Do what you enjoy - not what's best

👉 marketing heresy

It’s marketing 101 that “you are not your customer” and you need to do the marketing that works best for them, not what would work best for you, or that you happen to enjoy doing.

In fact, I suspect that marketing agencies and big companies doing marketing they enjoyed, they thought was clever or creative has resulted in some of the biggest wastes of advertising budgets in history.

But you are not a marketing agency or a big company.

You don’t have teams of people you’re paying to get the best from your marketing.

You’ve got to do it yourself.

Along with all the other stuff you’re doing like client work or running the business.

Perhaps an even more fundamental rule of marketing is that…

Half-decent marketing that gets done is infinitely better than brilliant marketing that doesn’t. (Source: me, just now)

And the truth is that if you don’t enjoy the marketing you’re doing (or at least not hate it) you won’t stick to it.

It’s especially true of email marketing or writing a newsletter where results come from consistency over time not one big splash.

You could probably force yourself to write a giant article or sales page as a one-off if you didn’t enjoy it. But if you have to do something you don’t enjoy week in, week out it’s almost impossible when you’re running a business.

Other priorities will just take over. You’ll constantly push that painful task back.

And while productivity gurus may say clever things about swallowing frogs and the “hustle and grind” crowd might scoff at your lack of grit - normal folks like you and me just stop doing things we find painful.

And in practice, it’s almost always possible to find an intersection between marketing you enjoy and marketing that works for enough of your prospective clients.

Take newsletters for example.

Maybe you’re the kind of person who enjoys scouring the web and keeping up with the latest news and ideas in your field. If so, summarising the resources you find and linking to them would make a decent newsletter.

Would all your potential clients find that useful? Of course not.

But if you’re a small business, would enough of them find it useful to build a lucrative audience for you? Absolutely.

Same goes if you like doing in-depth analysis. Would there be enough people in your potential client base who would value an in-depth treatment of a topic that’s important to them? Of course there would.

If - like me - you enjoy telling personal stories and anecdotes, are there enough people who would get value from them? I’ve certainly found that’s the case.

You get the point:

• When you’re a small or solo business the bottleneck in your marketing is usually you. So finding something you can do and will do consistently is crucial.

• There are enough different ways to do marketing and enough variety in the preferences of clients that you will almost always be able to find something you can do and will do that also works well with a subset of your client base.

• That subset of clients is almost always big enough to give you a very successful business.

Of course, if you want to run a bigger business you’ll often need to move outside that client subset. And you’ll certainly need to remove yourself as the bottleneck.

That means bringing on board a marketing team or hiring a marketing firm. And they’ll absolutely need to focus on marketing that works for your clients rather than what they prefer doing.

But right now, when you’re small and consistency is the key - focus on what you can and will do. And that means marketing you enjoy.

Agree? Disagree? Hit me up in the comments.