - Jen Lehner And then after some further investigation into herself and her business, she started focusing more on ADHD and women with ADHD. And so she reframed chordography to be more about your ADHD brain is okay, same program but now it's reframed. Would that be an example of reframing?
[32:38.220] - Rich Brooks It could also be an example of focus. And I guess this is an important thing to mention is I came up with these four things, right. These were after looking at a bunch of examples of companies that had somehow become remarkable or experiences that I've had or things we worked on with clients and finding these examples of remarkability. These are words that I came up with as best categorized it. So what you're talking about could be an example of focus or could be an example of frame.
[33:11.490] - Rich Brooks I would tell people that's not what's important here. Like, these are just tools to get you further along. You may not have something in every category. In fact, I'd be amazed if you did have something in every single category. It's more about using these four lenses as ways of uncovering or creating something that would get people to remark upon your business and would make your marketing so much easier. So if she was also doing other things as part of her services that were dedicated to ADHD, and then she became like, an ADHD coach, she rebranded herself, reframed it.
[33:48.700] - Rich Brooks Then I'd say that's a good example of frame. Frame is, like, find in the fact it already exists. But you just need to turn the spotlight in a different way. So people see it from a different angle.
[34:01.620] - Jen Lehner Yeah. And actually, that is what she ended up doing. She completely just rebranded. And in fact, she has, like, the number one ADHD podcast in the world.
[34:09.420] - Rich Brooks There you go.
[34:10.460] - Jen Lehner Shout out to Tracy Otsuka. Okay. So once we've identified what makes us remarkable, how do we leverage that in our marketing?
[34:19.660] - Rich Brooks Yeah. So like I promised at the beginning of the interview, this will make your marketing easier and more effective, and you can use it in so many different ways. Focus obviously. Really, it could be about who you serve once you really get clear on that. Once you understand who your ideal customer or customers are, all the content you're creating becomes easier because you're writing for that individual person, and it's much easier to write for a single person than it is to write for a wide group. But also, it could also help focus, like if you're doing Facebook ads or Google ads, and you need to geographically target people, that's a good way where all of a sudden you're like, okay, well, I only want to serve people who are coming up from this area to whatever it is.
[35:02.740] - Rich Brooks So you can start to narrow the focus of some of your advertising campaigns as well, and then fashion. The bottom line is you can create things. One of the things that you might be able to do is enter a platform where you would not normally be expected to be, but you show up in that place. So people who are teaching people how to get jobs on TikTok might be a good example of that. It's remarkable because they've never been. That's not what you would expect to find there.
[35:30.500] - Rich Brooks You might expect to find them on LinkedIn, not on TikTok. So those are some ways in which you can start to use that in your marketing. But again, it's really about who am I serving. And so you're going to narrow the content and the copy and the photographs to really narrow down on that audience. And whenever an audience feels like it's special, it's going to more resonate with your message. It's also going to help in terms of your targeting for your advertising as well. And just using that language, all of your content and understanding that putting it into your blog post and everything else, all of those things become more interesting.
[36:07.400] - Rich Brooks And when you are able to market the fact that you can get something painted in two days because you have the largest staff of any painter in the area. Those are the kinds of things that people pick up on, and suddenly it pops out at them, because the bottom line is we see too many ads. We see too much content on social media. There has to be something that's really different, which brings up a good point that I hadn't touched on yet is that remarkability is really in the eye of the beholder here.
[36:37.000] - Rich Brooks So you may think something is remarkable, but if no one else thinks that's remarkable, even if it is, even if you're the only person doing it, then it's not remarkable because you need to get other people to remark on what you're doing. And this is why, like you brought up earlier, you should be surveying your current audience because they may bring up things that you had no idea they thought were important. And then once you hear that, you're like, so from now on, this is what I'm going to put into my sales copy.
[37:02.190] - Rich Brooks This is what I'm going to put into my email newsletters. This is what I'm going to put into my ads and my landing pages.
[37:07.890] - Jen Lehner I love it. And I think you could be seasonally, remarkable or remarkable, like at certain times about certain things. I was just thinking, like if people just said, I have a Journal, I have a Journal you can buy. I have a diary. You could buy a calendar, a planner, and they're in stock and can be delivered within two days. I mean, everything is out of stock. Everything like rental cars. You can't get a rental car, you can't get furniture, you can't get anything right now. I don't know how long this is going to last.
[37:39.360] - Jen Lehner Hopefully not very long, but that by itself could be right. You could be remarkable in the moment.
[37:46.350] - Rich Brooks I've never thought of it like that, but yeah, remarkably. In fact, I do talk about remarkability. It's not permanent, because once you do something, the next time you do it, it's immediately less remarkable. Or other people may jump on that bandwagon. But yes, right now, if you have a used car, you're remarkable used car for sale, because I know that it's so hard to find used cars right now. And there's so many supply chain issues. But at the end of this, yes, there's find, focus fashion, and frame.
[38:13.550] - Rich Brooks What I would recommend for people is to just go through this exercise, write down the kind of things that they find or focus about their business that might be remarkable and that in and of itself might help clarify some of the ideas. And suddenly you're not doing these me too ads or these me too blog posts, and you're creating something that's fresh and relevant for your audience, and suddenly they're taking notice and they're talking you up to everybody else. So those are the kinds of things that can happen when you really figure out how to stand out online and what makes you remarkable.
[38:51.230] - Jen Lehner I love it. Thank you so much, Rich. I really appreciate you being here with me today. Listeners, Rich has this fantastic book, and the book is called "The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing. And if you head over to itunes and leave a five-star review for this flash briefing, I'm going to send you a copy of his book. So make sure and do that today. And if you are in need of any marketing services at all, including SEO website creation, just all the marketing things you can go to takeflyte.com.
[39:26.800] - Jen Lehner And that's spelled F-L-Y-T-E. And you got to go and listen to his podcast at Agents of Change and you could go to the agentsofchange.com to learn more about that. Rich, thank you so much. I really appreciate you being with us here today. I really learned a lot.
[39:43.330] - Rich Brooks Absolute pleasure. Thank you so much, Jim.
[39:46.170] - Jen Lehner After you leave your five-star review, make sure and take a screenshot and send it to support@jenlehner.com along with your mailing address. And I'll get the book right out to you.
