What is a magazine of you, and how can you publish one? With Matthew Stibbe.

Getting noticed nowadays is not that easy - you need to be different and be an expert on that 'different' niche you chose. In this episode, Matthew Stibbe, CEO of Articulate Marketing, explains why you need to be zigging while everyone zags - in short, be different, and have sites some examples, good and bad, that businesses and entrepreneurs make in positioning themselves.

Matthew also shares why aside from being different, you need to connect emotionally with your prospect and existing customers to they choose you and your services, how their concept, Magazine of You, could help entrepreneurs #getnoticed, and why you shouldn't be looking at the man in the mirror but rather look outside the window to appeal to more clients. He also shares a bit about his gaming company called Intelligent Gaming, and, lastly, he shares how he gets himself and Articulate Marketing #getnoticed.

Post-production, transcript and show notes by XCD Virtual Assistants

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Transcript

Jim James: 0:00

Hello, and welcome to this episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur. Today, we are staying in London and we are going to meet Matthew Stibbe, who is the founder and CEO of a company called "Articulate Marketing". Matthew, welcome to the show.

Matthew Stibbe: 0:13

Hello. Hello, Jim. Nice to be here. And, thank you for having me.

Jim James: 0:16

Well, thank you because you've got a career as an entrepreneur, you build a big gaming company, and now you've got a marketing consultancy, and you've been an author. So tell us, from your experience, how should entrepreneurs get noticed?

Matthew Stibbe: 0:30

Well, I think it starts by doing something interesting and different. What I would advise everybody to do if they want to be noticed is avoid being a round pebble. So if you are trying to be inoffensive and not alienate anyone and not say anything uncontroversial, uninteresting, for fear that you might lose a potential customer here, or you might irritate somebody over there - that's a very bad place to be. In the words of a former editor of mine, when I used to write for Wild Magazine, she said, "Matthew, if you want to write about everything for everybody, you're going to be a really lousy writer and you'll be competing with thousands of wannabe freelance journalists who want to write for what. Pick a thing you want to write about and be really good at that." And in my naivete arrogance, I thought it would be great to write about business jets. So, I spent several years flying in the back, and sometimes in the front, of some very fabulous jets. And sure enough, there aren't a lot of people who review business jets, and it was quite a nice gig for a while.

Jim James: 1:28

Well, it sounds like a really great niche to pick, to be honest.

Matthew Stibbe: 1:31

Don't be a rounded pebble, right?

Jim James: 1:32

Yeah, business jets sounds like a really great niche. You weren't a niche writer on cat or dog food, that would seem to be the other end of the spectrum. But you run a company called Articulate Marketing and you work with a lot of big companies. Can you give us some ideas of positioning, good and bad, that you've seen entrepreneurs and businesses make?

Matthew Stibbe: 1:53

Well, sure. The perennial problem amongst big tech companies, and I've worked with a few of them over the years, and I'm not picking any of these out by name but you've seen them out there - they tend to talk about the technology. So, we would say speeds and feeds, you know, we've got this many gigahertz and this many, you know, megabits and this many megapixels. And, it tends to be very insular. It's like, they're looking at their competitors, and they're doing tables of features, and they're working all of this out in order to differentiate we need a little bit more of this and a little bit more of that for slightly less money. So in the moment you step back from that, and you start addressing and understanding your customers, your audience, perhaps, is a better way of putting it, and their validated needs, and their attitudes, and their beliefs, and you talk to them, you can move towards a position of differentiation like Steve Jobs achieved for Apple, where he didn't put, such Dell, HP, 9742 XP. It's got more megabytes than those guys. He just had a picture of Miles Davis' "Think Different", right? And he was appealing it to deeply understanding his audience, which were creative, often solo-preneurs, people had an eye for design, and that was enough of an audience, enough of a customer base for them to sell Apple computers and to turn that business around. Because remember, when he took over, the business was, you know, practically going to go bust. So that's a one way of positioning, right? To really get in touch with your audience and to find some emotional hook. There's a really interesting video by Sonya Marciano about enterprises and differentiation and branding, and she uses the example of Subaru. So in America, Subaru has this tremendous reputation for safety, and so people are buying it for various reasons. And they understand their audience and they understand who is buying it. And in Europe I drive a Volvo. Why I'm interested in a safe comfortable car? But safety is an important factor. So they found a thing that they can differentiate, they can tell a story around, but it's a story they're telling you something that appeals to you emotionally, and it's substantiated with the intellectual, with the data, with the evidence. It's not our Volvos have this steel and it's like it's a safer car. So, I think finding a way to emotionally connect with an audience is really important. And I sometimes use the analogy most IT companies are selling cold dead fish, and Apple is selling sushi.

Jim James: 4:21

Right. That is a wonderful analogy. Now, when you think about how popular Apple is and how successful it is as a brand, you know, world's, I think, most valuable brand trades with maybe one or two petrol companies at the moment. Why is it though, Matthew, that everybody doesn't do this? Because it's not as though Apple has a new secret or Tesla. Why is it that so many companies, big and small, fail to find that emotional hook?

Matthew Stibbe: 4:47

Well, of course, Apple have been able to parlay that initial success into technological differentiation and product differentiation, and lightness and thinness, and process of power and other things. So, you know, it's hard to say to a small business audience, "Be more like Apple", because, you know, what experience do we have of running a trillion dollar company? But other things that you can do at that early stage of, you know, you haven't got the resources of a multinational, you can invest in the tone of voice. So if you look at Virgin Airlines, right? All airlines basically are functioning the same - you sit in a seat, you go from one place to another, you go from an airport, maybe the food's slightly better, there's slightly more choice of videos, you get an ice cream, certainly in the back of the plane, there's almost no differentiation. So what does that Virgin do? They have this incredibly cheeky, rather sexy saucy sort of British seaside humour. And that sort of helps them differentiate. And I think that can be something that's accessible to any business. And in fact, from that, you can build a website that has this potentially shiny copy. You don't have to be cheeky. You can be very serious if the rest of your competitors are rather frivolous, you can be serious. If everyone's zigging, you need to just zag. And if you've got everyone has a website that's got pictures of, you know, skyscrapers, you need a picture of something else on your website. So you need to find a way that just sound look different. And maybe, some people, you might need a little bit of help with that. You need to go and find an agency or an expert to help with the naming, help with the positioning, help with the visualisation, but it doesn't have to cost mega bucks and you don't need to be a multinational to do those things.

Jim James: 6:24

Right, and really just to, perhaps, unleash your creativity. And you have a concept, Matthew, called the "Magazine of You". And I know you've got a background as an editor and a journalist, but the Magazine of You is that something that you think every entrepreneur or company could have?

Matthew Stibbe: 6:40

I think it's possible, right? Years ago, I remember seeing a standup comedian talking about her craft, her art of standup comedy. And she said, "As a comedian, your obvious is your truth, your obvious is your talent." The thing that you know because you are an expert in your business, you're an expert in your field. Whether it's installing swimming pools or sorting out IT problems or, you know, going to Mars, right? So what you need to do is to think about the thing that you know your obvious, and find a way to translate that, make that relevant, useful, and interesting to people who might buy your product. So you need to understand a little bit about them, and their needs, and their pain points and what, you know, keeps them awake at night, and what they're excited about, and what they think is interesting, and what they don't think is interesting. So what you know on the one hand, what your audience is interested in on the other, and then the Magazine of You is about how you communicate that and how you build that bridge. And for me, historically, that's been writing blog posts, because as you say, I'm a writer I think by typing. But it can be a podcast, it can be your Twitter stream if you're into that, it can be your Instagram stream if you like photography. The Magazine of You is for your customers. It's about them and things they're interested in, but you are the originator of it. You are the author of it. And here's the business secret behind the Magazine of You - if you can build the Magazine of You, instead of renting advertising space in other people's magazines, literally, if you buy advertising, or metaphorically, if you're putting at paid adverts on Google or buying your way into somebody's Facebook stream, right? People will come to you because you've got something interesting to say. People will subscribe to your podcast, blog post, Twitter stream, LinkedIn messages - whatever the medium is. And then it's all you all the time and you're not having to pay anybody for that, right? They're coming to you because you're saying something interesting. So, the Magazine of You, it has an advertising purpose, but it's to advertise you, and it's to introduce you and your thoughts and your ideas, in the right context to the right people.

Jim James: 8:48

And Matthew, one of the common elements of entrepreneurs is they're often busy fixing many problems, and they're not all starting as if you're like creators from a content perspective, which the Magazine of You, as the way you've described, kind of implies that they might need to be good and feel self-confident about how they write, how they sound, how they look. What's the work around for the entrepreneur who may be a little bit shy or isn't so confident about the way that they sound? Because not everyone feels confident that way. So how can they do that?

Matthew Stibbe: 9:20

It's a really interesting thing. Obviously, I feel very comfortable writing. So writing is my medium. But I've heard from people, "Oh, you know, I'm nervous about public speaking so I don't want to do a webinar." But when I talk to them one-to-one, they're confident, they're fluent, they're experts, they're well informed. So what's different? What's changed? It's the perception that they're being scrutinised and judged. The risk that they think they're going to alienate somebody or say something stupid or whatever, or be revealed perhaps for not being as expert as they see themselves. But the moment you say to yourself,"I'm doing it for the audience. I'm trying to share something, and I'm willing to take a little bit of a risk. I'm willing to be a little bit humble about it. I'm willing to be a bit vulnerable." Right? The stakes can be lowered. And one of the things we do when we do webinars for our clients is we say, "You know, yeah, okay. Maybe people are coming and maybe they aren't, but I'm going to be on the other end of this, I'm going to be recording. You just talk to me, right? Like we did in the rehearsal, like we did if I was a client in a coffee shop or in a meeting room, you'd be incredibly confident because you're an expert at what you do. Just tell me that stuff and suddenly they feel completely fine about it." So I think if people can find a way of, sort of, end running around their own neurosis and anxieties. And if they can find a medium where they can feel comfortable and, you know, maybe a bit derisked, and they get over the fear of saying something that might be dangerous alienating, because, basically, when you start, you've got an audience of nuns, so who are you offending anybody. And lastly, I think, the critical thing I think here is, time is often a factor and the antidote to time and the pressure of time and the stress of it is to create a habit. So if you blog every day, if you are going to do, you know, a LinkedIn thing every day, if you're going to do a Twitter thing every day. But frequency commit to it, make it a real part of your routine. And I remember when I started blogging back in 2000 and whenever, you know, I used to get up early in the morning and the first thing I did every day was write my blog post for the day. I used to write a blog post every day for like week in, week out. And that's how that blog launched and became successful for me. Nowadays, maybe I'd be doing podcasting. There's a medium for everybody now.

Jim James: 11:37

Yeah, and I think that's a really great point - there is a medium for everyone. And also that these are skills that can be learnt, and our confidence that can be built, that actually no one was just born into doing this. Everyone has had to learn it as a skills we would with many other things as an entrepreneur. Matthew, you've been an entrepreneur, you had a gaming company. Do you want to just tell us a little bit about the gaming company and also how you got that company noticed? Because that's often as is interesting as the way that you give consulting now to clients.

Matthew Stibbe: 12:07

How did I get started at Intelligent Games?

Jim James: 12:10

And how did you get Intelligent Games noticed that you built it to 70 people?

Matthew Stibbe: 12:14

Get noticed. Yeah. Oh, going back in time for me. You know, somebody once asked me, "Have you been an entrepreneur your whole life?" And I said, "Not yet." So how did I get Intelligent Games noticed? When I've started it in the kitchen of my flat, the first place I lived in on my own when I left university. Well, I had done a couple of games when I was at university, but Intelligent Games as a proper business. And I hired a designer, and he used to come and work in the sitting room. So he would be designing things and I'd be writing things in my study, and we'd be working in. So, how did I get it noticed? At that time, printers meant a dot matrix printer, you know, you, and it went and it did little black and white things and it looked really crappy. And Canon came out with a thing called a CLC 10, and it was the first inkjet printer you could buy, and it had a scanner on top and a color inkjet. And you had to have this very shiny paper, and you had to go and lease it from Canon. It was thousands of pounds and it was the size of a fridge. Well, I went and got one. I leased one of these things. And I was able to use that with Richard's help doing the design and me writing the things, and I edited and, oh, I designed the Oxford University magazine for a couple of terms when I was at university. So I knew how to use desktop publishing. So I was able to use desktop publishing, plus a colour printer, plus the amazing artwork of Richard Evans, and we produced game proposals that we then sent to publishers to say, you know, "Hey Maxus, we want to do SIM rainforest." which eventually became Simile, and we proposed another game for a naval war game, and we proposed another game about Wall Street. And anyway, these proposals went out, and it was just me, Richard, and our CLC 10. And the interesting thing there was, as a geek, I've always had that story in mind because there's always the next TLC 10, for some people it might be podcasting, right? That probably is now mainstream, but there's another thing, another technology solution that if you've find it and adopt it, and you're an early user of that, and it allows you to be different from everybody else that can be incredibly powerful. And back when I started Bad Language, which is now the Articulate Marketing blog, blogs were quite uncommon, and blogging was the next CLC 10 for me.

Jim James: 14:28

Well, that's really fantastic, though. I love that idea that you can take a new technology and use that in itself to differentiate your business even if the business itself is not differentiated. And you talked, also, Matthew, earlier on about, you know, companies not doing that because of them building businesses and brands for the man in the mirror. Matthew, explain what you mean by that little phrase.

Matthew Stibbe: 14:49

Well, the man, or should we say, the person in the mirror, tends to be the reflection or the mental thought process that I have acquired all this expertise. For example, in the world of Articulate Marketing, I have started a technology business and our clients are running these businesses with 20, 30, 50, 500 people, and the thing that helped them succeed was their mastery of some particular piece of technology, right? They were experts in Microsoft SharePoint adoption, or they were experts in data manipulation, data engineering, or whatever it was that got them there. So they get up in the morning and they think that person, you, out there, the customer, probably thinks the same way I do, right? And you are interested in the things I'm interested in. And the things that got me to where I am in my career, probably are the things that are motivating you. And therefore, if I talk about the stuff that I know about in my language, and prepackage my products and services in my language, because you are like me, you will automatically understand and want them, right? But in reality, most people have their own thing they have to do. They've got their own problems. They're the expert in their own business or their own part of the operations of the company they work for. And they're not really spending a lot of time thinking about the thing you sell, all your products, all your services, all your competitors. You know, for example, if you need an IT support company, maybe once every three or four years, you might go out to tend and you might spend a couple of days as an owner manager, thinking about IT support, right? It is not like the main thing in your life. And so you want an IT support company, or you want an, you know, computer manufacturer, or a car company, to talk to you about your issues in your language when you are ready for it. Understand me as a customer, don't tell me about you. And that way, you can start the conversation and earn the trust and get in into a relationship with a customer by talking about their issues in their language. And when they're ready, you can start saying, "Well, of course, this is what we can do for you. And this is how we can help. And this is why you can trust us." But you've earned the trust, you've earned the engagement, long before that conversation before you get to talk about your products and services. I divorced about nine, 10 years ago and I was back on the dating scene rather unexpectedly. And I realised very quickly that if you go out on a date and you just talk about yourself all evening, the person you're with gets very bored very quickly, and doesn't think you are that interesting, or clever, or worth seeing again. If you sit back and you ask them very nice questions and you learn more about them and what's going on in their world, they think you are fascinating at that point. So it's the same relationship, right? Talk to them about their issues in their language. And that's the antidote to the person or the man in the mirror problem, I think.

Jim James: 17:35

Yeah, that's wonderful. I'd say more look through the window, rather looking in the mirror. And Matthew, what about yourself?

Matthew Stibbe: 17:41

Good analogy. I like that. I'm going to steal that.

Jim James: 17:43

Well, you know, you just give me that inspiration there, Matthew. What about for yourself? Finally, Articulate Marketing - how are you getting that business noticed?

Matthew Stibbe: 17:52

Well, we're lucky because we have almost 20 years of blogging that has given us a very attractive SEO profile and back link profile. So we get found a lot on Google for, you know, questions like, "How do I improve my organic traffic?" Or "Should I hire a marketing agency or a marketing person?" These sorts of traffic and con contact-generating blog posts. Increasingly we're working in partnership with our clients and our vendors. So we're doing quite a lot of work with HubSpot at the moment, and they're working with them and supporting them, also helps them support us and find us customers. When I started our Articulate, I did quite a lot of live events. Microsoft used to let me use their meeting room in Central London. And I used to host a writing breakfast- how to write about your business? How to do blogging? And some of my earliest customers came from those very small, very simple events. And I think we should start that again now that the COVID restrictions are evaporating. I think, though, we also do quite a lot of things like this, you know, guesting on podcasts and trying to get the word out a little bit, that's becoming a big thing. More LinkedIn eengagements and, quotes, thought leadership. And I write my own blog now. My old writing blog sort of got folded into the Articulate Marketing blog. So I now blog at geekboss.com and I'm writing about management and leadership, and a little bit of marketing, a little bit of aviation, and a little bit of Lego.

Jim James: 19:15

Matthew Stibbe, thank you so much for joining me in. In terms of a final place people can come to see you. Is that that blog you just mentioned?

Matthew Stibbe: 19:22

I'd love it if anyone wanted to look at geekboss.com. If you wanted to find Articulate Marketing, we are at articulatemarketing.com. If you would like to talk to me, I'd love to hear from you, articulatemarketing.com/meet M-E- E-T. That's my online calendar. You can book up a time. We have a chat. Come on over, I'll put the kettle on.

Jim James: 19:40

Well, that's a fantastic offer. Matthew Stibbe, thank you for sharing so much wisdom with me and my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs today. Thank you so much for joining me.

Matthew Stibbe: 19:49

Its been my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Jim James: 19:51

It's been fantastic. So you've been listening to Matthew Stibbe, and of course, as always, I will put all of my guest's contact details in the show notes. Thank you for joining me, Jim James, on this episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur.