Marketing Strategy Advisor and Mentor
I’m on the road for the next few days visiting family.
I could miss a day of writing but then it would, by definition, mean I’m not daily blogging anymore.
There’s nothing wrong with doing “sometimes” blogging—i.e. whenever you can, or even doing it weekly/monthly.
But if you’re going to commit to daily, you can’t miss a day. That’s the rule. You show up, add value, and do it again tomorrow.
One idea, one post, one day at a time.
Keep it simple.
One of the advantages of being a consultant is you get to stay small if you want to. That might not seem like an advantage, but it is.
Why is it an advantage?
When you keep your business small, you can work with a few number of great clients, do great work, and make a very healthy living.
You get to learn and develop rare skills. You can specialize and create a Methodology around the work you do.
You don’t have the stress and overhead that comes with staffing and permanent office space. Which also means you have margins in your business.
As a result, you get to remain relaxed about whether a client comes or goes—assuming you’ve built up a roster of clients and do good work to keep them.
But the biggest benefit of being solo is you’re inherently rare. You’re scarce. There’s only one of you.
And when you’re in high demand, scarcity increases value.
The best thing you can do is limit the number of people you work with while building an audience of engaged and interested people who may one day do business with you.
As demand starts to exceed the supply, you can increase your rates and create more leverage.
You create leverage by packaging up your Methodology into a course, one-to-many offerings, or series of educational products.
Staying small has it’s advantages. In fact, it could be one of your greatest advantages if you play it right.
I was listening to a Clubhouse Q&A with Jason Fried of Basecamp this evening.
Jason is one of my mentors. He doesn’t know it—he doesn’t even know me—but I absorb as much of his ideas as I can. He’s a clear thinker with an interesting perspective on things.
One thing he mentioned was that a lot of freelancers (or consultants) throw a lot of “stuff” into their engagements to justify the price.
Why? Because deep down they are insecure about the value they are providing.
The thing is, people don’t more stuff. They want less stuff but better quality.
They want an outcome, not more stuff.
As a consultant, what you don’t do is as important as what you do do.
More hours, words, revisions, deliverables, phone calls—none of these things add value in and of itself.
In fact, the more stuff you do, the more likely you are to do poor quality stuff!
Figure out what your clients want to receive and help them get there as efficiently as possible.
Cutting the fluff and focusing on the outcomes will make you and your clients happier.
It will make your work better, too.
When you’re a marketing consultant, the work you do—whether it be strategy creation, systems development, or new hires you help make—will often last many years after you’re gone.
That’s why when you price your services, you can’t compare it to delivering content or managing ads for a month. It’s not quite as transitory as producing monthly deliverables.
The work you do as a strategist, in contrast, becomes embedded into the way your clients do business for a long time. It becomes an asset that produces benefits long after you’re gone.
That’s why you should always remember to price your work in alignment with the value you create over the longterm.
Your work should be high value and high impact. It should produce value in your clients’ business for a long time.
Price it right and both you and your clients will enjoy the fruits of your expertise for a long time.
The strength of your marketing can be reduced down to one question: why should I choose you?
The better you can answer that question, the better your marketing will be overall.
The vaguer the response, the more work needs to be done get clarity on this answer.
Don’t let your clients off the hook with this one. And don’t let yourself off, either.
If you don’t really know why people should choose you, how will your prospective clients know either?
Why should I choose you?
The job of the ship captain is to chart the straightest course possible to a desired destination.
But unlike steering a ship, marketing has no one set course. The waters and routes are always different.
The best you can do is keep the bow pointed eastward and adjust along the way until you find your destination.
When applying yourself to whatever marketing challenge you face, remember to keep your eyes on the destination and you’ll get there eventually.
I recently bought a new iPhone 12 and got the leather case with it.
I was surprised to see how bulky it all felt after my last phone.
Sure, it was a slightly bigger phone (by a little), but with the new case too, it felt quite clunky by comparison.
Enter: Peel
Peel focuses on making the thinnest cases for your iPhone or Android device. That’s all I know about them, but it was enough to make me think of them, seek them out, then buy a new case for that very reason.
Sometimes, good marketing is about picking one thing and going to the edges with it.
So, what are you the only/most/best at?
Try focusing on that one thing in your marketing and let people uncover all the other benefits of your products and services later on.
I’ve never done this, but I think hiring some random celebrity like David Hasselhoff to do a Cameo for your clients would be a great way to create a memorable impression on them.
So much of business is about the experience element.
To me, something like this is easily worth spending a few hundred bucks to surprise and delight a key client on their birthday, onboarding process, or any other time you want to sprinkle some magic into your engagements.
Nothing shows you care like a personalized David Hasselhoff Cameo. 🙂
Keep this one in your back pocket.
If you’re going to write a daily email, it’s best to keep them short and sweet.
One idea, one email. Nice, simple, tight.
That way, the reader can grab a piece of value without expending a ton of time or mental energy.
The daily emails I subscribe to (and read) are generally concise and to the point. The ones I gloss over try to say too many things at once, forcing me to “work” for the value.
There’s a time and a place for long blog posts. But if you’re writing daily, you’ll probably have more regular readers if you keep it to one idea at a time.
As a busy professional, I just don’t have the time nor the bandwidth for frequent dense emails. My guess is most people are the same.
By keeping things concise, you might just get your idea to sink in to your reader’s mind.
And that’s the goal, right?
