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Smarter Marketing From Super People! CMA Kick Off 2019

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Earlier this month and for the third year running I attended CMA Kick-Off 2019 in Dundee.

The event is for people who want to give their business the best start to the new year.

While many of the attendees were members of the Content Marketing Academy membership community, there were also a number who were not, and could experience a warm CMA welcome (we’re a friendly bunch!)

The day consisted of six speakers, a business hot seat session and a special announcement.

Chris Marr

Chris Marr at CMA Kick-Off. His t-shirt reads "Born to work together"
Chris Marr at CMA Kick-Off. His t-shirt reads “Born to work together”

Chris talked about the work he’d done with Marcus Sheridan, who has been a mentor to him in his work in the content marketing space.

But Chris noticed from the work that they’d done together that Marcus had an “X Factor” that he couldn’t quite pin down.

Chris realised that to be as an effective communicator and teacher as Marcus he needed to find a sense of self within.

For some people that’s found through faith, for others introspection.

He delved into the world of philosophy looking for answers, and found Ryan Holiday and Stoicism.

We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.

Marcus Aurelius

Chris has used his learnings to come up with the Content Marketing Academy manifesto:

  • Bigger, braver, bolder
  • Elevate and inspire others
  • Strive for progress
  • Keep an open mind
  • Stay humble

The CMA manifesto

You can see the results of this in the way that Chris has built and manages his membership community. Personal development and support are encouraged. While members do trade with one another, it’s not a group of people aggressively hustling for sales.

For my tweeting efforts during the day I got a copy of Seneca’s Letters From a Stoic to add to my reading list and help figure out my personal philosophy. Thanks, Chris!

Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

Yva Yorston

Yva’s message was the one that resonated with me the most on the day.

Her advice was:

Go all in.

She had got to the point with her virtual assistant enterprise where she realised that she had not built the right foundations for a scalable business.

She had run into a number of problems:

  1. Offering too many services, without one focus
  2. Not delegating
  3. Not specialising
  4. Working too hard to find clients
  5. The right processes not in place

Yva Yorston. Brick by brick, learning to build a scalable business.

Yva decided that she had to target one area for success.

After some brainstorming, she settled on blog management.

She took the idea to her existing clients, and got a lukewarm response.

Her old brand was holding her back.

It was time to make it work or get a job. Time to go all in.

The answer was a complete rebrand.

Sure, it could fail, but if she didn’t try she would always think “What if..?”

She picked out a new name – Content Boost, chose a brand designer she trusted and worked hard to rewrite her website and brand message.

Even her relaunch was planned on Trello.

The work paid off – the business has now hit new heights! Win!

Alasdair McGill

Alasdair gave a gentle introduction to accounting for the terrified, just in time for the self assessment tax deadline!

Alasdair McGill wearing an "Abandon Ship" t-shirt

As an accountant, he’s surprised at how many businesses don’t understand their own balance sheets.

You need to learn finance; you need to become fluent in it. You need to know accounting inside out, upside down and back to front.

James Watt, BrewDog

Alasdair’s advice boiled down to four points:

  1. Have a plan. He’s a big fan of the Business Model Canvas.
  2. Learn the accounting lingo. For example, debtor days is the number of days between you providing a service and being paid for it. (Did you know that the average debtor days for a small business is 43? Try and make that as small a number as possible. Best of all, make it a negative number by being paid up front.)
  3. Review everything. He loves graphs and charts, and the Xero software his firm uses can produce plenty of them!Xero accounting table and graphs
  4. Cash is king. A sale isn’t a sale until the money’s in the bank.

Kenda Macdonald

Kenda Macdonald

Chief Ninja of Automation Ninjas Kenda talked about the growing divide between what consumers want (advice and solutions) versus what businesses want (to sell).

How can we fix this divide? Content marketing can be part of the answer.

But first we need to know about brains.

Our brains are made up of two attention systems:

  1. Autopilot (like the Minions)
  2. Pilot (like Gru)

Most of our time is spent on autopilot. We make a lot of decisions without really thinking: the minions have taken over.

So what marketers need to do is to design minion-friendly experiences where consumers don’t have to think. They just get directed towards the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel. Obviously with a happy ending for both parties!

Kenda recommends a 4 step process:

  1. Attract – get prospects to your site through great content.
  2. Engage – lead them on to other helpful stuff and get them to sign to via email.
  3. Sell – put the offer out and let them choose.
  4. Wow – keep being brilliant to retain your customers.

To sum up: Kenda is a marketing genius and I look forward to the release of her book, out this spring!

Debbie Ekins

Debbie is the marketing person for her family’s business, Eagle Leisure. They sell swimming pools, spas and more across Scotland.

Debbie Ekins

When the site was redeveloped, Debbie took on the job of writing a blog.

The blog got a woeful 72 views a week in May 2017, so she soon concluded that blogging didn’t work.

She then realised after following Marcus Sheridan online that she’d been doing it all wrong.

The blog was lacking:

  1. Answers to customers’ questions.
  2. A strategy.
  3. Consistency.

Getting the management to adopt a “big 5” content marketing approach was a tough sell. Debbie had to get her parents on board, and no parent ever thinks their kid knows better than them!

The way to get buy-in was to try out the new strategy and measure the results, sales being the most important figure.

Happily, Debbie’s hard work paid off.

  • 30% increase in sales
  • Shorter sales process (as customers’ questions were answered through their blog)
  • Huge increase in traffic from organic search – 91% of their total
  • About 3,000 visitors a week – a 4000% increase!

Hot seat with Steve Bonthrone

Steve Bonthrone and Chris Marr

This was a practical session with personal trainer and coach Steve Bonthrone bravely stepping into the “hot seat”.

He outlined a challenge he was having with business, while the room asked him questions to find out more information and formulate a solution.

Steve has now made a plan to take his business in the direction he wants to go. We shall see how he fares in the next few months!

Rich Davies

Rich Davies

Rich Davies is an entrepreneur who runs Abandon Ship Apparel, a clothing and merchandise company with their own designs. (They produced the official CMA T-shirt of the event.)

He’s seen the highs and lows of business: 3 years after starting a business from his bedroom he reached £1.2 million in turnover.

Unfortunately the company went into liquidation later, and he had to let 20 staff go, including his wife.

Rich said it was harder coming down in business than going up.

His goal now is to have a sustainable and scalable business. He believes in the 80/20 rule – that 80% of results come from 20% of your efforts.

Personal goals, such as keeping healthy and spending more time with his wife, are important.

Find out about a day in the life of Rich’s business.

The big announcement

The big announcement of the day was delivered by Chris and Cara with a carefully prepared statement about the CMA Live conference.

This year’s CMA Live was set to be the biggest and best yet, but CMA Live 2019 has been cancelled.

Cara Mackay and Chris Marr announce the cancellation of CMA Live 2019
Cara Mackay and Chris Marr announce the cancellation of CMA Live 2019

The conference had grown expensive to run, and 2018’s event – which unfortunately I missed – made a £39k loss.

As well as stressing out Chris, Cara and Nic of CMA, running CMA Live would have endangered the existence of the CMA Community, which wasn’t a risk they wanted to take.

It must have been a heartbreaking decision to make, but ultimately the right one, and I commend the team on the way they handled it.

Everyone in the room was supportive and the general mood was “thank you for the memories”.

Summing up

While CMA Live may not be continuing, CMA Kick Off will continue. You can already book for 2020!

If you’re not convinced of the value of this event, here is a look back to the last two Kick Offs:

How has your 2019 started? Let me know in the comments.

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