I used to think the secret to getting what I wanted was to have an ambitious goal, to state it publicly, and to exert as much effort as I could in that direction, as fast as I could. But I was wrong. That doesn’t actually work.
For anyone who struggles with coming up with topics for their content marketing, I can relate.
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.
The business world often tells us to be aggressive. We’re told to project strength and hide weakness. But if there’s one thing that’s clear from my study of high-stakes decision making, strategy, and conflict it’s this: aggression is weakness, and calmness is strength.
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.”
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.
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.
Knowing ourselves—what we like, what we’re best at, what we value above everything else—is what makes us different.
“The bold move is the right move, except when it’s the wrong move.”
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” even mean? What’s your definition? Do you see it as just a “synonym for expensive,” as one economist called it?
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.
