All Audiences

There are fundamentally 4 ways you can sell your expertise as an independent marketing professional:

1. Doing (Freelancing/Execution)
2. Managing ( Fractional CMO)
3. Advising (Consulting/Coaching/Mentoring/Advising)
4. Teaching (Knowledge Products, Speaking, Training)

In this video, I explain how to take the very first step towards selling your expertise—not just your hands.

I also go into the journey from doing into doing more strategic and higher levels of engagement that leverage your expertise without scaling an agency.

If you’re looking to earn more, stay small, and do less grunt work, this is the video that underpins a lot of my teachings and will give you a roadmap for growth.

Watch the video (and subscribe to my channel) → 

—kevin

When I’m in the car, I like to listen to the radio.

(I know, I’m old school like that).

There are two or three stations I like to tune into. Mostly rock but occasionally I’ll venture into the pop or even jazz channels.

The point is, I can predictably turn the radio dial (press the button) and get to the types of music I enjoy.

That’s because radio stations are always on. They keep showing up. They have a genre. Most importantly, they run a program.

And that’s how I like to think about marketing also.

Good marketing is like an always-on radio station. People learn to expect what you’re about. They tune in when they can, and tune out when they’re busy, but you’re always showing up regardless. And people learn to expect that.

Imagine radio stations only periodically ran “campaigns” of music and banter whenever they wanted to sell ads. You’d never have their station tuned to your favourites, which means they wouldn’t even exist in your mind.

It’s the same with marketing—particularly when you’re trying to sell your services and expertise.

Rather than thinking in fits and starts—doing big pushes between long downtime—try to keep the music flowing.

Even if it’s small pieces published regularly, being consistent with it over time is part of the magic that gets people to buy from you.

People learn to tune into your station when they have the time. You’re on their favourites list (eg. email list or social following).

Campaigns have a place, but good marketing is less about campaigns and more about maintaining a program.

What’s your program?

—kevin

A lot of people are scared to go all-in on a single, sub-specific niche.

That used to be me. And if that’s you, keep reading because I have a solution to consider.

I’ve talked before about how you can be a specialist and a generalist at the same time to help mitigate the risks while you build your niche practice.

And while that works, there is another way.

The other approach you could take is to overtly specialize.

Let’s say you work with $1 billion+ companies. A broad yet specific target market based on a company size (firmographic).

Now let’s say you have lots of experience with manufacturing, logistics, and energy companies. Those are sub-segments of the larger target market.

It would be strange to make your niche around helping all three of these disparate verticals. They don’t really hang together except for the fact that they’re large in scale.

And you don’t necessarily need to focus on just one of them (though your life would be a lot easier if you did).

Instead, you could say you work with billion-dollar enterprises and specialize in manufacturing, logistics, and energy companies.

How would that look?

Your case studies could show the wide breadth of the industries you’ve worked with—yet there might be specific pages (audience pages) for each of the three specializations above. These would allow you to showcase industry-specific case studies and examples of your thinking.

You could also attend the conferences for each of those three industries and build relationships, establish authority, and become a speaker—whatever you could muster. This is hard mode but it would work to some extent.

You could even create content that uses examples from these industries but extracts the lessons to a wider audience.

Most importantly, you could still work with anyone who fits the firmographic (size) of your target market while building some level of credibility in your areas of specialization.

To be sure, this is harder than simply picking one sub-specific target market.

But by using the idea of specialty and demonstrating credibility using audience pages, you can at least demonstrate how you’re better than the sea of more general alternatives.

And it means you don’t have to limit yourself to a single niche.

Big legal and consulting firms do it all the time. They have various practice areas and industry experience.

But remember—you’re not a big firm. You’re an individual.

So while this approach may work, your results can be even stronger if you simply pick one and become entrenched in the industry.

The target is not the market, after all.

Food for thought.

—kevin

I often hear advice that online communities within your niche are a great place to distribute your content and meet prospects.

But if you do it wrong, you risk putting yourself in conflict with the community incentives and have you committing the cardinal sin of marketing instead: spam.

As with all things, it’s all about how you do them.

It may be easy (and tempting) to slide into the DMs of those juicy community-members-soon-to-be-clients (unbeknownst to them) or spam the group with links to your stuff under the guise of sharing something helpful, but it just doesn’t work in practice.

The best way to attract clients in communities without committing spam is twofold:

1. Be genuinely helpful to others in the group—without expectations

Reply to people’s requests for feedback, offer guidance when people ask for advice, start conversations to help spur discussion in the group. These activities place you in the good graces of the organizer and make you someone members can trust and potentially buy from down the line.

In other words, you’re aligned with the incentives of the community (members and organizers). No pitches, hard sells, or links to your site are required. If people like what you offer, they will look you up.

2. Once aligned with the organizer, you can offer to teach your expertise

As an aligned community member who adds value and seeks nothing in return, you will have fair justification to speak with the organizer privately and offer to do a webinar or training or even offer some pre-created benefit to the community.

This is part of my Golden Goose strategy and the key here is creating alignment between you and the community’s interests.

I can’t stress that part enough.

Nobody wants to be in a community where they’re being pitched, DM’d, or spammed with irrelevant stuff. No community organizer wants that, either.

But people do want to learn. People do want feedback. People do want interesting conversations happening in the community,

And guess what? The organizer wants that, too.

The better community member you are—measured by how much you contribute without taking—the more you can get out of the communities you belong to.

It’s a fine line between being helpful and doing thinly veiled selling (people can smell it), so the best mindset is to give with no expectations in return.

Not for a day or a week, but for a while.

Even if you don’t get clients from it right away, you’ve learned what your market cares about, you’ve built a positive reputation, you may get referrals, and you never know who may reach out to you to inquire about what you offer.

Communities look like delicious honey pots ready for the taking. But the more you try to take advantage without contributing, the less likely you are to succeed.

Be a great contributor (no personal links or salesy DMs required!) and great things will happen.

—k

A lot of what I talk about is helping marketers go from “grinding out deliverables on a deadline” to selling strategic engagements, advisory services, and teaching what you know.

In other words, it’s to become strategists, not just implementers.,

The longer I do this, the more I realize that most strategists do a little bit of everything.

Almost all of us do.

I’ll pick me as an example. I started advising in 2017 and began phasing out my web design and digital marketing agency work in the years that followed.

But even today, I host more than a handful of websites for legacy clients and my team manages website changes and maintenance for me on auto-pilot.

It’s been a while since I did the math, but I’d guess this work adds about $20k/year profit to my business with only occasional intervention from me.

The reason I still do that kind of work is that it’s largely done without me. I was very involved when I designed and built the site for those clients originally, but now that they’re in maintenance mode, it takes very little involvement from me unless the clients want to add significant new features.

I also advise half a dozen consulting clients, mentor several marketers in various capacities, and sell training and education to them as well.

I even have one interim CMO client, which means I’m spanning the full spectrum of done-for-you, managed consulting services, advisory services, and education products.

And I’m not alone in this.

Several members of the membership also sell some combination of done-for-you services with advisory and education parts of their business.

When I got started doing this mentoring thing, I thought I’d help people transition out of doing the execution work and into doing advisory/education work.

Selling expertise, not your hands.

But the more I study the reality of my business and the many strategists I encounter, the more I realize it’s a spectrum that many (most) of us involve ourselves with at various levels simultaneously.

If you’re looking to make the transition from selling purely your hands to more strategic and leveraged offerings, the best thing to keep in mind is that it won’t happen overnight.

You start with a single strategic engagement that doesn’t involve the long tail of execution (which you may or may not also do separately).

Or you package interim CMO or advisory services on a new site and transition leads over to it, keeping your current thing intact.

Surviving as a consultant is about just that: surviving.

It means doing what sells while slowly introducing higher-level engagements to your offerings—whether on your current site or a new one.

It’s about overlap and transition, not a major leap of faith. This is the way of the emergent strategist.

If you need help with this evolution, you’ll be in good company with the membership—a hybrid of mentorship, training, and a community of marketing strategists doing this exact thing.

Maybe I’ll see you inside.

—k

Imagine you wanted to clean a sidewalk.

You take out a hose and start watering the sidewalk. The water pours out but nothing is being washed off.

So you place your thumb over the end to create a bit of a spray. A little bit of dirt gets cleaned away.

Then, you add a tight hose nozzle adaptor over the end of the hose. Suddenly, you have a pretty strong spray. More dirt flows away.

But then, you add a pressure washer to the equation. It pumps out more water through an even tighter nozzle.

Suddenly, you’re blasting 50-year-old dirt off the sidewalk. Eureka!

Personally, I want to be in the power washing business, not the hose business.

I want the demand for my products and services (water pressure) to greatly exceed the supply (nozzle size).

I want the right people to be banging down my door to buy from me.

And to do that, I only have two levers:

1. Create more demand (water pressure)
2. Reduce my supply (nozzle size)

If you want people breaking down your door to do business with you, those are your options.

How you do that, is up to you. If you want help, check out the membership. The pricing is new, and the support is higher.

Or you can watch the latest video on this topic over on the YouTubes: https://youtu.be/-Irkw9Xo090

—k

I hire a lot of people with and on behalf of my clients.

And while there are a lot of traits I look for, the biggest one is being easy to work with.

That usually means being open-minded, collaborative, willing to find solutions to tricky problems, adjusting to changing scope or requirements, and a variety of other examples.

I remember reading in a magazine many years ago that Harrison Ford was wonderful to work with.

He was quoted as saying something along the lines of “I just try to be easy to work with.”

For who knows what reason, the line stuck with me. Maybe it’s in part because he’s been acting for 70 years—you don’t go that long without being easy to work with.

So much of business is based on interpersonal relationships. It’s about doing good work, caring about your clients, and ultimately, being easy to work with.

That doesn’t mean being a pushover. You have your way of doing things, you have to say the hard things, and you don’t need to tolerate mean people (it’s not worth it).

But in general, the easier you are to work with, the longer clients will stick with you, the more referrals you’ll get, and the better your reputation will be.

Being good will get you far. Being easy to work with will also get you far.

But being both will set you up for life.

—kevin

I’ve been talking myself out of publishing a lot recently.

Usually, I’m a “let it rip” type of person. Get the idea out of my head, give it reasonable polish, ship it, and move on.

And for the most part, this approach has worked just fine!

It’s what’s helped me build a waiting list of clients, attract speaking opportunities, be invited to guest on podcasts‚ and frankly, to stay in business for nearly a decade so far.

Lately, though, I’ve been recording Audiologs for the membership but not sharing them, writing emails like these but not sending them, and even recording videos for YouTube but not finishing them.

I’ve been accused of a lot of things but lacking confidence is not one of them. So what’s going on?

It largely comes down to momentum.

I’ve been busy lately. This year has been busy.

And with that, I can dedicate less time to my content production.

But that hasn’t stopped me in the past, so why now?

I honestly think it comes down to momentum. If you skip publishing for a day, it’s easier to do the same tomorrow.

And if you miss a week, it’s very easy to skip the next week.

The more you publish, the better you’ll get at coming up with and sharing new ideas.

I don’t care how much of a perfectionist you are, if you don’t publish regularly, your published work won’t be great. 

But the more you ship your ideas, the more new ideas flow to you and the easier they will be to explain and build upon.

It’s ironic, but I see a lot of marketers struggling to create content for themselves. I hear things like “too busy on client work!” or “I suck at writing/video/insert your thing here”.

Everybody is busy. And everybody “sucks” when they don’t do something long enough.

If you want to be in business for the next decade, publishing is one of the most critical skills to develop and maintain.

It can be the difference between being reasonably paid or paid like a dentist. Or worse, getting a J.O.B.

But it takes momentum to keep things going, and when you get off the horse, it will be hard to get back on again.

Once you know this truth, you can get over yourself and start publishing.

You can get back on that horse, put your ideas out there, and open the taps to better ideas that compound over time.

Open the floodgates.

—kevin

P.S. I’m closing the doors for the How to Sell Advice membership next week. If you want to hop in, do it now because things might look a little different again when I reopen the doors (hint: not cheaper). Consider this your heads up!

I heard an interesting quote the other day in an old Jeff Bezos interview that struck a chord with me.

He said:

“All of the senior executives operate the same way. They work in the future, they live in the future. None of the people who report to me should really be focused on the current quarter.”

What I found interesting about it is the similarity between that idea and our work as marketing consultants.

Sure, we might need to put out some immediate fires. We will still aim for short-term objectives. We must deal with today.

But the vast majority of short-term results were baked several months and even years ago. They’re very unlikely to be dramatically shifted overnight.

Instead, we want ourselves and our clients to be thinking beyond the next quarter as much as possible.

We want everyone to think about building sustainable systems and strategies that will compound over time, not simply driving more leads tomorrow via ads (for example).

It’s a tough line to tow because all businesses want results tomorrow. And to some extent, we still need to do our best to take care of the short-term issues and opportunities.

And yet it’s the long-term planning, preparation, and ground work today that will drive the biggest outcomes for our clients in the future.

If we’re not focused on a far enough horizon, we won’t do ourselves or our clients justice.

It’s our jobs to educate our clients on how marketing works. More than likely, it’s not an overnight effort.

Much like health, you don’t become unhealthy overnight. You won’t become healthy overnight either.

To do our best work, let’s help our clients think long-term, too.

—kevin