But what should you DO?
What are you actually supposed to do to get the clients you really want?
customers
100 posts
You’re writing it, not reading it
“I can’t write about that, everyone in my industry already knows it.” A friend recently said that to me. They were worried that the marketing content they were working on was too rudimentary, too basic to be impressive. Have you ever worried about that?
What is there to meet about?
Frequent marketing meetings are often a sign of marketing struggles. Of course, when marketing is struggling, we tend to meet about it. But the meeting itself is part of the problem, or at least a symptom of a greater one.
Getting better at the wrong things
The astronaut Chris Hadfield once provided perhaps the most important lesson in all of business, life, and marketing: “No matter how bad a situation is,” he wrote, “you can always make it worse.”
Whose side are you on?
A recent spam message offered me the opportunity to get “10–15 appointments every week” for my business, as if more meetings is the secret to success. These cold emails, messages, or calls are unwelcome because they’re not interested in me.
Flailing for attention
The job of a marketer is not to make marketing assets, or to implement tactics. Or to just get attention. The job is to get customers. Nobody cares about our ads, our social media posts, our videos, or even our newsletters. They care about their own problems, their own lives, their own jobs.
Will your marketing work?
Your marketing position is a core part of the structure of your strategy, and of your business. In short, it’s the answer to these five questions:
How to not fit in
The hardest part about creating a marketing position that’s right for your ideal customers is that it’s necessarily wrong for your non-ideal customers.
How do you suppose customers choose?
A large part of my day-to-day work is applying marketing strategy to help people make a successful transition into consulting. And some of the most common struggles I help them work through are variations on, “My industry is so price-sensitive.”
The more you address, the fewer you attract
I don’t know about you, but for me, August has always been the month that made me suddenly aware that the year is going to end at some point.
Pick something you actually believe in
Business owners usually want to know how to judge their market position before they make public moves to reinforce it. Beyond confirming it is within your current capabilities and that it has a credible opposite, how can you tell if you’ve come up with a good position?
The most wasteful thing in marketing
When I talk to the owners of service businesses, I often encounter the same struggle. Phrases like, “I just need to get the meeting,” or “I can make the sale, I just need some more leads or opportunities,” or, “If I can just get some face-to-face time with the executive, I can close the deal.”
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