Framework: Marketing Rangefinder
It helps you look for the answers to: Where are my customers, and how do I reach them?
It helps you look for the answers to: Where are my customers, and how do I reach them?
People tend to do things they like, and they tend not to do things they don’t like.
Strategy is simply the structure to work efficiently to get what you want.
That’s the only hard question.
Marketing cannot save a company, nor can it make one.
You know the expression: “All roads lead to Rome.” There are lots of ways to get to the same place. It applies to marketing. There are a lot of ways to do marketing, and an awful lot of them will work.
If you ask anyone how to create a successful business, there’s a good chance they’ll say: “Talk to customers.” And, they’re right. But, if you don’t know what your best customers actually value most about you, you’re likely to optimize for the wrong things.
Darwin said that he “followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once.”
In 1916, the Saturday Evening Post published “Obvious Adams: The Story of a Successful Business Man” by Robert Updegraff. In the story, the titular Adams becomes a sought-after consultant to business leaders who know they've been blinded by their own narrow perspective.
Today’s newsletter is, hopefully, applicable to everyone, but it’s specifically focused on small business owners and consultants. No one else—no agency, partner, or consultant—can care more about your dream, your business, or your marketing than you do.
Everything is overwhelming. Writing the copy for your new website. Your social media marketing. Your latent guilt over not yet joining TikTok, and your growing worry that everyone else is moving faster than you are.
A lot of business owners are putting off working on their marketing strategy. They’re waiting for things to settle down, for the market to become more stable, or to simply have more certainty about the way things are going to go. But the problem is that they’re likely to be waiting forever.