Marketing Advisor, Mentor, & Educator

Kevin C. Whelan

Marketing Consultants

By doing less you accomplish more

By doing less you accomplish more.

By doing less, you’re forced to focus exclusively on what you do best.

When you only do what you do best, you’re more competitive.

You can charge more. You do a better job. You get more referrals. You’re not interchangeable. You become rare.

By doing less, you free up time to make your best work even better. You perpetuate your advantages.

You feel less overwhelmed. You enjoy your work because you’re good at it.

You become known for your specific thing. People start tagging you in things and sending opportunities your way.

You become the go-to person on your main thing in people’s minds.

The opposite of all this is also true.

Choose wisely.

A visual approach to a marketing plan

Here’s an interesting way to approach the development and visualization of a marketing plan.

It uses four quadrants to lay out marketing channels (and perhaps investment) based on whether a client is looking for a product like yours, and whether the target market is specific or not.

There are lots of ways to organize your marketing plan. This was a useful visualization to perhaps replicate with a client.

 

h/t Tim Suolo who shared Kevin Lord Barry‘s resource on Twitter.

The best marketing

The best marketing is plain, straightforward, and non-sensational.

It doesn’t care if you buy or not. It believes in its own product but doesn’t go out of its way to convince you to buy it.

It doesn’t use gimmicky tactics. It doesn’t use hype. It requires no added frills.

It simply states what it is, who it’s for, and what it does. It does so in a creative and interesting way. But that’s it.

The best marketing isn’t cute or clever. It conveys a quiet confidence that speaks for itself.

Of course, the best marketing comes from having a good customer value proposition. In other words, it sells something people actually want to buy.

Solve that and your marketing can be the best kind, too.

Minimizing your cognitive load

Today, I stumbled upon a wisdom-packed old blog post by Sam Altman.

The following quote brought me to the article and I thought you might like, too:

Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most people are at it. Get rid of distractions in your life. Develop very strong ways to avoid letting crap you don’t like doing pile up and take your mental cycles, especially in your work life.

Cognitive load is a knowledge worker’s enemy. It’s what makes you feel scatter-brained and anxious if you don’t keep it under control.

You simply can’t grow your business if you’re mired down by too many small gigs, odd jobs, distracting work, or other low-impact activities.

At best, these things create cognitive load that stresses you out and distracts you from the bigger picture.

At worst, they hold back from achieving your potential.

Sweat the basics

In order to be great at most things, you have to master the basics.

If you can’t perform the basics well, you’ll reach a plateau that will hold you back. There are few exceptions.

That’s one of the reasons I write every day. Writing is the gateway to marketing. It’s the skill that underpins all the rest.

By writing daily, I put in the reps needed to think and communicate effectively.

For you, it might be something else. But whatever it is, if you’re reaching a plateau, it might be time to simplify things and get back to the basics.

Chop wood, carry water, master the basics.

P.S. This is my 100th consecutive daily blog post. If you like my articles, consider referring a friend here: kevin.me/subscribe.

First impressions matter

When a new prospect crosses your desk for the first time, you only have one first look at their marketing.

In that first look, you’ll notice things. You’ll see various details that make the company compelling or not.

Conscious or not, these are your first impressions. And first impressions are critical.

If you pay attention, you’ll notice what stands out as good or bad. What makes them credible or not. How unique and interesting their positioning is.

Jot them down. You’ll never have another first impression.

Like it or not, we tend to become blind to things over time. The more we see things, the more we learn to accept them as part of the scenery. Little design flaws, messaging flops, or other nits that add up to the whole.

And yet, those first impressions make a big difference to the effectiveness of a company’s marketing. Those little details add up.

Let’s remember, a high percentage of people will make judgements about whether to buy based on first impressions. You don’t always have a second chance to win people over.

As a marketing consultant, the best thing you could do for your clients is honour your own first impression and write it down.

It will serve you and your clients down the road.

The nuance to selling a “system”

As marketing practitioners, we often lean towards selling our process. It’s the way we approach our client work, so it feels important for us to talk about it.

But if you’ve bought anything lately and encountered someone selling their approach to the way they work, you’ll quickly realize how little you care about it.

What you care about most is the outcome.

Now that doesn’t mean systems don’t have a place. They do. You should have a system or methodology and clients should know you have one.

But what they really care about is the system you’ll create for them. 

If I go to buy a Tesla, I don’t care how they make it. I mean, I do, but not really.

I care more about how the car I’m going to drive works. All the things it will do and how I will be able to use it.

Systems have a place. But instead of selling your methodology, focus more on the marketing system you’ll make for your clients.

Everybody loves a good marketing engine that creates results for their business.

Sell that, not how you make the system.

Good marketing strategists and planners use examples

At my last corporate job, we undertook a several hundred thousand dollar website redesign project with an outside agency.

The agency had a “strategist” on their team who helped wireframe the website based on our business goals.

The strategist’s main job was to match our company’s business goals with user experience best practices and industry standards.

For any decision we had to make, he was able to show us examples of what other companies in the same/similar industries were doing. He’d explain the pros and cons of doing things each way, educating us about how best to make decisions.

It struck me as interesting just how much research and examples he had ready to show us.

It seemed like a lot of his work was borrowing good examples from similar industries to inform the design of our website.

There’s obviously a lot more to strategy than copying and iterating off a bunch of examples. But if you want to create a marketing plan or strategy, it’s not the worst idea to have examples at the ready.

Good strategists and planners are researchers.

They gather knowledge and examples and have it ready to show clients. Not to convince them that their ideas are good, but to educate them about why their ideas are right for certain situations.

If you want to sell strategic marketing services, be someone who does a lot of research.

Find examples. Keep them in a file and have them ready to present next time you want to educate your clients on a decision.

Not to convince your clients, but to educate them.

An educated client is a satisfied one. Your work will be better, too.

 

A writing trick for daily bloggers

If you’re going to write every day, you need to get into a rhythm that feels natural for you and your readers.

The easiest way is to do this is to write like you’re writing to a friend.

There’s only so much hard content people can handle. And it’s too much work to make every piece feel like it should exist in a book.

It has to be light.

Personally, I start by composing an email in Superhuman. You can use whatever email tool you want, of course.

I just start writing as if I were drafting an email to someone I talk to regularly. I keep sentences short, simple, friendly, and to the point.

Sure, some articles are longer, more formal, and require more of an editor’s touch than others.

But I find the best style of writing is the kind you would use to in an email to someone you know and like.

Natural language, easy to digest. Short paragraphs. Bolding, highlights, bullets.

Whatever is easiest to read and digest.

That’s what makes daily writing easier for me as the writer and hopefully for you as the reader, too.

Why you should work on your marketing daily

It’s easier to do things daily than it is to do them weekly or monthly.

It’s counter-intuitive but it’s true.

When I exercise daily, it isn’t even a thought. It’s a habit. I make time for it and it gets done. No excuses.

And it’s the same with your marketing.

If every day you publish on social media, write that blog post, refine that ad creative, or generally check in on things, it’s a lot easier than trying to do them once a week or whenever you have time.

You don’t have to do all of those things every day, but you need to do something every day to get the best results.

And here’s the thing: your results will be a LOT better, too.

We all get busy. And when you’re not planning to work on your marketing every day, it becomes an afterthought.

Things get missed. Days go by.

And then what happens? The pipeline slowly dries up until one day you are wondering what happened to your leads.

It must be the competition, you think.

I get it. Marketing is time-consuming. It can be difficult. There are so many details, tasks, revisions, coordination, and headaches that come with it.

But it’s also the highest point of leverage in your business.

After all, would you expect a fruit stand to be successful if it did not take its fruits to the marketplace each day?

Yes, you have operational responsibilities. Yes, they’re very important.

But if you’re not working on your marketing initiatives daily, moving projects along, and publishing content to the world, your business will suffer.

Maybe you won’t see the effects today. But every day you’re not investing your time in marketing, you’re losing opportunities. I guarantee it.

If you own the business, ask yourself how many days each week you work on your marketing—even if it’s just for a few minutes.

If the answer is less than five, you’ll have a problem soon (if you don’t already).

Work on your marketing daily. It’s easier and it gets better results.

This post originally appeared on my coworking consultancy’s blog.