Marketing Advisor, Mentor, & Educator

Kevin C. Whelan

credibility

Choices and trade-offs

One of my absolute favourite books on business strategy is Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don’t by Kevin Maney and Jim Collins.

I was re-reading it yesterday and this quote from the intro struck me:

If business leaders fail to make choices—fanatical, obsessive, focused, disciplined choices—to build for the long term, and succumb instead to grasping as much as they can in the short term, they will build mediocre companies.

The reality is, we make trade-offs in our businesses whether we’re intentional about them or not. If we don’t make them, they happen to us.

There’s no right answer for everyone—it just depends on what you want to build and whether you’re willing to make the necessary trade-offs to get there.

How to stand out in a sea of competitors

Do you feel like it’s hard to stand out among the sea of other marketing consultants?

One of your available secret weapons for standing out is going smaller either in what you do or who you do it for.

My preferred approach is picking a smaller target audience and going deeper on serving their few core needs.

You can pick a smaller pond and make a bigger splash—which makes standing out a lot easier.

Once you get traction, you can begin to broaden again if and when the time feels right. Or, you could do smaller again.

It’s counter-intuitive, but standing out more often means going smaller, not broader.

How I plan to write and publish a book

I’ve decided to start writing and self-publishing a book.

Actually, it’s mostly written already. I’m selecting my “best” 100 posts from the last year—I have 365 posts to choose from—and turning it into a book.

I’m hiring someone to help me organize, edit, and refine the posts to make it into a worthwhile read for marketing advisors.

There will be more to it, but that’s the general idea right now. It could turn into something else, who knows.

I think I’m going to use Tablo to help me do it. I heard about it via Paul Graham and it seems like a great combination of convenience and quality.

If you’re thinking about writing a book, check out Tablo to see if it’s right for you.

And if you’ve written and self-published a book before, any advice you have is appreciated!

Hit reply and let me know what you think.

My unofficial definition of strategy

There’s a lot of definitions of strategy.

None of them are particularly clear or obvious. So here’s the way I think about it:

To me, strategy is about having one or more insights that you believe will give you a competitive advantage if applied, making many of the tactical decisions easy or obvious.

How you get to those insights is a story for another day. It might be a combination of research, data, knowledge of the market factors, product-related, instinctive, or any combination thereof.

The key is that when you have these insights, it’s easy to recall them and use them as a lens to make tactical decisions. They should also make a self-evident case for how they might help you win.

That’s a good a definition of strategy as any, in my eyes. It’s not the “right” definition, but it works in practical terms for the strategy work I do with my clients.

So what conscious (or unconscious) insight (s) drive your business and marketing tactics?

What’s your strategy?

Belonging to a genre

In Seth Godin’s book, The Practice, he talks about belonging to a genre. It’s been a while since I read it, so I’ll riff on the concept a bit because it’s an interesting way to view the world.

Belonging to a genre means being similar to people or things in an existing category. You quickly “get it” when you see something that belongs to a genre you’re familiar with.

Bob Marley was part of a genre of reggae artists. Jaws is part of a few genres, including cult classics and classic thriller films. Tony Robbins is part of a genre of motivational speakers.

All genres are made up of peers who do similar things but have their own unique angle or perspective.

Belonging to a genre makes it easy for the market to understand you more quickly. They have a context to place you in.

And with that context, they can more easily see where you stand out or are unique.

It’s the difference among people within a genre that that compels people buy or engage. We want things belonging to a genre we like, but we choose which ones to engage with based on their differences.

It’s good to belong to a genre. The question is, what genre do you belong to, who are your peers, and how are you unique?

What does a marketing consultant even do?

One of the questions I get from clients and students alike is, “what do you even do if you don’t do execution work?”

This is an important question. You will inevitably be asked some version of it. And when you do, you’ll want to have a response internalized.

This is also important if you’re still wrapping your mind around the value of your brain without doing the actual execution.

The main four things to know is this:

  1. Your job to act in their best business interest at all times.
  2. Your mission is to get a result with whatever tools you have at your disposal (though not your hands if you can avoid it).
  3. You’re a facilitator of outcomes. You’re a guide. You are not the pack mule. You can’t be everything.
  4. Niching makes your expertise rarer and immensely more valuable independent of execution.

Here are 22 ways a marketing advisor adds value without doing execution:

  1. Create an insight- and data-driven marketing strategy
  2. Create a marketing plan that actually gets implemented
  3. Bring a proven process that makes things more efficient
  4. Source outside specialists to perform specific tasks
  5. Help them develop and manage a financial budget
  6. Help them measure results in a non-ambiguous way
  7. Help them limit mistakes they could easily avoid
  8. Hold them accountable to their goals and promises
  9. Coach them on their marketing skills and mindsets
  10. Bring rare subject matter expertise they can’t find elsewhere
  11. Help them achieve their goals faster by knowing what to do
  12. Bring examples, templates, and resources they can use
  13. Help them create lasting habits, systems and processes
  14. Challenge their assumptions about what they can or should do
  15. Provide a neutral, outside perspective on their business
  16. Connect them with others in their industry or niche
  17. Assist with the market research and analysis process
  18. Draft proof-of-concept wireframes, content, and other materials
  19. Help them sell their business, attract investors, or report to stakeholders
  20. Help them hire an in-house marketing manager when the time is right
  21. Guide their marketing from a higher level without getting lost in the weeds
  22. Think strategically on their behalf

When you eliminate the need to use your hands, your time is freed up to work on higher-value things that ultimately help them save time, avoid problems, and get better results.

There’s a lot to unpack in all of these, but the bottom line is this: advice and execution are best sold separately.

Once you and your clients internalize this, it’s hard to see it any other way.

162. Three ways to get clients to take your advice

This is a preview episode of the private podcast that comes with a free Mindshare Community membership. Join today for more members-only content and community.

In order to be successful as an advisor, you need to be able to:
  1. Prove you’re worth hiring for your knowledge in the first place
  2. Reinforce why you’re worth listening to after they hire you

If you have difficulty selling advisory services, or if clients stop listening to your advice during your engagements, it might be due to one of the three things I talk about in this episode.

Give it a listen and share with a friend who might benefit!

If you’re reading this via email, click here to listen to this episode on the web or join Mindshare to listen to more episodes of the private podcast.

Buying credibility with ads

Today, while driving, I heard a radio ad for a longterm disability law firm.

I found myself noticing that if I needed to hire such a firm, a rightly-timed radio ad might just get me to call them.

Effectiveness of radio ads as a strategy aside, it got me thinking: some forms of advertising can create an impression of credibility

I figured if they advertise on radio, they must have reasonably big budgets. It’s not the kind of thing you do once, nor is it cheap to keep running them.

And if they can afford to advertise on the radio for an extended period, I also figured they must be reasonably successful at what they do. At least successful enough to do mass-media advertising (albeit at the local level).

This experience made me realize how advertising can, in some cases, create a level of implied credibility. 

Another example of this might be seeing a company’s ad on an NHL hockey rink’s boards. They’d have to be reasonably credible to do that, right?

Or let’s pretend I was looking for a new coworking space. If I visited five local coworking spaces’ websites and one retargeted me with ads on all platforms but the others did not, I would probably assume they are at least a market leader worth considering.

Funny how you can buy some degree of credibility. Not a lot, but potentially enough to get an inquiry or two.

What other ways do people “buy” credibility?

Prove your expertise with samples

It’s risky to hire a consultant.

Sure, you have skills. But prospects wonder if those skills will move the needle in their business.

That’s why removing risk from your engagements is so important. And you can do it in several ways.

Your credibility signals reduce some degree of risk. Your guarantees reduce risk even more.

But there’s a third important way to reduce risk: samples.

Your content marketing and thought leadership are like samples at the grocery store. People can get a taste of your expertise before they buy it.

And samples sell products.

Without a strong content strategy, people have to rely on your promise of expertise and whatever risk-reducing signals you can put out there.

Conversely, your content proves you have expertise in the areas your prospects care about. Either the content is useful or it’s not.

That’s why good marketing without expertise isn’t really possible for consultants.

If you want to sell more, prove your expertise with content.

Build credibility with a research-backed, clearly-stated problem

What do you do when you’re new to a niche and don’t yet have lots of credibility in that market?

You research as much as you can.

Instead of trying to prove you’re credible with results you may not have yet, try to understand and articulate the real problems of that niche better than anyone else.

Look for the actual words they use to describe themselves, their situation, and their challenges.

Find examples of people’s frustrations or aspirations in communities, product reviews, social media, and wherever else you can find them.

Look for signs people are actually paying for solutions to their challenges and/or actively seeking out people who can help them.

Read job descriptions if you have to.

Once you see the problem patterns emerge, talk about them in your marketing and positioning.

Focus on on the value of solving (or not solving) those pains and challenges. Paint a vivid picture of both scenarios.

The better you can articulate the problems of your ideal clients, the more likely they are to trust you can solve them.

As the saying goes, “a problem well-stated is a problem half-solved”.

State the problem better than anyone else by doing research—not by guessing.

—k

P.S. If you want my research methodology and Airtable template, join Mindshare Pro for that and a lot more.