Marketing Consultants

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.

The four stages of the buyers’ journey usually look something like this:

1. Awareness (total exposure to new audiences)
2. Consideration (earned and engaged audience)
3. Conversion (sign-ups and purchases)
4. Retention (repeat purchases and lifetime value)

So how do we decide where to focus?

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.