Your marketing won’t work
Your marketing isn’t going to work. At least, not at first. It’s something I call “The Principle of Expected Failure”.
strategy
100 posts
You’re not being paid to suffer
A lot of us were raised to believe that, if we’re having fun or doing something we find easy, we’re not really working. And that feeling can stick with us even as business owners, consultants, or creators.
How I’ll get what I want this year
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.
Start as close to the end as possible
For anyone who struggles with coming up with topics for their content marketing, I can relate.
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.
Holding on by the eyelids
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.
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.
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.
The noise before defeat
“The bold move is the right move, except when it’s the wrong move.”
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:
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