Itâs marketing 101 that âyou are not your customerâ 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 donât have teams of people youâre paying to get the best from your marketing.
Youâve got to do it yourself.
Along with all the other stuff youâre doing like client work or running the business.
Perhaps an even more fundamental rule of marketing is thatâŠ
Half-decent marketing that gets done is infinitely better than brilliant marketing that doesnât. (Source: me, just now)
And the truth is that if you donât enjoy the marketing youâre doing (or at least not hate it) you wonât stick to it.
Itâs 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 didnât enjoy it. But if you have to do something you donât enjoy week in, week out itâs almost impossible when youâre running a business.
Other priorities will just take over. Youâll constantly push that painful task back.
And while productivity gurus may say clever things about swallowing frogs and the âhustle and grindâ crowd might scoff at your lack of grit - normal folks like you and me just stop doing things we find painful.
And in practice, itâs 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 youâre 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 youâre 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 thatâs 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? Iâve certainly found thatâs the case.
You get the point:
When youâre 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 youâll often need to move outside that client subset. And youâll certainly need to remove yourself as the bottleneck.
That means bringing on board a marketing team or hiring a marketing firm. And theyâll absolutely need to focus on marketing that works for your clients rather than what they prefer doing.
But right now, when youâre 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.
Excellent email and good points Ian - thank you. I suppose that sometimes the battle is about "what you think you should be doing" (or "what's the best thing to do") vs "what you're best at or like doing": those two things can often conflict and so I guess clarity, commitment and patience is required. For example, you could argue that recording a video, posting it to YT , than transcribing it into a blog post, then converting to an audio for your podcast is the most productive way to go. But if you dislike doing videos, then you have to stick to just writing the blog post (for example). Thoughts?
Oh, this was timely - thank you, Ian âșïž
I agree completely. Over the last few weeks Iâve been thinking about where best to spend my time, and what I actually enjoy doing when it comes to marketing or building relationships. On Monday I heard someone say (to this effect, anyway), âIf marketing is building relationships, then your best marketing activities will be similar to the ways in which you meet people and form friendships in real lifeâ.
Those words, coupled with your newsletter today, have helped me to make a decision. Thank you!