The game of wasting money
Knowing ourselves—what we like, what we’re best at, what we value above everything else—is what makes us different.
focus
100 posts
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:
What does “strategy” mean?
What does “strategy” even mean? What’s your definition? Do you see it as just a “synonym for expensive,” as one economist called it?
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 to get better marketing advice
It’s hard to see our own business objectively. It’s hard because we’re so close to it. We can’t see much of ourselves without a mirror, and we can’t always see our own business from the inside, either.
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.
You have to get it done
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that, if you want to get a lot of things done quickly, you have to slow down. It feels counterintuitive. We can easily think that, in order to achieve a lot, we must do a lot—and fast.
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?
People don’t eat in the long run
The long-term benefits of focusing on a clear, reinforceable position are obvious: We get to do work we love, that we’re the best at, for clients who appreciate our value and are happy to pay profitable prices for it.
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.
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