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:
customers
100 posts
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.”
The opposite of honesty
Isn’t it often true that when someone—whether a government official or a friend—is too eager to tell us what should have been assumed, we doubt them?
Never a settled product
Our immediate measure of the quality of our marketing is whether we are enjoying the process or not. We need to enjoy it, which means we need to feel confident in what we’re doing, embrace joy and celebrate our achievements, and set a measured, sustainable pace.
That which you actually do
Eleanor Roosevelt once said that “action creates its own courage.” Moving forward makes continuing on easier. Taking action builds confidence, and getting what we want is its own motivation.
What we can and cannot do
People reportedly spend about an hour every week just deciding what to watch on Netflix. And more than two hours every week deciding what to eat. And that was before the pandemic.
Getting unstuck in the middle
This is the first in a short series on moving your service business up-market through marketing strategy. If the Ever Given container ship fiasco taught us anything, it’s that getting stuck is a lot easier than getting unstuck.
Genius is the art of taking pains
Knowing what to say in our marketing is one of the most frustrating challenges business owners and marketers like you and I face every day.
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