The Secret to B2B Marketing: Owning a Perspective

James Lawrence: Welcome back to the Smarter Marketer Podcast. I'm here today with Alex James. Alex, welcome to the pod.

Alex James: Thank you for having me, James. Looking forward to today's conversation.

James Lawrence: Alex is a B2B messaging strategist for service firms, and he's the founder of Melbourne based firm Minimalist Marketing Co.

Over the past 12 years, Alex has worked with a wide range of B2B service firms. There was a post that Alex put onto LinkedIn recently, which was titled A Niche is No Longer Enough and it got shared many, many, many times, multiple people sent it to me. It clearly struck a chord with people working in professional services agencies, B2B marketers we're chatting off air and the post has now been viewed, I think over 150,000 times.

We then caught up. We had lunch. It was a great conversation. I was saying to Alex off air, we need to just bottle the conversation we had over lunch and he promised it's gonna be even better so we can go deeper. So

I think you've got so much wisdom when it comes to the distinction between good copy versus good messaging. But I think a good place to start, Alex, is your marketing journey. Like, where did it start?

Alex James: Yeah, it's interesting. I've really been wrestling with this problem for so long of like, how do we get, as a service firm, how do we get people to realize that we are different and better before they've worked with us? Because, you know, there's no free trial. We can't do a seven day thing , with a service firm.

You're either in it or not. And that's really tough. And it's why for most firms, their value proposition is more like a marriage proposition. It's more like, Hey, let's get married, and then you'll see how great of a partner we truly are. But I stumbled into this problem quite early on in my career.

My first job was actually at a travel company, , and we . Helped people get good deals for flights and resorts and stuff like that. And James, I thought I was some kind of marketing prodigy wizard, a genius because I would get a picture of a beach, slap some generic copy over the top of it, put it up on Facebook and what do you know would get clicks and conversions in customers?

And I was like, top of the world. I was like, ah, , is this what people are talking about all the time? This is easy Wi winter getaway to Bali. Exactly, exactly. Who knew that that would be easy to sell? , It was my second job that was very, very humbling, which was at a boutique consulting firm. And that's when , all the ads, all the SEO, all the cold emails, all the trade trip, like nothing.

I tried, worked, nothing worked. And that got me to realize, oh, okay, cool. This is a very different game. This is all about building trust and authority in the long term and really building mental availability. So that somebody is going to reach out to you when they're ready to do so. You can't really just put like a discount in front of them and expect action.

They have to be ready to reach out to you. And so I've just really been in the trenches that, , the good thing is that , I really sucked at that job, but it fascinated me. I'm like, why do I suck at this so much? And I had my breakthrough at the job after that, , which I'm very grateful for.

Trying to crack this code and I feel like I'm onto something here.

James Lawrence: Hmm. What was the, next job , that you moved into after that one?

Alex James: The next job was a, , IT consulting and managed services firm. They had brought me on.

Because they had lost two of their biggest clients and they hadn't done any kind of marketing or anything , for the previous two years. And so they brought me on to steer the Titanic away from the iceberg. And , I go in there, I'm like, great, what's the, marketing budget?

They look at me and they're like, you are the marketing budget. What are you talking about? So I'm like, okay, cool. I gotta figure this out. I gotta figure out how to get two big kinda whale clients at least quickly with the $0 budget. And so what I ended up doing was, uh, it built out like a bit of a funnel, but the main thing was writing an article.

That I got published in a relevant publication. The good news was that this firm did have some good positioning. They were an IT service firm for nonprofits specifically. And so I wrote an article, got it published in Pro Bono Australia, which is , a thing that every nonprofit leader reads. Yeah. , Contacted the editor, said, Hey, would you be interested in publishing this?

She said, sure, because, , they're always desperate for something. And , it was, , titled It Has Failed Nonprofits.

That article went into like, Hey, stop investing in it until you fix these foundational things. Because guess what? We as an industry, as a category, we have failed you. We've been treating you like a for-profit business. We've been treating you like you have the resources and the money available to actually execute like these rock solid it, , infrastructure strategies.

Yeah. That's not you and we haven't been taking that into account and we've been underserving you as a result.

James Lawrence: Yep.

Alex James: Here's what to do differently. Here's how to think about things differently. That article got three new clients within a week and I was in the sales calls , and , they all quoted like direct lines from that article.

They were like, , this sentence really resonated. I didn't know what I was talking about. , I didn't know anything about it strategy for nonprofits, but , it was enough of a strong perspective that resonated with that market who are also non-technical like I was. But it was the perspective of not just saying, Hey, you need to do better.

It's, Hey, we're sorry we failed you, but we're on your team and we wanna make this right. We suddenly positioned the firm not as. Opposite sides of the table, but as on the same side, we're in this together. It's not you versus me, it's you and me versus the problem. And that is what was really my first taste of a strong perspective and how it , really cuts through to the market when you frame it correctly.

James Lawrence: And what's your journey been since then, 'cause that taste, showed you , what an impact a perspective can have. , Where have you gone from then?

Alex James: Yeah. So since then, I, , worked at a couple of nonprofits, , myself had some really big, , successful campaigns, , I'm very used to having a $0 marketing budget.

, And I think that's been a blessing really, because I've had to just figure out how to do this without just throwing money at it. How do you actually cut through if you can't be loud, how do you be precise? And it was in 2020 that I, , started, , working for myself and taking on , copywriting clients.

I started out as a humble copywriter. , Just doing whatever work anybody would pay me for. , And that was also a really, really big, , learning curve for me when it came to actually not just delivering good work, but getting good at delivery of the work. Yeah. How do you get people bought in to the ideas, bought into the concepts, bought into the exact execution, not just hand it to them and say, cool.

Good luck.

James Lawrence: Yeah. And , when we caught up last time, you're talking about, . Working in smaller businesses, working , in businesses that don't have budgets, it forces you to be scrappy. It forces you to test stuff.

You're very close to it, right? There's no fat, which masks what may or may not be working. And , you talked about tinkering during COVID with TikTok , almost as this little curiosity project. I think that's fascinating and I feel Yeah, from the outside looking in, that has had a massive impact in terms of this next iteration around the minimalist marketing code, LinkedIn perspective, all that kind of stuff.

Alex James: Big time. Yeah. , I started posting , on TikTok, , during the height of lockdown. , It wasn't really to gain an audience or anything like that. It was literally just for me, because I realized that a big weakness of mine was that I was pretty bad at explaining marketing to non marketers. I. And so I treated TikTok as a bit of a dojo of like, you know what?

This will force me to communicate one principle, one concept, one example in 60 seconds. And then I'll start to build the muscle. I'm like, okay, cool. Here is, here are the, like how I use it here is I, here's how I construct a quick argument. I started posting that kind of semi-regularly. People started paying attention, people started leaving comments saying that it was helpful.

That was very unexpected. Soon enough people started saying, how do I hire you? I said, I don't know. So I put up some website, it was literally James. It was like this form on a blank white page I guess. Fill that out I suppose. And people did. And then that started , yeah, snowballing. And I did a whole bunch of things.

It was a very big like experimentation phase , I've been in this kind of B2B space for a long time. Should I branch out from that? , And. , What it really confirmed for me was that, no, I need to stay in the B2B space. 'cause , I find it way, way, way more rewarding because it's not about just generating impulse purchases and triggering people to buy.

It's about building long-term trust and authority and honestly respect between vendor and client. And that's the magic , when that all comes together, I find that incredibly rewarding , when it works, it just takes a longer time , that you need to develop some patience for. And so that's what really guided me through.

I got to experience a lot of different things. I was writing like the copy on the back , of a snack brand, like, you know, the cute little quirky copy , that they require. , But , I always found myself going back to the well of like , B2B service firms, a lot of time in B2B SaaS as well.

But I find that. B2B service firms are way more challenging than a SaaS product and way more underserved as well. Hmm. There's a lot of information there around how to sell tech, really. You just need to communicate what the tool is and what it does clearly, and people will get it. For service firms, you have to really capture what the philosophy is.

'cause everyone's offering the same thing, but it's how you deliver it. That is your differentiator, and you need to learn how to communicate that. How.

James Lawrence: Mm-hmm. And that's a good segue. I think you're being probably a little bit modest there. How many, like how big did your TikTok following get to? Oh

Alex James: yeah. I got to, uh, 125,000 followers about millions

James Lawrence: and millions of views.

Right. It was kind of millions

Alex James: and millions and millions. Tens of millions of views. Yeah. , I'm really grateful for it. I don't actually post there anymore. Yeah. I'm just 100% on LinkedIn now. But, , it was literally like a life changing, , thing that I.

More or less stumbled into, I feel very lucky.

James Lawrence: Yeah. , I know a few people that have blew up on TikTok around that period. Right. And I think similar kind of was this life changing moment, right? In terms of just capturing this huge audience and suddenly, going from, , posting in your bedroom during, I'm not saying this is a view, but to your bedroom during COVID, and then suddenly it's,

Alex James: yeah,

James Lawrence: the thousands of half follow up.

I'm in

Alex James: my office at home, different room. But kind of same thing. Uh, but yeah, it really highlighted to me actually the people talk about how important a , first move or advantage is. And I was kind of the first person on TikTok talking about copywriting principles, and I just caught that , big wave at the start.

, And that's really cemented to me, if you get in early, a lot of the hard work is done for you because you don't actually have to be that differentiated if you're early to market. You just have to exist. And so it's also folded into the work that I'm doing now, which is like, well, if everything already exists, how do you create something that feels new?

James Lawrence: I think that's it. Yeah. . So you've alluded a few times to , the fundamental differences between marketing a product based business tour service business, , and , I do think whether that's a B2C product, like you're selling trips to Bali and trips to Fiji, , or even a SaaS business .

It's a different purchase to, yeah. Jumping into bed or getting married to a service-based firm. And Rocket , We're a service-based business. Um, I think we're probably talking here, professional services, right? And it probably depends a little bit on how you define professional services.

Whether or not, , to be professional, you need to be certified or part of an industry group that , accredits businesses. But for me , it's law firms, it's accounting firms. It's what you talked about before in terms of managed services , to some extent, , business coaches, pr, marketing agencies, advertising agencies.

And , the poster niche is no longer enough. Maybe if we could talk a little bit about the mental process behind it, and we'll include a link , in the notes to the show, but what the premise, , of the post was.

Yeah. And, and what the response has been. So

Alex James: the niche down strategy really came up through the ranks in the 2010s. During COVID, there was a huge amount of money thrown at digital transformation. And if you actually look , at the stats, like , if you were a digital agency in 2021, the average growth rate was something like 25% for that year.

Yeah. Normally it's around 12. It More than doubled. Yeah. The, these days it's shrunk. It's now a bit below 5%. Um. You're not allowed, you're

James Lawrence: not allowed to laugh as you say that.

Alex James: Sorry. Yes. , It's at below 5%. I'm sorry to report, , and , what a lot of agencies in particular realized was that okay.

Yeah. You know what, this niche down stuff we've been hearing about it for a long time now is the time to adopt it. And you could adopt it with fairly low risk because there was so much money flooding into the space. It didn't actually feel as scary and as risky as it would've a couple of years earlier.

And so we actually see this in the stats, this is from, , Promethean research In 2021, 50% of agencies were niched in 2024. That number's now 84%. Like it's just been mass adopted this strategy and with a bit of. Tea leaf reading and critical thinking, we can realize that. Well, you know what? Every strategy, every tactic, every approach has a shelf life.

Everything has a peak level of effectiveness. And then it has diminishing returns after that. , And , the classic example is you look at a banner ad on a website. When that first, in the mid nineties, the first banner ad had a click through rate of 53% or something like that, .

Now it's like 0.0 0 0 0 0 5. And I'm missing a couple of zeros there probably. But our brains don't even register it anymore. We don't even see the banner ads when they're there. We filter them out as like nonsense noise information. This is , the way with everything, like everything has a shelf life.

And what we can really quickly surmise is that, well, hey, we've got way more agencies now than ever before. There's 53% more agencies actually , in the last five years that have come up, just digital agencies in US and Canada alone. So the market has been flooded. Barriers to entry have collapsed and crumbled.

AI is coming through to eat everybody's lunch. All the moats have collided and dissolved into a sea of sameness. Clients expectations Have raised their demanding industry specialization or skillset specialization or both. And so now that everybody has adopted the niche down strategy, it's competitive, edge has grown, dull a strategy really only works if not everybody is doing it.

If everybody is doing the same thing, then it doesn't differentiate you. It makes you the same. And I speak to firms all the time. They are feeling their differentiation dissolve. And so where we are at now. Is a bit of a interesting pivot point where it's like, okay, cool, we've done this, we've adopted it, we did what we were told and we did the scary thing and we niched down, but , we've moved past the point of it of its peak effectiveness.

So what's next? What do we do now? And that is where we need to think about more than just the niche. We have to go beyond the niche and we have to think about the perspective that we bring with it. It's no longer enough to say we do X service for Y industry. We have to think about it in terms of we do X service for Y industry because Z Reason.

James Lawrence: Hmm. And is that how you would, , define or explain what a perspective is?

Alex James: We need to acknowledge that we have now. Alongside everybody adopting the niche down strategy. We have now also entered the thought leadership era , officially in 2019. 58% of companies, , this is Edelman Research.

20 19, 50 8% of companies purchased a B2B protocol service due to thought leadership content. In 2024, that number was 72%. This is not a blip. This is a true new normal setting. Like that line is going up into the right and it's not slowing down. It's why , the vibes and values trend of the 2010s doesn't cut it anymore.

The storytelling thing doesn't cut it anymore. Prospects see this for what it is, which is not differentiation, but decoration.

James Lawrence: Mm-hmm.

Alex James: What we need to do is actually develop a perspective, not just, Hey, we do X for Y, but we do X for Y. Because then why do we have this specialization in this industry? Why do we have the specialization in the skillset?

What do we know that others don't? We can't just be niched just because we have to be niched Justifiably.

James Lawrence: Hmm.

Alex James: And the only way that we can justify the niche that we adopt is by expressing it through a perspective. And a perspective at the end of the day is very simple. It is. Here is how things are typically done, and here is how things should be done.

James Lawrence: Hmm.

Alex James: It's exposing that gap. And if we can adopt that, if we can express it in a compelling way, that's how we will enroll people to our vision, our ideology, here's how things ought to be done. And also sets like the parameters and the metrics for what good looks like. I. That's what gets clients excited.

That's what gets us to do the best work that we can do, and it's what sets the tone and raises the standard for the industry.

James Lawrence: Hmm. , It's waging war, or it's attacking the flaws in the status quo. Right. I

it's exposing the flaws in the category that you are operating in. Whether that's digital marketing, if you rocket, or whether it's. A particular area of the law, if you're a law firm kind of thing. Like what are, what are the flaws in the way that things are currently being done? Exactly.

Alex James: Exactly. , The big problem with so many kind of messaging strategies is that they force you to call out your client's flaws when you should be calling out your categories failings.

James Lawrence: Hmm.

Alex James: And this goes back to, it has failed nonprofits. Like we called out the category failings. We didn't point the finger and put the blame on the people that we're trying to help. It's like a doctor blaming the patient for being sick. That's not a helpful stance to take. It's actually a combative stance.

What we wanna do is actually have a perspective on where the category itself has fallen short, where it has underserved, what it's doing today that only benefits the supplier and not the client, and therefore what it needs to be doing to flip that around.

James Lawrence: Mm-hmm. And , in this era that we all operate within, we're.

The cost and time to create really high quality content on a particular subject matter or area or discipline is just rapidly deteriorating, right? It, we can just create awesome content on, , how to build an SEO plan for 2025, or how to write great copy for, , professional services firms.

We could use a couple of prompts and put together something that's pretty possible pretty quickly. But the things that I think do make you sit up and the . Prevailing sentiment just keeps coming through. . And you go, , that's interesting.

I've never thought of it like that. And if AI is this kind of, um, and not in any critical negative way, , it's average, right? It is this amalgamation of what's already out there and , it is almost the status quo, inherent, right?

And , the ability , to put your perspective on things is something that I'd like to think will permeate through and continue with all the technological change that , we're going through and we'll continue to go through.

Alex James: Absolutely. , I'm very not anti ai, which a lot of people are.

I see a lot of copywriters actually specifically saying, Hey, , it's not good enough. It's not as, I do better than ai. And I want to tell them like, . Have you asked your clients if they care?

James Lawrence: Hmm.

Alex James: I think, uh, you know, good enough , is good enough for a lot of firms, but when it comes to actually standing out with thought leadership content, you're exactly right.

Like all AI can do is remix what already exists. It can't really bring anything new to the table. What we need to remember is that the process that people go through when they say, Hey, we should start developing thought leadership content, is, well, what are the best practices? Let's put down the five tips for writing a landing page.

You go into it and people know how to frame these up and hype it up in, in like amazing ways. 'cause you see it all the time. They're like, I've written 4 million landing pages and here are the five secrets. People won't tell you about what actually converts and what doesn't. And you go into it and it's like, have a hero section,

James Lawrence: have,

Alex James: have social proof, have a call to action, like really, really basic stuff.

And , that will actually get a lot of likes and a lot of engagement and it will look like that's the correct thing to do. But what those likes and shares and comments do not translate into is clients that doesn't translate to bottom line revenue. Because it turns out that people don't really remember tips and tricks.

They'll read it, but they won't assign it to you. What people remember are tipping points.

James Lawrence: Mm.

Alex James: They remember the moment where their belief shifted from one thing to another thing. And if you can be the engineer of those tipping points regularly, , they won't just remember you. They'll appreciate you and they'll wanna work with you and only you.

That actually eliminates all competition out of the picture.

James Lawrence: And , that is at the core of B2B marketing, right? Where we are looking in, even if we are looking in, , the product side as well, and SaaS and ERP and all those things, , it's this long-term form of marketing, which is most of the time, not always, it's gonna be very difficult for you to force demand.

At the time and the timeframes that work for you, but generally what you want is, but when someone is ready to go to market and there's a reason why they can now go to market, you wanna be the one that , we talk about being flipped. Right. Which is they know , you are the one that can solve that problem, , in the most reliable form.

Exactly.

Alex James: Exactly. And this is really what I think is the biggest kind of key difference between SAS and services and how it's very dangerous to get those two categories mixed up just because they're both B2B. Because in the world of services, what you're selling doesn't really exist.

Like you're selling a promise, you're selling the promise of a positive situation.

James Lawrence: Mm-hmm.

Alex James: Which means that , their purchasing mindset shifts , from vetting to betting. Like they're making a bet on you. It's a gamble. Every time somebody buys a service and they don't wanna buy a service, it's a last resort.

They hate it. They'd rather not. They'd rather not have to purchase anything from you purchasing any services from you. It's way uncomfortable. It's way scary. But this is why in the world of professional services, , it's not actually about proficiency, it's about perception. It's perception management, it's reputation management.

, This is all it can be, because they cannot try before they buy. And so when I see people saying, well, you know, just send a whole bunch of cult emails and then , hopefully you'll get a couple of bites or whatever. Like , it's digital door knocking and all it does is commoditize you and say, Hey, I.

Hopefully we're hitting someone at the right place at the right time. We're playing the numbers game, but that doesn't build your authority, it doesn't build your perception in the marketplace. In fact, it only devalues you. It's a very, very short term play that you cannot build a sustainable business on top of.

And so we think we need to be , very conscious of the fact that expertise is recognized, not advertised.

James Lawrence: Hmm. And , the analogy there around and , here are my, all my, I've run a million different campaigns and here's my playbook.

And just put, you know, e-commerce into the comments and I'll send you a copy of it. It is a little bit like the old direct response mail days, where it was always, don't put something on the envelope that runs contradictory to what happens when they open it, and you just have this . Friction where it's like, ah, well you ba and switched me into opening up the envelope or the same as the subject line on an email.

, You might me move it a particular metric that you think will move someone down the path to purchase, but you're actually not doing anything like that. Right. Um, exactly.

Alex James: Yeah. I saw, I saw this comment the other day of somebody talking about how a friend of theirs used , find all the emails for a client that he wanted to work with and just send like an, like a meeting invite to all the staff, because then people thought that it was like an official thing and everyone would show up and then he would pitch at them.

I'm like, great. That's a great way to get a meeting. It's a bad way to sell a surface.

James Lawrence: Yeah.

Alex James: Who's gonna buy that , after you put winked them? What are you talking about? This is not a good approach. We need to be very,

James Lawrence: but if you do it a million times,

Alex James: be Yeah, well, exactly. And then you've got the numbers game, but is that like the smartest way of doing it?

And is that sustainable in the long term? Or are people just seeing you as a pair of hands rather than a brain that they actually want to have access to? Yeah,

James Lawrence: and , we're fortunate enough to have had, you know, a good number of clients who found out about Rocket through the pod in the first instance.

And often it will be the most innocuous turn of phrase or conversation or tidbit with, with sometimes with an external guest, sometimes with a rocket guest. And it'll be, you know, you saying that resonated because previously, we're doing this in house and it took us x amount of time.

To get to that point. And , you've already gotten to that point with your clients, therefore I trust you. And it is just , those prospective clients, they're not out to market. They're not shopping around. They trust us. It's how do we actually put something together that kinda works for both parties?

It's a very interesting dynamic.

Alex James: Yeah. , There's that stat of 5% of the market are actually in market and actively looking at 95%. , I don't think that's actually true for professional services. Like 99 1, probably, probably more 99 1. Yeah. And so everything that we build has to be catered to the people who are not ready to buy and probably even would never be ready to buy or even consider buying.

If they hadn't encountered the podcast, if they hadn't encountered the post, if they hadn't encountered whatever the thought leadership piece was. That's what we need to be building for. , It's not a, it's not a numbers game. You cannot play the numbers game with this thing. You may get a couple of clients, you won't get any leverage.

James Lawrence: Hmm. It's really, it's really interesting. You've got a quote, which is better copywriting won't solve your marketing problems, but better messaging. Will, can we just talk a little bit around the distinction between copy and messaging? I think it's something that I think a lot of marketers would probably conflate , as the same thing.

Alex James: Yeah. . Well, let me give you my favorite, , analogy, , which is to think about the marketing function , as a flower. So we've got like the head of the flower, and that's like the copywriting that's like colorful and it's designed to attract the right attention from the right bees. But the flower isn't growing in a vacuum.

It's in a field of other wild flowers all trying to compete for the same attention from the same bees. And so we need our messaging, which is like the stem to . Help our flower, stand tall, and underneath that we have the roots. That's like our positioning. This is our patch of dirt that we own, that nobody else does.

And so if we look at somebody who I think is the world's leading positioning expert, , which is , one Mr. Donald J. Trump, we can see that this actually really applies. His 2016 campaign was a masterclass in really good positioning, really good messaging, and really good copywriting because what did he do?

, He positioned himself far away from every other candidate. So every candidate in America, right? They're all measured on this liberal to conservative spectrum. But Hillary Clinton, who's more like center left Bernie Sanders more further left. Jeb Bush was more on the right. What Donald Trump did though, was introduce a new metric.

Which was this idea of a political insider versus a political outsider. And suddenly every other candidate was also measured on this. How inside versus outside the tent were they? And this is actually how Bernie Sanders got a lot of steam. 'cause he was considered as like he's more outside the tent. He is not on the inner circle.

And that's a good thing. That's what the people want.

James Lawrence: Mm-hmm.

Alex James: Where Donald Trump positioned himself was maximally outsider and maximally conservative. And this gave him so much leverage with his messaging and his copywriting. So if you look at his positioning, his roots, far right, conservative, extreme outsider, that led to the messaging of something that he could say that others couldn't say, which was that there are too many career politicians in Washington.

Because if you are more inside the tent, you can't say that with credibility. 'cause you either are one or you have to work with them. You don't wanna annoy these people. He could say it. And then that led to the copywriting of Drain the Swamp. That cut through positioning, messaging, copywriting. One more example with him as a far-right conservative, he could say something that even a more moderate conservative could not say, which was that, uh, all southern border immigration needs to stop.

That was the message. And so what was the copywriting? Buildable wall

James Lawrence: was, I, I couldn't tell if the po if the pause was, , a test for me to answer the, to, to answer the

Alex James: question, or it was, but you took too long so I answered it for you

James Lawrence: is the correct answer. Build the wall. Build the

Alex James: wall,

James Lawrence: exactly. And make Mexico pay for it.

Alex James: And make Mexico pay for it. Which is another language trick that he used brilliantly because when you say, , we're gonna build a wall and Mexico's gonna pay for it, the debate became about whether or not Mexico would pay for it. If he had just said, build the wall, then the debate would've been, should we do this or not?

He made it taken for granted that we're building a wall. The debate was who's funding it?

James Lawrence: Mm.

Alex James: Very clever languaging, very clever communication devices and techniques that he uses constantly and they work. Yeah. One last example, positioning was far right, conservative and political outsider. The messaging was something that someone who had been in the political game for too long could not say with credibility, which is we need to recapture our nation's lost glory.

And then that became the master stroke of the entire campaign, which was Make America great again. Make America great again. What's interesting though is that Donald Trump ran in 2000 for president as like an independent, and his two biggest policies were stricter gun control laws and universal healthcare.

He wasn't this extremist that he presented himself as and positioned himself as in 2016, but he learned his lesson from 2000. If you cater to the center, you get no cut through. You have to be polarizing. You have to say things that your competitors are not saying that your customers want to hear.

James Lawrence: And that's, and that's always been the way with marketing, right?

And like great marketing should repel in the same way that it attracts, right? The more repulsive we are to some, the more attractive we become to others. Yeah, it's, it's fascinating. Um, , in terms of niching down, we've probably talked about that more from an agency viewpoint, which has, as you've articulated over the last 10 years, it's kind of been this, we do X for y, , we do UX for E-commerce firms.

We do e-commerce businesses, . And , I don't know if listeners will be as familiar with this, 'cause a lot of this comes very much out of agency land, A lot of it out of North America. , And I think in Australia it's a little bit different. I think in Australia a lot of agencies will be full service.

Maybe, you know, B2B is almost broad enough. , Or you might niche down into certain areas of digital as kind of where your point of difference is. How, um, how do you see that playing out in Australia in areas of professional services? Say like the law, , or. Managed IT services, like where you used to work, , , is there similar trends happening in, in those types of, , areas as well?

Alex James: Yeah, so 100% of my clients are either in the US or in Europe. I don't actually work with Australian clients almost ever. Yeah. 'cause it, it's simply not competitive enough.

They don't actually need me. It's not competitive enough. , If you are visible enough in Australia, then you'll probably be fine. It's more of a distribution challenge than a messaging challenge in Australia. , What we do see is that, . If you're a smaller firm, definitely be niching down.

You may not need a perspective, you can just say, we do X for Y, or even just. We do X, , and we specialize , in Google Maps optimization. Great. There's enough demand for that and there's enough businesses that would benefit from that. You don't really need to niche down. Niching down isn't a requirement.

It's only a necessity if the market is competitive, , if you actually have no other way of standing out. , But if there is enough pent up demand for the kinds of things that you do, , then don't niche down arbitrarily unless you have to. It's actually why I tell my clients, , 'cause sometimes we don't even need to go.

We do X for Y sometimes we do full servicing for only this industry. For only veterinary clinics, that's enough. You only wanna niche down enough , to where it's required. And so in Australia, if you're a smaller firm, you'll find an edge by niching down if you're a log firm. You'll probably niche yourself out of business if you're not careful.

Like by arbitrarily limiting the people who you work with. If there's enough demand and people aren't complaining from different industries and different sectors and different whatever, like, , don't do it, you're fine.

James Lawrence: But surely , , The benefits of perspectives , still play, right?

. 'Cause I, I couldn't agree with you more. Right? And we've, um, over the years, rocket has, you know, you're always looking at what do you do and who do you do it for? And , is your service offering right? For what the market needs at this moment in time? And how do you balance industry expertise with kind of competency across a wide range of services?

And if you go too broad, you , can't do all things for all people rights. You do need to have a territory where you play. But surely Australian law firms or Australian digital marketing agencies will benefit from. A perspective, right? About Yeah. The category they're playing within.

Alex James: Certainly. Yeah.

Absolutely. And I think really , the more competitive your field is, the more of a benefit you'll get from it. The best kind of clients that most firms can work with are people who have been burned by another firm in the past. I actually, have a friend who does have a digital marketing agency in Australia, and he only works with people who have been burned by digital marketing agencies before.

And there's no shortage of that, right? , Because then they see the value in what he does and what his team does. And that's actually what gives you the raw material to craft a perspective on here is how things are typically done, and here is how things should be done. You can get people to more easily agree with that once they've experienced it, once they've experienced the typical status quo approach firsthand, and they're looking for something new.

So, yeah. It comes down to your market, how competitive it is, and have people purchased from you before and been dissatisfied in some way, shape, or form. That's when a perspective can really, really shine. If they're brand new to the field, if the, if this was the first kind of entry point into your category, then you can try and educate with a perspective, but it won't resonate quite as deeply

James Lawrence: uh, yeah, because the perspective is kind of the inside, isn't it?

, The perspective resonating means that it has to resonate inside the mind of the prospect, right. It has, it has to align with a challenge or a problem or , a reality that they feel does exist at that moment in time. Exactly

Alex James: like positioning.

Really, when you boil it down, it is just owning an idea in the prospect's mind and a perspective is, which is getting more specific on what that idea should be, which is here's how things are typically done. Versus here's how things should be done.

James Lawrence: Hmm. It's fascinating.

. You've got a, I think it's the strap line , of your website and you always come back to this. I see it a lot on LinkedIn, which your perspective is your product. If you could just talk a little bit about that. I think , it's a great line.

Alex James: Yeah.

Your perspective is your product. I just find this to be more and more true over time. Uh, my favorite example of this is Refine Labs who are like a B2B performance marketing agency in the states. They work with mid, mid-market and enterprise SaaS companies. They started in 2019. They went from $0 to 21 million a RR in three years, which is just.

They definitely caught the wave of the digital transformation time. But even still, that is an amazing result for a service firm, which typically has to have like really careful margins.

And they did it because the CEO at the time, Chris Walker was very active on LinkedIn, but he wasn't just sharing best practices. He was saying, Hey, here is the typical customer acquisition model for B2B SaaS. Here is why it's broken. We're putting all this stuff out there. Here's an ebook. We're gonna get gate it behind a, an email form, putting your email.

Then we're gonna spam you with a nurture email sequence and we're gonna throw an army of salespeople at you, SDRs, BDRs. And then hopefully enough of those people will buy. And if you bear out the data,, the conversion rate of that, like as actual close one is 0.5%. It's a very inefficient, very costly process and even if you do get the client across the amount of money it took to actually get them acquired, you're looking at a payback period of four or five, six years.

Sometimes , it's just broken. He really spotlighted that and he said, here is the new way forward, and he presented a new model of what it should be, and if you follow this, stop just trying to get anyone into the funnel, optimize for high intent leads only, and if you do that in the right way, it's not a 0.5% conversion rate, it's a 8% conversion rate.

He was able to go out there with this perspective, here's how things are typically done versus here's how things. Should be done and make a really, really compelling argument for it. He wasn't storytelling. This is what I always come back to. We're not trying to tell stories. We're not sitting around a campfire swapping tails with each other.

We're more like a lawyer in a courtroom making a case to a very, very skeptical jury. We need to understand that. We need to respect it and we need to pick our words very, very carefully. And it has to be the logic based, not emotion based in this B2B area.

James Lawrence: And I think it's so we talk about it all the time with our clients, which is the, generally speaking, the person on the other side, the person reading this content, whatever it might be, they're smart, they get it, they understand the space.

, If there's one word that jars it will dismantle the credibility of the entire piece. And this is not. A space where it's about volume and punching out blogs for the sake of punching out your four blog articles a month and your four edms and your 12 social posts and whatever else.

You're so much better off doing nothing than putting something out there that hasn't been vetted or hasn't been written or, , isn't understood by someone who actually understands the space. Right. You have to understand the market. Then you also have to understand, , the service, , that you are offering.

Right. It's

Alex James: exactly, exactly. And actually just, it goes back to, to the refine labs piece as well, because everything that he was doing was like, he was posting , maybe once or twice a week, but it was like quality stuff. It wasn't just posting for the sake of it. And at the peak, he said this on a podcast, he said that, .

They were closing 40 KA month contracts with one phone call. Mm. And that slapped me in the brain because I was like, wow, , the client didn't really know what they were buying then. They didn't know the nitty gritty details of the engagement and how it would be structured and what the flows would be, and all the, they were just so bought into the perspective behind it that is what they were buying.

And so when I say your perspective is your product, I mean it literally, that is what they are buying. That is what differentiates you. It's the only thing that differentiates you because everybody else is offering the same services and making the same promises. It's your perspective that you've folded into it and built into the DNA of it.

That is what people are actually buying. They need to be bought into your perspective before they will buy your service. And so this is why it's really, really important that we are very selective with what we publish. We need to make sure that we are perspective first in everything that we publish. I post on LinkedIn at most once a week because I understand that it's not about what happens on the day that I post it.

It's about building out , the Netflix back catalog, that the right person at the right time can rabbit hole down, go through and become essentially indoctrinated on my philosophy, on my ideology, on my perspective about perspectives. Yeah. And then they will reach out to me after that

James Lawrence: because I think this space is so inherently difficult to build measurement plans around.

There is so many marketing teams and so many agency side professionals will default to the metrics, which we do understand. Right. And . These are organic channels, you should put as much content as you possibly can because if you pump out 20 articles a month, you know, three of them will get this kind of traction.

But it, it comes back to the whole downloading , the white paper of the hacks for the e-commerce email marketing campaign or whatever it might be. These metrics might look good, but whether or not they actually shift someone to wanting to procure your services, , in a month's time or three months time, whatever it might be, it's very, very different, isn't it?

Alex James: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, , the problem is that it is more art than science a lot of the time, and art is really hard to measure. Like it's risky. It's like making a movie. They don't know if it's gonna be a box office success or a flop. You have to take the risk and you won't know until , if that risk pays off until way, way, way down the line.

So the way that if I was in charge , of every marketing department in the world, it would simply be, Hey, let's look at it from a three month perspective. Did we win more work than the previous quarter? And that's the only metric that matters. And then you do everything and everything that you can to make sure that number goes up.

It's not about the on the post engagement rates. That doesn't matter. It's about does this translate , into new business?

James Lawrence: Yeah, it's good perspective. Um, Alex, it's been awesome talking to you today. I'm gonna, uh, finish the pod with a rapid fire round, which I've been introducing recently. Let's, uh, let's see how we go.

What's one marketing trend that you wish would disappear forever?

Alex James: Uh, , there was a Boston Consulting Group, , report that came out. Recently, uh, saying the funnel is dead and it's, they've, they've just joined the choir of cold takes. I'm so sick of people saying that the funnel is dead. It's a misunderstanding of what the funnel is.

It was never meant to accurately map the buyer journey. It's simply a guide to help businesses create marketing material at the right level of specificity. Stop pretending it's a, a buyer journey mapping tool when it's just actually for businesses to help them understand what they should be doing and what they shouldn't be doing , and how much detail they should be going into with their marketing material.

You can't force people down a path. Everyone knows that you spend two seconds in marketing and you know that you can't force anyone down a path. All you can do is have the right information for them at the right time when they are ready to walk down it. And so that's what the purpose of a marketing funnel is.

Let's just keep that in mind.

James Lawrence: Love that, uh, biggest messaging mistake even smart service firms make.

Alex James: Biggest messaging at stake, even smart services service firms make is confusing. Retention features and attraction features. Retention features are the things that keep them coming back. Attraction features are the ones that get them in the door in the first place.

Every time you see a firm say, oh, , we've got expertise, or We've got great customer service, or, we're very responsive. Lovely. I'm sure that's true. It doesn't bring people in because they can't know whether or not that is true and whether or not that's valuable until after they've already purchased from you and experienced it firsthand.

What you need to be doing with your messaging is not talking about retention features, but talking about attraction features. It's not, we are very good at supporting websites. It's, we will build your website in three days, not three weeks.

James Lawrence: Love it. What's a book podcast or creator that's heavily influenced your thinking lately?

Alex James: Book

James Lawrence: podcast. You're gonna struggle to keep this to one. I know.

Alex James: I'm just gonna go with the og. , He's my Paul McCartney. , It's Blair Enz. He changed my life. The Win Without Pitching Manifesto is a book that I've read maybe 10 times now. , If it weren't for him, I wouldn't be where I am.

So big ups to Mr. Endz.

James Lawrence: I'm

Alex James: gonna

James Lawrence: get Blair on the pot. I think shortly. If there's been talk internally, we've, uh, we used to do some work with Blair. He is a, he's a legend. , What's your one piece of marketing advice? This is the last question for an in-house marketer, one best piece. It can be career, it can relate to messaging, it can be anything.

Alex James: If you're an in-house marketer, think of yourself as a consultant, not an employee.

James Lawrence: Love it. . Alex, thanks so much for coming onto the pod.

Alex James: Thank you so much for having me. This was, , so much fun.