Marketing Advisor, Mentor, & Educator
Kevin C. Whelan
Nothing is great right out of the gate.
If you wait until it is, you’ll never ship anything.
Better to get things going than to aim for perfect and find out… it still isn’t perfect. And that’s assuming it gets shipped at all.
Most people never ship their ideas. Don’t be most people.
Start with the basics then make it better.
Warner Bros. Pictures released a trailer last week for The Matrix 4: Resurrections.
The movie doesn’t launch until Christmas. As the date gets closer, the trailers will get longer and the hype will increase.
If theatres were more of a thing right now, you’d see them more frequently in the previews leading up to the launch.
Why do it they do it? Because pre-selling works.
If you’re planning to sell something new—whether a product, membership, service, it doesn’t matter—the best way to do it is to build anticipation slowly over time.
Talk about something coming in the future. It’s fine to be vague at first. That can even add some intrigue.
As the time approaches, add detail to the picture. Share a firm release date. Talk about what goes into making it, or what features it will have, or why it’s going to be unique.
Weave it naturally into your blog posts, emails, social media, in conversation—wherever it makes sense.
In other words, build anticipation long before it launches.
The best way to sell anything is to pre-sell it before it’s available. It creates a tension between want and unavailability such that those who do buy have made the decision in their mind long before it’s available.
Oh, and the longer you drip it out, the more anticipation you’ll build and the better it will perform on launch day.
There’s nothing like a good pre-sell.
When you decide you want exercise regularly, you’ll face a lot of days when you just don’t want to do it.
Excuses will come to mind. You’ll tell yourself all kinds of stories about why you should give it a skip on this particular day.
You’re tired. Sore. Busy. It’s always something.
So what do you do? You take the smallest step possible.
It might be to put on your running shoes, or do a simple stretch, or go for a walk. Usually, the act of completing one small thing or agreeing to do the tiniest version of a workout is enough to get you to do the full thing.
It’s the same with your marketing. If you let your brain talk you out of doing the things you know you should be, like writing content, you’ll never get anything done.
The brain is good at talking you out of doing things that make you feel uncomfortable. You can’t listen to that voice.
The next time you’re hesitating with your commitment to consistency, make one small act toward your goal. Write a short post (like this one). Publish something simple on social media. Aim for the smallest thing possible.
More than likely, you’ll ride that momentum into something more meaningful.
Whatever you do, keep shipping—even if it’s small stuff.
Good marketing requires focus. And that means making trade-offs.
Trying to do everything at once will move you an inch in all directions. You won’t get anywhere like that.
One way I help create my clients focus is by looking at the 4 stages of the buyer journey together. We choose one area at a time with ~80% of our resources and ~20% on everything else.
I do this for a quarter or two depending on the situation, then reevaluate where to focus after that.
Well, there’s no point in building broad awareness of your consideration engine isn’t strong. People need to consider your offers before they even think about purchasing.
Which means you need to get your website right and support it with good content marketing to keep people’s attention.
There’s also no point in focusing efforts in building conversions if nobody is even aware of you, so once you have your consideration engine figured out, you might want to work mostly on awareness.
This could be ads, sponsorships, podcast appearances, influencer marketing, or a range of other tactics. The key is exposure to new audiences.
And there’s no point in focusing on retention if you have no/very few clients or customers! You might need to revisit the other steps to build your client base before you double down on retention efforts.
But here’s the caveat: you might also decide to flip this entire process on its head if that’s what your strategy dictates.
For example, you might be a product- or experience-centric company, meaning delivering the best possible product or client experience is the way you plan to grow. Word of mouth would be your core channel in this case.
And that’s where strategy comes into play. Knowing where to focus your efforts to get the best results is the shared responsibility of marketing strategist and CEO together.
If you try do everything at once, you won’t move the needle very quickly.
Better to focus 80% of your resources on one general area and 20% on everything else until you’re ready to move into a new focus. How long you spend on each period depends on what needs to be done.
Focus is the fastest way to meaningful results—even if it takes months or years to come to fruition.
There’s nothing like the 80/20 principle to help you get there.
I recently saw somebody announcing their friend’s new sparkling water company.
The website said it had “just the right amount of carbonation” and something along the lines of having a “bold yet classic flavour”.
I’m other words, they weren’t taking any stances. They were playing it safe.
In Europe, it’s common to be able to choose a sparking water by the amount of carbonation it has. Some are lightly carbonated and some are a lot more fizzy.
They could have chosen to be the fizziest, or the smoothest, or maybe even have options for both. But they chose to play it safe.
And by taking the middle road on flavour and carbonation, they lost an opportunity to be different. Like most new companies, they seek to look the same as the competition in the hopes they blend in and get picked.
But the reality is, without a hook or differentiator, it will be harder to stand out. There will be no word-of-mouth factor, which is critical for any business.
The middle way may feel like the safe way to reach more people, but you don’t get people’s attention in the middle.
Optimize for the edges.
Email is Good is weirdly one of my favourite blogs right now. It’s written by Chris Coyier on the topic of “email productivity”.
Chris is a highly prolific web developer and educator at css-tricks.com—a massively popular website in the web development community.
Email is Good is a small side project he’s working on. And I’m here for it.
What I like most about it is how raw and singularly-focused it is. Chris writes about email. That’s it. Nothing else.
Most of his posts are short, highly meta topics on all things email with productivity playing a small overarching role.
He is ultimately advocating for the importance of email as a medium.
Here’s an example of one of his recent posts:
Bron Gondwana, CEO at Fastmail on the Fastmail blog in 2018:
The email in your mailbox is your copy of what was said, and nobody else can change it or make it go away. The fact that the content of an email can’t be edited is one of the best things about POP3 and IMAP email standards. I admit it annoyed me when I first ran into it – why can’t you just fix up a message in place – but the immutability is the real strength of email. You can safely forget the detail of something that you read in an email, knowing that when you go back to look at it, the information will be exactly the same.
I’m a big fan of people, tools, and projects that do one thing. There’s something remarkable about things that do just one thing really well.
Email itself is a perfect example of this.
It’s rare and beautiful. It inspires me, so I thought I’d share.
If you did one thing and nothing else, what would it be?
Hit reply and let me know.
The point of content marketing is to attract clients.
To do that, you need to gain the attention of the people you want to serve.
To do that, your content needs to be useful. If it’s useful, people will usually keep giving you their attention.
Usefulness comes in many forms. It could be education, inspiration, entertainment, storytelling, or any other form as long as you deliver value.
So remember, opportunities come from attention. And the price of attention is usefulness.
Be as useful as you can and opportunities will follow.
Yesterday, I wrote about how naming and claiming your ideas can create more harmonious and effective marketing teams.
But it also benefits you personally as a consultant, especially if you write those ideas down.
Here are a few examples:
The better you name, claim, and document your ideas, the more efficient you can be and the more leverage you will create around your ideas. And leverage leads to profit.
Turn your ideas into assets my naming, claiming, and documenting them regularly.
Yesterday, I talked about standards.
As a marketing advisor, I can help my clients ship work at any level of “perfection”. I’m agnostic about which path we take and my fees/effort don’t change whether we do 80% quality or 20%.
What changes is how long we take to perfect things, which impacts results. Highly polished work takes time, which has a cost.
That’s why my general tendency to help clients ship their marketing efforts at 80% perfect in order to get results within a reasonable timeframe.
That doesn’t mean shipping typos or errors—that’s not allowable. It means doing the best you can within a reasonable time and budget.
From my experience, those who tend to aim for near-perfection end up moving too slowly. They over analyze to the point where it has negative effects on the one thing they’re looking for—results.
Usually, those clients are experiencing some form of fear—whether it’s fear of not knowing what they’re doing, not wanting to look bad, or not wanting to do mess something up.
It’s my job to help them overcome that fear and push forward.
If you’re already doing the fundamentals well at 80%, it’s probably time to elevate the standards across the board. I call this the Optimization Phase of our engagements.
But until then, unless there’s a strong strategic reason to only ship near-perfect work and you have the time and budget to take as long as it takes, ship the best work you can.
You can ship a 90% perfect website, a 70% perfect social media effort, an 80% perfect ad campaign—whatever you can muster as long as you’re moving and not spending too long on the polish and you’re getting results.
Then, once you’re seeing the lions share of results, you can go back to optimize and make everything even better.
Otherwise, you’ll move too slowly to get meaningful results—most of the time.
There are two ways to start a business:
The instinctive move we all make when we start out is to pick the first path.
I do marketing, who can I sell this to?
But if we pick an audience to serve first, it opens up our minds to all kinds of business models—whether in the field of marketing or otherwise.
You could sell done-for-you services, advisory services, coaching, subscriptions, memberships, knowledge products, software, and a whole range of other products and services not related to consulting.
The minute you pick a target market—ideally one you can relate to, have experience with, and have some built-in advantages with—your business opportunities open up significantly.
You’re less confined to the traditional ways of doing things. And that offers powerful potential for differentiation.
Over time, you can become “vertically integrated”, selling a whole suite of solutions to your target market as you get more familiar with their needs.
You become entrenched and ubiquitous in their world. You build a competitive moat that compounds over time.
I realize this is hard for most people to do. It’s not the quick and easy path relative to selling low-margin services to anybody with a heartbeat. It’s not what conventional teachings and stories may imply.
But it is a far better way to build an innovative and profitable business of any kind.