How To Find Your Remarkability For Competitive Advantage

welcome to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson a show that brings you regular
interviews tips and tools for building your business online [Music]
well hello and welcome to the ecommerce podcast with me your host matt edmondson
all of this week's notes and links can be found on our website at ecommercepodcast.net forward slash
today find out how you can find your remarkability and use
it as a competitive advantage oh yes if you want a competitive advantage then
it's time to become remarkable it's as simple as that now whether it's your customers whether it's with your
employees or your investors being remarkable will set you apart from your
competition the secret it all starts with finding what makes you
unique what is your remarkability that's the topic for this week's show
honestly i think it's what's going to separate you if you're competing with amazon but we're going to get into all
of that don't go anywhere i'll be back again soon hey there are you a business owner here
at oregon digital we know firsthand that running an e-commerce business can be really hard work
as the online space gets more competitive it is becoming even more challenging to stay ahead of the curve
we totally get it so we want to help you succeed by offering a wide range of services from fulfillment marketing
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so thanks for joining us on the ecommerce podcast it is great that you are here now whether you are starting
out or whether like me you've been around e-commerce for a week the goal of this show the reason for
this show is simple we're here to help you deliver e-commerce wow and to do
that every week we bring you two things great show sponsors an amazing guest we
put those together and we have a show yes we do uh we talk to people who are
experts in their own field we get their stories their insights their thoughts their ideas their pixie dust you know
all those things that are going to help us grow and adapt on line and today is no exception we have the
phenomenal rich brooks joining us he is a digital marketing pioneer who has been helping businesses achieve their online
goals for almost years he is the founder and president
of flight new media a digital agency that's been in business since the dawn
of the internet era i love my conversation with rich because
he and i have so much in common yes we've been around a while he is a nationally recognized speaker on
entrepreneurship digital marketing and social media in addition to his speaking
engagements rich is also the founder of the agents of change uh podcast i'm
losing my words there the agents have changed podcasts which i've actually been on go check it out i loved my conversation with rich
and he also has an annual conference that focuses exclusively on search
social and mobile marketing which is because if that's not enough rich also
is the author of the lead machine the small business guides digital marketing which is well it's a very popular book
that helps entrepreneurs and marketers reach more of their ideal customers online he appears regularly as the tech
guru on the evening news show which airs on the nbc affiliates in maine i
don't know where he finds all the time i really don't uh he has appeared in the in india in ink magazine the huffington
post fastcompany.com cnn.com social media examiner and many many other
places around the web the man is a genius he is in heidi man
people want to know what he thinks and so it was great to get him on the show so without further ado we've bigged him
up enough let's see if he lives up to the hype here's my conversation with rich
rich great to have you here on the e-commerce podcast thank you so much for joining me uh it's great to be chatting
with you um and when we it's great to be back i mean it's like obviously we've already
chatted yes i had you on my show and you know then there's that moral obligation that ethical application you have to
have me on so you know i'm glad that i really used the uh reciprocity reciprocity
uh to its fullest extent absolutely absolutely and we had a great
time uh on your show we did loved loved the conversation great conversation and so it seemed only sensible really to
have you uh on here and and repeat the the conversation well not repeat the exact conversation but obviously you get
to talk a lot more than i do on this one uh rich which is always a better way around i feel um but yeah thanks for coming on uh it's
great and and who knows well i guess we'll be doing this back and forth without the next you know a few years of
our lives but it's great to have you on the show now the title of well before we get into
this whole thing just um quick bit of background whereabouts in the world are you right now
so my offices are in portland maine which uh i'd like to say i often joke
around is the original portland meaning that the portland that most people think of in the u.s is portland oregon but
then i realized i'm talking to somebody on the other side of the pond and you guys probably had the original portland
and we just took that name when somebody came over yeah probably probably this is generally higher we didn't come up with anything original over here
um but yeah so the top right corner of the country if you're looking at the u.s map about two hours north of boston yeah
a main beautiful part of the world love it love it moving up here from boston maybe back uh back in and uh never
thought of moving anywhere else yeah i know fantastic and so day to day wise what what what's your um what's your
day-to-day look like well i run a digital agency and we do both uh lead gen and e-commerce sites
for clients we do a lot of digital marketing uh we've been doing seo as a
since before google uh so we've been doing that quite a while we do social media we do email marketing we do a lot of content
creation for our clients and just a lot of strategy around how people can stand out online how to drive more qualified
traffic to the website and basically how to run your business online
and uh you've been doing that since before google i like that yeah i know i mean it's true like when i first started
there was no google there was no facebook uh there were still geocities for the people on listening who are old
enough to remember that yeah yeah um in fact we're turning years old over
just uh just over a month about a month and a day and uh we've been preparing for this
year-long celebration because years kind of a big deal yeah looking back at like what was going
on in to do a bunch of social posts and stuff like that you know bands and
and movies but also things that were going on like when i was designing i was the website designer back in when i
started and uh you know we were we were i was designing websites for screen sizes that were six forty by four eighty
postage stamp in the top left of your screen it's crazy and you know what i i remember those days because no when
was it was the year i did my first ever website i designed my first website
back then and um i remember i you know was a
year i got engaged uh was a year i got married um and so i remember that time very very
well i had an analog watch for example do you mean yeah dial up that's how i got online
when i first started i remember when we first got married and got our first house in and
you just you plugged it in and i was so excited when the k modem came out oh
yeah it was like lightning fast it only took like two hours to download some screensaver from aol at that point
yeah it was just crazy crazy times and um uh fun times but crazy time so well you
guys you guys have been around you must have seen like like everything uh you know during that
time it feels like it in fact you know as a as we're kind of talking about our th and looking back um
my original newsletters before the company was even called flighty media required a stamp to arrive in their
destination i used to write them out in microsoft word print them up on blue paper
fold them and try you know thirds i xerox them on my dad's uh dad's uh
copier and then i would literally lick every stamp lick every envelope and send out like a hundred or so of those
newsletters and uh that was how i got started doing some internet marketing was real really old school stuff that's
fantastic that's absolutely fantastic i remember once and i appreciate this is not the reason for our conversation but
i am enjoying this little uh you know time down memory yeah yeah it's it's great
talking to direct mail i remember um in the in the mid s sending out letters
to people uh maybe it was the late s um but sending letters out to people with a
fork you know sell a tape to the paper saying um you pick the restaurant
i'll pick up the bill uh and i'd a fork i just thought you know would be interesting in fact i went to a friend
of mine who owned a restaurant and said just give me a load of your old forks and so i i remember mailing them out just getting lunch appointments with all
kinds of various people that's really fun uh back in the days where direct mail had to be interesting because a bit
like email now you had to arrest their attention because you got loads of letters every day it's like yeah i'm just throwing that one in the bin
throwing that one in the bin uh so we put a four kill if you get one with a fork in it that's gonna stand out for
sure well that was what you had to do back then i don't know if they would let you send that through the mail anymore but
back then probably you know it was like the wild west yeah it was just it was the way it was and uh yeah yeah crazy
crazy times now remember i remember when we first started doing a few more online sales we got one of
those machines where you printed postage on a label and then you stick it on your yeah that's crazy
crazy crazy well uh let's move on to maybe years
later before everyone's everyone under the age of sort of s going what are you talking about
um so years later you're still doing the agency you're still in around the digital space
so you must have learned a few things during that time one would hope so yeah
one would hope so yeah yeah you would really you know if you've not this will be a very short
podcast um but no yeah it's crazy isn't it when you sort of look back over that one
of the things that we chatted about regarding this show was this idea that you've the remarkability
formula is that something that you have picked up over this sort of year period of time
absolutely i mean just in term it's funny because i never went to school for business um i did run a small business
while while i was in college just a typing service i used to type again we're so i'm so old where when i
was in college first drafts were usually written in longhand and you could even submit if you had
good enough penmanship your papers in written format but a lot of people you know just either
didn't have the penmanship didn't want to deal with it so they i ended up a service dollar fifty a page
and i would just type out your papers and i always improve them because i was an english major looking back on it with
my entrepreneurial skills now i would have charged a page as is two
dollars a page if i fix your punctuation and page i'll guarantee you an a because really it's so easy to get in a
those days so i didn't do that but where were we going with this story
this was what you've learned over the last years i'm sure it'll come back to me like i
said it's early over here but yeah the remarkability for me it's just you know it's it's about learning
how to to stand out kind of like you did with a fork so um one of the things you
know that i've learned over the years is even though i didn't have this business background that's where i was going with this um i discovered that a lot of
people who run businesses have no sense of business at all and when it came to web design i just started realizing that
people hadn't really thought through how to lay out a page or what you know all these different things so
about five years in i realized it was almost more of like a business therapist for a lot of these people than i was a
web developer and that's when we kind of started evolving into where we are today but we spend a lot of time with our
clients up front kind of trying to find out where they are in the marketplace which is surprisingly something that
very few businesses do which is probably why the average business at least in the us small business folds within five
years so what we started doing is just you know because we wanted our clients to succeed is have some of these
conversations with them simple things like who is your audience who are you trying to sell to who's your competition
all those sort of things over time we started to really work on understanding what made our clients
stand out what we could talk about in terms of the marketing arena what made them
interesting and worth remembering um and in the last few years i took what we had
been doing and kind of codified it into this idea of the remarkability formula so in some ways it's been something i've
been working on for nearly years and in just in terms of like coming up with the formula aspect of it that's really
only been happening in the last couple of years yeah that doesn't surprise me and in fact i
would have probably expected it to be that way because mainly personal experience if i'm honest
with you rich that actually what i've learned over the last years we have frameworks now
but that's based on years of learning i didn't have those frameworks years ago but we sort of refined and tested
them over the years and you didn't even know you were doing it and you kind of look back and go okay well that
that was actually really clever more by accident than design but it was really clever jeremy most of it most of
the brilliant ideas i've come up with is more by accident than by design yeah and you're like oh that's that actually
works yeah well done me just uh you know reach over paddle myself on the face like well done
um so yeah i i but i find a lot of things like that actually um that
when you've got that kind of experience you do create these frameworks you do create these formulas that start to work
but they're not just plucked out of the air they're plucked out of the years experience you know the hard living that
you've you've had to do the good times and the bad times right so and that's what makes them i think a lot
more interesting and some and i mean this with all due respect but you know when someone in their s comes and
sells me the winning business formula i'm kind of like yeah i get that you might be the outlier
here but where's the experience and i i kind of need i need to
understand where this is coming from a bit more or the people on twitter who tell you how to get thousands of
followers a day and they've got like three try some of your own medicine first please um yeah and the reason why i mean
sometimes i know that people roll their eyes at marketers or business people who come up with clever names but
part of that is is because there's so many things to remember that if you can cre if you have some knowledge based on
years in business sometimes to teach it to somebody else it helps to really come up with a
pneumatic device or some other way to pass that along so that they get it and
then they can make it their own yeah absolutely all helps with the all helps with the teaching
so well let's dive into it so the formula that you've got um [Music]
how would we how would we write it out what is it sure so the way that i look at it is every business
is or can be remarkable and i know that word sometimes is intimidating to people
but when i talk about being remarkable i just mean that there's some element or aspect of your business that's worth
remarking upon by the people who are likely to buy from you and what kind of came about from really
realizing this is coming up with this formula these four lenses that i use to
help businesses figure out what makes them different and then to be able to lean into those differences and this is
not rocket science and i am not saying that i invented a new flavor of coke or anything like that i know that there
have been people before me who have talked about this you know there's been the you know what's your unique selling proposition or unique value proposition
blue ocean strategy the purple cow i get all that the formula aspect of it is the part
that i want people to work on because i think it's something that helps anybody tackle this work themselves okay so the
four the four lenses that are part of this formula and then i'm happy to talk about each one in turn and try and give some
examples but is find focus fashion and frame and just to kind of
give you a quick overview of what those things mean to me find is very often if we've been in
business for any length of time there already is something remarkable about our business whether we know it or not
and it's just about uncovering what that is and turning and turning our attention to it yep
focus is just a way of niching down or niching down as they say outside of america
um just the idea of you can often accomplish more and make more money by
narrowing your focus fashion has nothing to do with catwalks or david bowie sucks fashion is just
talking about creating something and um creating something new so it may be that
you are in a competitive industry an industry where everybody basically has the same products or services there's
not much yet at least unique or remarkable about your business but you could create something that is not
intrinsic to your offering but is in alignment with your mission vision or
values that will help attract people to you so and we like i said happy to give
examples of all these and the last one is also a little tricky it's called frame and it's the idea of you may
already be doing something but you're not looking at it from the right angle and if you were just to shift your
perspective on it and to promote it through that new uh perspective you're going to attract the right type of
clients and a lot of what i talk to about people is you none of my clients at least can be all
things to all people and very few people out there unless you're selling like coke or toothpaste
you're not going to be selling to everybody so it's about finding those people who are you're most in alignment
with and just making sure they understand that they're part of your brand part of your vision part of your
worldview fantastic and i and this is important actually i think um right here at the
start for anybody in the world of e-commerce anybody in business to be fair but especially if you're in the world of e-commerce and i think
um i tell you why i think this is important and that is because this is how you differentiate between
you and amazon this is how you differentiate between you and your competitors and um i often call you know people like
myself that have got smaller websites the digital davids you know you're taking on the big goliaths of the world
and um and one of our weapons uh or one of our stones in our slingshot if i'm gonna be
true to the story uh is is the ability to create this sense of remarkability this
sense of personality this this this brand that is worth talking about because on amazon
you're a commodity on your own website you are a brand you are a story and you can bring that uh to
the market in a way that um you couldn't through uh marketplace sites like amazon and stuff so
um this is why i love these kind of conversations rich um because they help me re-frame or think about or find it
ways to communicate what we're doing and why we're doing it in a way that's going to resonate with our customers right
absolutely because there's always going to be somebody out there with a cheaper version of what we're trying to sell people
and you can't be racing to the bottom when it comes to price so it's really important it does mean sometimes when we
choose uh something to focus on when it comes to our own remarkability or what helps us
stand out online that we are pushing away potential customers but that's okay
the the idea is to find the audience that is going to be loyal to you to be
acolytes for your business acolytes for your e-commerce store and really work on being the best
we can be for those specific people yeah i think that's that's such an important point and
probably worth repeating um it's okay if some of your customers leave you yeah in fact as you probably
know because you've been doing this role it's wonderful sometimes when some of your clients leave you and sometimes if
they don't you have to show them the door yeah yeah yeah i've had a few conversations where
i've ended up saying to clients it's obvious we can't help you here's a phone number of a company that i think will be
much better suited towards you you know and right uh i think when you're first starting out that just feels like a
million miles away but again this is just one of the benefits of being around for a little while you you know when to
say no to people that want to give you money is the bottom line so let's go through each one in turn so
the first one was uh find yeah so find is usually where i start with
people unless it's a brand new business and they haven't really done anything then that's a little bit hard but find
there's a lot of meat on the bone when it comes to fine so um let me give you an example in my own
life of a company that i found remarkable something that they were already doing
and when i moved into my first home that i bought we got there and uh it was in
dire need of a paint job so you know i i wasn't looking forward to this you know like the idea that some painting company
was going to be there be on my front lawn for like you know five six seven days and just
you know putting up scaffolding and all this sort of stuff just like i didn't want my house to look like it was a construction zone we asked around we
called a few people and then one guy said oh i can get the job done in two days and i'm like done
so when the first day came he shows up there's five bands about guys spill
out of this they throw up the ladders they paint the entire house top to bottom in a single day i think
they were saying she see shanties the whole time but i might be just embellishing the story right now
but they're and they're done and then two days later after the paint is dry they come back and they put on the second coat and it's just the same way
well as you can imagine i don't know what it's like over there but here it's like usually you hire somebody to do your paint painting outside of your
house it might be two guys might be three or four that's about it so guys in five vans i mean of course all of our
neighbors you know we're asking questions about it they thought it was amazing and just going from before to after just a matter of days was really
an incredible thing it was it was remarkable so that's just one example where it's v and here's another aspect
of remarkability if you can do something that's hard to emulate that's even better because what you're trying to do
besides attract the right type of client is keep your competition at bay and employing
day laborers is a very challenging thing especially in maine where it's a short season where
you could actually paint houses because the winter is so long um that's a very difficult thing to do so your
competition is not going to try and compete with you by hiring you know more guys just so they can look like you
do but so that's one example but when i talk to people we take a look at a lot
of different things like one thing is pricing and i'm not talking about trying to be the least expensive option out there that
that can be a terrible business decision what i'm talking about is going to the extremes so for example when um
what was it uh gray goose came to market it was already going to be an expensive vodka when it
came to market um it was using a very specialized wheat from a specific area
of france and had this whole process on how to make vodka and at the time the premium brands were
all like a bottle and they certainly could have gone head-to-head with them maybe make their theirs a couple bucks
less but instead they decided their call themselves a super premium brand and
started selling bottles for well above anybody else but of course this attracted people because it was
remarkable it's worth talking about and if you had gray goose in your liquor cabinet or in your bar
it showed a certain level of sophistication a certain level of success and all of a sudden people
couldn't you know stop buying enough of this and they ended up i think was like two to three years later selling the company to bacardi for two
billion dollars oh wow so just one example like now there are people who go
low and that's really good too uh columbia record house was a popular way of getting albums back when i was a
teenager albums for one penny now that was pretty remarkable just the idea that they would sell you for one and
all you had to do is buy one at their price but just the idea of that got people talking about it so it could be about
going high it could be about going low another example is radiohead they put out an album they said pay what you want
for and they put it online and although there was some controversy around it it made more money um
it made more money in the three months that it was only available online than their previous album had and when they
finally launched the exact same list of music on a physical album it went straight to number one yeah you know so
it's just it's an incredible story and again it was remarkable the idea that you could pay whatever you wanted even
if that was zero so those kind of things are remarkable they get people talking and it's about going to the edges and
finding trying to do something or delivering it in a way that's different than everybody else that is
that's great and i like how you can do that around price um i'm just gonna throw another story in
here just because i can and i and i i remember talking to a lady who um
who was running a burger joint uh a burger bar in in london um
uh she i was talking to her and she was saying how's it going and she goes oh we're struggling a little bit
and um looking at the menu tasted the bird the burgers were great and i'm like okay if i was to look at the price of
the burgers down the road would they be the same oh yeah we're all pretty similar around here would they be the same flavors yes they'd all be the
same flavors i'm like what you need to do is instead of having a ten dollar burger on your menu is go and figure out
how to sell a burger for a hundred quid right um just go and find me the do whatever put caviar um with it
lobster tail i i don't even know but create a pound experience because no one else is doing that and then what
that does uh which i found a really interesting consequence of this is if you have the
hundred dollar burger you can put all your other burgers up to because everyone's comparing the price
the fifteen dollar bonus against the hundred dollar burger you're anchoring it as opposed to against everybody else
right i remember being in the savoy uh uh with one of our suppliers once
and uh he was buying he was buying the cocktails and um i remember looking at the menu
and and the price of a gin and tonic was like quid which is what about somewhere around there and i remember
thinking man that's really expensive for a gin and tonic even for the savoy right
i'd probably expect to pay maybe maybe half of what they were charging and um and then i turned the page and
they had cocktails for quid and i'm like who in the world is going to buy a cocktail for pounds which is like a
thousand dollars i thought this is just insane um and then i turned the page and there was
one cocktail which they had which was twelve thousand pounds twelve thousand pounds for one drink which is
what like seventeen eighteen thousand dollars and i said to the waitress i'm sorry but does anybody actually buy
the twelve thousand pound cocktail and she said to me said you'll be amazed how many of
those we sell and here's what it did rich when when i saw that
when i saw the twelve thousand pound cocktail in my head i thought three or four hundred quid for a
cocktail is not bad i might try one of those do you see what i mean how just how the pricing had changed my thinking
when i came from the bottom up it was stupid expensive but when i started the top work done i thought actually that's
not bad yeah i was gonna say the biggest mistake they made is not putting that pound one on the first page and then
continue to go lower but uh yeah there i remember years ago they sold a million dollar cocktail at uh the
kentucky derby which is a famous horse race in the u.s uh mint julep which is the official drink of the kentucky derby
but it and to make it work worth quote unquote uh million dollars it's like they flew ice
in from the arctic that was only that was like the only ice they would put in this and it came in a very fancy gla not
glasses like a silver cup that you would keep and stuff like that but there's you know the bottom line is no matter what
they did they couldn't probably bring their prices up above a hundred dollars but it's that idea
that uh it's remarkable and if i order it obviously i have a million dollars that i can just throw away so of course
you know everybody's going to be looking at me so this is a great first point find uh your remarkability there's plenty of
meat on your bone look at your pricing what can you do at the extremes i think this is brilliant we're going to get just not pricing like
i'd say your people your product your delivery like look at the things that are you're already doing and ask current
clients what is it about us that you keep on coming back you know find out because you may not realize what it is
that you do that's actually attracting your ideal customer that's such good advice and it's always
it's always one of those things isn't it when you actually talk to your customers for me there's always that
ah right aha you know that we call them the aha moments don't we you're like ah okay
did not anticipate that coming out of your mouth i mean we did um we made a slight error in one of my companies last
week um i made a slight air in one of our companies last week which i put my hands up and apologized to our customers
for we had within a matter of hours like um it was overnight so we had like
emails just come in from our australian customers um i read every single one of them and i'm going through it going aha
okay jeremy and the stuff that you find out is absolutely fascinating so very very
important point uh don't go anywhere we are going to take just a few moments to listen from uh to hear from this week's
show sponsors and then rich and i will be back [Music]
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hey there are you a business owner here at oregon digital we know firsthand that running an ecommerce business can be
really hard work as the online space gets more competitive it is becoming even more
challenging to stay ahead of the curve we totally get it so we want to help you succeed by offering a wide range of
services from fulfillment marketing customer service and even coaching and consulting just so that you can do what
matters most save yourself the time and the money and let us handle the day-to-day tasks this way you can run
your business without having to worry about the boring stuff so what do you say are we a good fit for
each other come check us out at oreodigital.com and let us know what you think
so rich we have started on part one of the formula find we've talked about pricing we talked about um maybe you
know talking to your customers and looking at some of these other things on the extreme is there anything else to think about in this section of the
formula before we move on uh there's always more to talk about but i think that it's definitely we can move
on to some of the other topics you and i could probably trade stories for hours yeah yeah it'll be a very long podcast
so we we move from fine to focus um and you briefly explained that in terms of
niching or niching down um expand on that one a little bit
yeah so you kind of hit on an important point earlier that when you're first starting out uh it always feels like you
want every single piece of business and you want to be everything to everybody and that's just a terrible terrible
approach and i understand why we all did it but the bottom line is just by behaving that way hey you look needy you
look like you don't you're you're un uh unfocused so the whole idea here is what
can you do to focus your attention and some of the suggestions could be good or bad for
your business ultimately you have to decide that but for example um you know john lee dumas who is the entrepreneurs
on fire podcast post is a good example of niching down uh when he first started
you know he's told me the story a few times but when he first started he uh was preparing to launch a business
podcast and he had talked to everybody who was in the industry at the time with a much smaller industry of people doing
podcasts and he was trying to figure out what he could do he's like well they all have excellent guests they all ask great
questions you know and they're all professionally recorded if he just went a little bit more like that slightly better guess or had slightly better
audio or slightly better questions nobody would have cared nobody would have noticed so what he ended up doing is he he said
i am going to do a daily podcast because everything else was weekly and all the people who he spoke to all the experts
were like that's a terrible idea no one wants a daily podcast no one can keep up they'll listen to a few days and then
they'll quit and it was good advice for the time but he's like you know what i think that there is a smaller audience in here of
people who want daily uh inspiration from other entrepreneurs and i'm gonna
feed that very narrow niche of audience and that's what he did and yeah a lot of people couldn't keep up with a daily
episode but there was a subsection that could and that subsection continued to grow not only that but by putting on a
daily podcast his skills improved x over what they would have if he was doing a weekly podcast and because he
was doing a daily podcast people were talking about him so whenever like a member of the press wanted to do a story
on podcasts they would always be referred to john and his star just continued to rise and there's a lot of
reasons why john lee dumas is a huge success but this is one of them for sure he even talks about it in his book as
well it doesn't have to be just that it could be anything so you know i when i moved
into my new home i was looking for oil delivery services and i looked online and i found the one with the cheapest
prices because you know to be honest as long as the oil comes i really don't care where it came from so um and there
was one that had the lowest prices and i looked online and i was just on the cusp
of their delivery area so i called up and they said well we don't deliver to that neighborhood um and i you know i
asked you know it's only one block literally it is one block away i'm looking at the map and she says hold on
she goes on hold she comes back she goes yeah we're not we can't do it we apologize here's a couple of other places
and i really respected that because even though it seems like well why would you give up on a customers just one block away they had figured out exactly where
they wanted to deliver and that's how they kept their rates so low because they knew that every one of their customers was going to be in the small
geographic area that it wasn't going to cost them a lot in gas to deliver the oil and by doing that they could remain
the cheapest route but they couldn't take me on as a client but again that's okay so in that case they shrank their
delivery area could you shrink your hours could you reduce the number of ingredients could you decide to narrow
the people you're willing to sell to maybe you only go after women or only after men or only after people overset
whatever it is like what can you do to narrow this to focus in on either
delivery or product or audience and while i was doing the research into this i stumbled upon this really
interesting fact that i think was back in which last year they had the numbers for this
the average american primary care physician general doctor
was making uh an annual salary of thousand dollars
uh i'm sorry a year which is great money but the average specialist
was making about more a year for actually
knowing less about being a doctor i mean not really but you know what i'm saying
he or she is able to help less people we are willing to pay more money for
specialists than we are for generalists so again as you're thinking about your e-commerce store you know what kind of
things can you be doing to narrow your focus maybe you've been trying to replicate amazon and sell everything but
really you're never going to beat amazon so why not be the best in you know dog
food or the best in bicycle parts or the best whatever it is or go after a very specific audience
that's going to be where you really start to become an expert and when you focus all your attention on that smaller
audience or on that smaller niche or niche you become the expert and people start
looking to you and if you're online like an e-commerce store people start linking to you as well and that's going to help
your seo which is ultimately also going to drive traffic to your website very very good advice very good advice
yeah and i yeah check out the john lee dunamis uh
podcast because it's entrepreneurs on fire it's a fascinating podcast actually i've learned a lot listening to him over the years and um
i'm one of those guys that dips in and out of john uh i do that with every podcast i listen to to be fair um yeah
but but yeah definitely check it out okay so fine focus fashion
yeah so fashion like i said is uh maybe there's something extrinsic to what you're offering
if you don't have something if you haven't found anything because you know as you go through these if you haven't found anything yet maybe
what you can think about is what could i add to a product or service or what could i do external to this that would
attract people would make me worth remarking upon and so one example of
this is uh bet and jerry's ice cream which i think is an international brand oh yeah it's in the uk so it must be yeah yeah
um and a few years ago they released a new flavor called pecan resist
ice cream and you know it's a series of different delicious and savorful flavors that they mix in but
they called it pecan resist and the reason they called it that besides the fact there were pecans in
there was the idea that they were going to take a hundred thousand dollars of the profits and give them to four
progressive organizations that they felt were fighting then president trump's regime they were
very anti-trump they they wore their beliefs on their sleeves and when you look at the social media
impact of the release of that particular line of ice cream compared to all the others it's night and day it's like
x in terms of the attention and articles were written about it and of course some people swore off ben and jerry's ice
cream because they they like the former president but for the majority of people and the people who were in alignment
with ben and jerry's mission which is they're very liberal and they're very out there about it this was just a
reinforcement and they knew that by buying this ice cream they were supporting these progressive organizations so again i'm not saying
you have to get political on this but they created something that was in alignment with their beliefs that they knew would really resonate with their
audience you know here in america there's a company that's called my pillow and the person is a
huge fan of president ex-president trump there's nobody in this country that
would buy a my pillow pillow uh unless they're making a political statement like you know it's just it
comes down to that you're either going to get it or not get it but not based on whether you need a good night's sleep so really like these are things we choose
to do because we want to be in alignment with the brand um for me i i didn't plan on this but i
put together my conference uh that we were holding pre-covet for eight years called agents of change um just because
i wanted to put on an event in maine that would bring in speakers from around the country around the world to talk
about digital marketing now you don't need to buy a ticket to agents of change to work
with my company flight new media nor the other way around but there's there's the idea of agents of change is trying to
teach people how they can be better at digital marketing and flight is a digital agency that helps people with their digital marketing they're in
alignment when i would get up on stage to introduce the day and to do my presentation people saw somebody who was
both from agents of change and from flight new media so immediately anybody who came to the conference became much
more aware of my company and over the years as people you know we asked people how did you find us a lot of them would
say things like oh well i went to your conference for the last five years but it's only now that i need a website only now that i need seo
so again it wasn't the original purpose of this and you can go to the conference and never hire flight new media but the
fact that these things are in alignment and it's extrinsic we fashion this again accidentally and
on purpose but we fashion this and this has been a great generator of business for flight media and have you found that
with a podcast as well because the podcast is called agents of change right and so correct um originally the podcast
was called the marketing agents but then i realized that's a lot of different brands to manage so we actually just
after episode we combined it we changed the name um we do get some business from the podcast for sure and
one of our biggest long-term clients came from the podcast they never would have heard of us otherwise so when i'm
talking to people and we're working on the fashion side of of the equation we're often talking about like is there
a local charity or non-profit that's in alignment that you could partner with is there could you be doing some sort of
event or some classes or something like that um you know one of the things i've seen is you know
somebody has a dry cleaner and what they do is anytime something's not picked up after days they give it to this
service that helps people who are down on their luck get jobs by giving them clean clothes fresh clothes to go into
interviews so you know and they talk that up so there's a lot of things that you can be doing that are in alignment with your mission and vision that are
going to help you become remarkable and get people to check you out
you know toms of maine is a famous example or yeah tom shoes yeah you buy one pair and another pair goes
to a needy person everybody always talks about that that was a very remarkable idea back when they first did it yeah it
was and in fact the idea was more remarkable than the shoe itself um they never really put one on but yeah it was
one of those wasn't it and you just saw this very clever very powerful way of of um
and actually his book starts something that matters um the guy that started toms is uh is a fascinating book one
that you should definitely definitely read um but now again that's really powerful i
like that so we've got find we've we've got focusing um
maybe start a podcast yes or a conference is what we're saying for your ecommerce brent um the last one
framed let's expand on that a little bit more yeah so frame fashion usually requires somebody to go off and do some
thinking frame is kind of the same thing um the best example i've seen a frame is a story that i read in the introvert's
edge guy who uh matthew uh pollard i believe he actually was on my podcast years ago and um he is a
business coach that helps people kind of brand themselves and there was a woman in the bay area of california who was
teaching mandarin to anybody who wanted to learn it and she had a good steady business but then as time went on
especially around the uh beginning of the internet things really taking off she found that there were a lot of new
people entering the business who were willing to take a lot less money to kind of build their clientele and so that
kind of started to cut into a profits people were more interested in going for the cheaper uh offers and then uh when
things like fiverr popped up suddenly are people in china teaching this teaching mandarin for so
cheap there's no way you could possibly compete and she was you know having to leave people off and she was really struggling with her business and he took
a look at her business and he's like well what what are who are these two people and it was two people who had
been uh moved by their job to go to china and she explained yeah not only am
i you know did i teach the mandarin but i also ended up talking to them about chinese business
rituals so that they would be better when they got to china and i also taught the spouse and children chinese as well
so they would be able to better um uh get into chinese society and succeed
you know while they're while their spouses were working and he's like oh so it sounds like you
kind of help people succeed in china not just teach the mandate i guess so he's like well from now on
you're the china success coach and you're only going to take on clients who are
being moved from relocated uh by their businesses to go there and we're actually going to reach out to all the
recruiters who deal with this sort of stuff once they did that she could charge whatever she wanted it was a business
expense she was hugely successful and she didn't have to worry about people trying to undercut her and that's the
idea frank she didn't change anything in what she was offering but she changed the perspective in what she was offering to
really kind of focus on some of the benefits and then the other interesting thing is they also uh
started to use focus as well where they're not going to go after any other business and they're going to talk specifically to the people who are
finding those people so another important thing here is it's not just about finding one thing that makes
you remarkable and stopping the exercise it's about continuing to go through and using fine focus fashion and frame till
you create this this position in the marketplace that no one else can touch they wouldn't want to
they'll go find their own remarkability and here in portland maine there's easily
you know people doing websites in internet marketing um i have found my
niche i found what makes us remarkable and it's the agents of change conference and it's the i'm the local tech guru on
the nbc affiliates here in in maine but other people have found their own remarkability maybe they're the least
expensive or they only focus on e-commerce or they only focus on non-profits or they are an all-woman
shop whatever it is they're creating their own remarkability so those are the steps that you can take to
really uncover if i am just selling widgets how do i stand out or if i'm selling the same product that amazon
also carries whether it's the exact same product or something similar how can i attract people to use my store even if i
don't have amazon prime or the equivalent um and get them to to buy with me
so find focus fashion and frame is your remarkability formula uh thank you for
sharing it with us i guess my as we sort of come into the the the top of the time as they say um
this is great right and i i can see me sitting in a park with a journal writing those four things out thinking about the
company coming up with some great ideas to increase our remarkability to help us stand out and position ourselves a
little bit better in the market but what do i do with that information
once i have it because journaling or writing about something or brainstorming with your team is one thing but actually
actually getting that weaved into my business is something else right yeah well and i definitely have thought a lot
about it being a digital marketer myself so some of it like i said is about um some of it would be in the messaging so
the messaging on the product pages the category pages the front page the blog
and any social channels that we're doing so you know those would be some of the places where i would be continuing to
hone in on this message where i'm going to attract the right type of people also by being a specialist um i also am
likely to attract links from other people and like i said that's a huge benefit from search engine optimization
so those are just a few of the ways in my email communication so a lot of it is once i've identified this how do i
communicate this and then if i'm doing advertising and i should be doing some form of advertising how do i use
targeting and social media and paid search to get my message in front of the people who are actually going to respond
to that because if i've got the cheapest product out there some people are going to be wildly enthusiastic about that and
other people are not going to care at all because they're more interested in service or deliverability or reliability or things
like that so it does help focus my targeting on advertising it can greatly
increase my seo especially if i'm doing uh surveys with my current clients hearing
the words they use and then using them in my copy myself and then when somebody who's like them goes to do a search at
google they're more likely to find a site like mine as well so it's really about getting clear on the message
leaning into it and then putting it into all your communications and into all your targeting for advertising
have you found any difficulty let's say
i'm a medium e-commerce business medium-sized business i'm doing probably around i don't know three four million
dollars a year in turnover i've got a couple staff um we've maybe plateaued a little bit and
i'm i'm at this stage now where i'm thinking about this remarkability thing and going yeah actually we need to reposition ourselves and i've got some
ideas on how to do that have you found any difficulty in getting this the staff
or the team to buy into that idea i have
not but i will say that sometimes you need to repeat things like if you're talking to your team because
i'm an owner like you are um and sometimes when i realize like we're not doing something we should be doing or
the focus is wrong whether it's like i need you to do more billable hours or i need you to do more on the customer
service side of things or we need to be experimenting more i've painfully discovered saying it once
doesn't matter saying it once at every staff meeting for two years starts to matter so i
think it's partially i think it's partially a matter of um i don't like the word repetition even
though that's what it is it's about consistency so if you decide that you're going to go in this direction and it's
hard to give an example without but you know like if you decide that we're really going to narrow our audience or we're really going to narrow our uh the
product that we're carrying or whatever we are talking about or the delivery is only going to be by drone going forward
whatever it is that's going to make you stand out you have to keep on reiterating that to your staff and explain to them why this
is so important and and so valuable um and you did a great job when i interviewed you talking about one of
your employees who went the extra mile for somebody and that person was just completely wowed um and probably has
told that story times so uh i won't say what it is people have to listen to my podcast
but um but that kind of thing like once you start talking yourself about it
not once but maybe times you shift
the direction of your company and people come along with you and are there going to be people who don't if
it's a dramatic dramatic shift yeah there will probably be people who like your you know your mission and vision
and values don't match up with where i thought we were going and they move on and just like shedding certain customers
shedding certain employees is best for everybody they can go off and do what they were put on this planet to do and
you can continue doing what you want to do exactly that's very well said uh remarkability uh or being remarkable
means it's repeatable right and so if someone they always used to say to me if something's worth repeating it's worth
repeating uh which is a sensible sentence i think and um and and that's
true i think that's true in your messaging with your team i think it's true with the messaging with your computers i think it's true actually as
a leader with the messaging with yourself you know just reminding yourself this is why i'm here this is what we're standing for this is
um what we're trying to you know trying to do to make the world a better place or you know whatever it is that you you know gets your boat floating
so um i i like that advice uh so once you've figured out your remarkability just keep keep talking about it keep
talking about it to every man and their dog right just keep absolutely out there and um and keep aware also if your
competitors are trying to copy you as well because you may continue to evolve what's remarkable about your business
what was remarkable five years ago may not be remarkable today yeah yeah that's very too next day delivery was great
years ago well we talked about like how k modem and how exciting that was and now it's
like if a website loads in less than four in more than four seconds we're like what's wrong with my connection yeah you know what we're out
of the next website and it's got you know i'm downloading video and everything which would have taken three days to download
uh no that's that's top advice uh rich listen um tell us about the podcast and
tell us how people can reach a whole deed sure uh if you love these kind of conversations and you're really focused
on digital marketing check out the agents of change podcast uh it's available on just about every platform
out there you can ask your smart speaker if you want to check out my website my agency website it's takeflightflyte.com
if you want to connect with me i am the rich brooks on just about every social media platform out there yeah and we'll
of course link to all of those things in the show notes as well but definitely check out the agents of
change podcast usually he has really good guests on there
so um yeah it's been an absolute pleasure it's been fun doing it this way around rich not gonna lie it do you find
i don't know if you're like me there's a very big difference between being the host of a podcast and being a guest on
the podcast oh it's a lot more work to be the guest i think i mean i don't mind it cause you can just show up and talk
sometimes but uh when i'm the host all i need to do is just kind of like bumper
people in a certain direction and that's about it um but then how many episodes do you have on your podcast under your
belt well funnily enough you are episode so we're not as far as you but you're uh
you're a prediction exactly so um yeah and and i think like
as you start doing them over and over and over again you just get good at understanding how to get the best out of
people so yeah like everything else there's a certain amount of experience that's required there is and i unlike
you i'm i i love being a guest i'm and i'm always flattered when people ask me if i can be on their show or you know
whatever and we go on and we talk about e-commerce and it's great but when i'm in this chair i get to control the conversation i get to ask the questions
right and i've just got to listen and ask the question well that's interesting uh and i that's the thing i love about
this show and um yeah it's fascinating isn't it when you're sat on the other side of the table uh on on both uh both those things
but no i appreciate it listen rich you're a legend an absolute legend really appreciate you getting on the
show but listen i love our conversations matt let's find more excuses to come on each other's show in the future
absolutely thanks brother well a big thanks to my very special guest uh rich brooks what did you think
i love my conversation with such a top dude i really enjoyed being on his podcast and i enjoyed having him on our podcast
it's always different when you run your own podcast and then you go on their podcast if that makes sense
because you're not you're not in control of the conversation you're not you're you're you're not asking the questions
which is it's a really strange thing uh but he was such a gracious host so do check out
his podcast we'll put a link to that and of course a link to all of the notes and transcript from today's show just
head on over to ecommercepodcast.net forward slash it will be there and it
will help you find your remarkability and if that's not enough and you want more
because we know you want more an insatiable appetite i'm the same way to be fair
next week we have uh a good friend of mine and just an all-round topic called
pat collins patrick collins who is going to be talking to us about drumroll please linkedin
events and how you can get the most out of them for your ecommerce business now might not sound
at first glance you kind of go what linkedin events for e-commerce yeah trust me it's a fascinating conversation
and to prove it here is an excerpt from my chat with pat
um i think the world is a completely different place now that people don't want to be cold called they don't want
to be sold to and so of the past two or three years my whole approach linkedin changed to say how do you mix these two
sort of circles and one circle is outbound and one circle is inbound and how do you mix it together
so you think about all the e-commerce businesses you work with um inbound is incredibly important seo backlinks paid
ads all these things to drive traffic to you but very rarely e-commerce will do too much outbound and go out and find a
client because it's it's a bit more difficult and what's really cool about linkedin is you have this
um sort of platform where you can create content you can create pro so you can create all the traffic to come to you we
can also find anybody to send a message and if you combine these two together you have this machine where people are
constantly coming to you and learning about you but at any one time you want to speed it up you can start to reach out and message them as well
as i said pad is a top bloke you're going to want to check it out so the way you get these podcasts delivered direct
to your inbox of course is if you subscribe either subscribe to the email and we'll email you let them know and
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really fascinating you know i say this every week that actually when you share it out it helps as it does
it really does which is why we say it what fascinates me is when we first started the e-commerce podcast we had to
hustle to get people onto the show now we're in you know season gazillion and we've been
around for a little while and we've got a good listenership and we have you know and i'm super grateful to all of you who regularly tune in to the show share out
and review and all that sort of stuff we have a list as long as you're on with people who want to come on the show and so we get to pick and choose the great
guests and it's it's a beautiful thing it really is so if you keep doing what you're doing i keep doing what i'm doing
we create some amazing content it is a win-win scenario so let's keep doing it as i said at the start of the show all
of the notes links and transcripts to today's show are online you can get them for free no email no nothing just head
over to ecommercepodcast.net forward slash they are there waiting for you
to help you deliver your e-commerce well thank you so much for listening uh it's
great to be with you and i will see you again next week so that's it from me bye for now
you've been listening to the e-commerce podcast with matt edmondson join us next time for more interviews
tips and tools for building your business online
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