Make Marketing Suck Less

Speaker 1 (00:00): We've all been there, you send an email that no one responds to, you post on social media, and despite spending nearly an hour on the post, it's crickets, you publish a podcast that you think is spectacular and the downloads are... at best. It happens to everyone. The key is not to let the setback or the failure derail you. So how do you bounce back when your best efforts aren't working? That's exactly what we're going to talk about on today's show, so let's do this.

(00:48): Get ready for the Rebel Uprising podcast, the only podcast dedicated to business owners who feel overlooked for their expertise, skills, and experience. Let's claim your expertise and turn your complex ideas into unmistakable messaging that grows your business. I am your host, Dr. Michelle Mazur, the author of the 3 Word Rebellion and Your Rebel Truth Telling Guide to Building a Business That Gets Noticed. Before we dive in, I want to give you one fundamental mind shift that will change how you see your business: Focus on the courage to try.

(01:32): The courage to try is one of the core values of the Expert Up Club. In business, I don't think we focus and celebrate what we try and what we're learning from trying enough. There is this singular focus on results that misses what it really takes to be successful. What did you try? Who did you become as you push the edge of what's comfortable? What did you learn? Rebel truth: your marketing is an experiment. Your messaging is an experiment. Your business is an experiment. The only way to know what works is to run experiments to learn and to grow.

(02:27): Here's a little story about how I see people getting so hung up on things working that they don't even have the opportunity to try. I once was having a conversation with someone who created a brand new lead magnet for her business. She thought the lead magnet was solid. She wasn't as sure about the landing page, so I simply asked her, "Well, how's the landing page converting?" And she told me, "Oh, I don't know. I am not running traffic to it because I am afraid that it's not clear enough." In my head I was just thinking, "The only way to find out if it's clear, if it's going to convert, if it's going to work is actually to send people to it."

(03:24): But when we hold on to the outcome so tightly of wanting something to work so badly, we actually prevent ourselves from putting our work out into the world. This brings me to the second core pillar that I'll be teaching in the Expert Up Club, which is my new community for experts who want to get known and hired for their work. The second core pillar is experiment to amplify. Last week on the show we talked about three unconventional pillars to become known and hired for your work. The first pillar was to translate your expertise into a minimum viable, meaningful message, your MVMM. And if you haven't listened to that episode, I highly recommend going back and listening to it now before you listen to today's episode, because that message piece comes before the marketing. In order to even experiment with your marketing, you need to have that foundational message to be able to experiment with.

(04:45): So what happens once you've got the message? Well, that's where pillar number two comes in, experiment to amplify. This is marketing, and I can hear you groaning all the way over here. I know how you feel about marketing. I get why marketing is not your jam. You don't love promoting yourself, and it even might feel pretty useless, like no matter what you do, it doesn't really work for you, so why bother trying? But this time I swear it will be different, and it could be so much simpler for you. Why is that? Here's what I know that works best for experts when it comes to marketing their business, and there are two fundamental truths here. Number one comes from the book Essentialism, do less better. You need a super simple marketing strategy. Most people are doing way too much with their marketing, and they're not spending enough time to do any of those things really well. But if you do less better, you can experiment, you can learn and grow.

(06:11): The second fundamental truth that I believe in is marketing should play to your strengths so you love it. Don't do shit you don't want to do. If you hate social media, don't do social media. Find another way to meet people. If you don't like writing, don't write. Although I feel like in business that could be really hard, but there are other ways for your core pieces of content to get out there, right? You could podcast, you could do videos. There's so much that you can do that plays to your strengths. There's one more reason that I know that marketing can be different from you this time because you have those three sets of key messages that we talked about in the last episode. You will have your grow message, your engage set of messages, and your offer messages. You'll have those sets. Then you'll know exactly what to say in each of the three phases of your marketing strategy, which are coincidentally called grow, engage, offer.

(07:32): If you're thinking, "Wait, Michelle, the messages have the same names as the marketing strategies?" Yes, yes, those messages will line up with what you're going to be doing in your marketing strategy. So your grow set of messages go with the grow strategy that you're going to use to grow your audience. See how simple this can actually be? I know, it's a little bit mind-blowing. So here's an example. Here's my current strategy, my grow strategy, I'm using LinkedIn to network and be discovered by new people. My engage strategy, you're listening to it right now, the Rebel Uprising podcast, and also my email list because that's a great place for me to be in your inbox and get people ready to work with me. And then my offer strategy, once again, it is this podcast and my email list where I can let people who are ready to work with me know how that can happen.

(08:43): For me, it's simple and doable, and the best part is I really enjoy doing it. But the real question is, how do I know what works? And the answer is simple: I do experiments. Right now, LinkedIn is my new addition. I'm kind of ditching Instagram, going over to LinkedIn. Feel free if you'd like to connect with me on LinkedIn, I would love to meet you over there. We'll hook my profile up in the show notes. But my research question, what I'm wanting to know from my LinkedIn experiment is can I get connection calls and sales calls from regularly using LinkedIn? I'm going to be running this experiment for about four months, maybe five. What my game plan is is I'm just going to post on LinkedIn once or twice a week, that's it, and then I'm going to interact every single day with at least three people.

(09:46): Interacting can be talking to someone in the direct messages. It could be leaving meaty comments on posts. It could be sharing other people's content with a meaningful thought attached to it. And then I'm just simply going to track how my followers grow and how many calls I book from LinkedIn in the next few months. And we're just going to see. I don't know if it's going to work, but based on the data I collect, I can then reflect and decide, "Hey, is this worth doing?" And if it is, what has been working, what doesn't really work for me? And I can just keep tweaking my LinkedIn strategy as I go.

(10:34): But while I'm doing that I'm cultivating the courage to try, because at first it felt really awkward to post on LinkedIn. I don't know, I was fine with Instagram, but I was like, "This seems more professional and more formal." It actually isn't. That's a little insight that I found out. I have to keep posting when no one responds to a post. Instead of thinking like, "This isn't working," I think, "Well, that's interesting, that post didn't really work. I wonder what would instead." So finally, this is all the work we will be doing in the Expert Up Club. So if being in community with other experts who are taking action to become known and hired for their work sounds like something you want to be a part of, then I would love it if you took one simple step, and that is to be sure you're on the waiting list for the club as it will be launching soon.

(11:40): I'll be announcing it in my email. I'll also be announcing it on this podcast. So just go to drmichellemazur.com/expert to be on the list. And plus, you'll get access to the Rebel Expert Manifesto to remind you how powerful your expertise is in your business. Until next time, remember, cultivate the courage to try, because everything in business is an experiment, and you never really fail when you're running an experiment, you just keep learning and growing.

(12:17): If the Rebel Uprising podcast is helping you claim and communicate your expertise so that your clients can find and hire you, please share the show with a friend. The easiest way to do that is through PodLink. You can find the show at pod.link/rebel, and that page will allow anyone you share the show with to subscribe and start listening in their favorite podcast player. That's pod.link/rebel. The Rebel Uprising podcast is a production of Yellow House Media. Our production coordinator is Lou Blazer. Our production assistant is Emily Kilber. The podcast is edited by Steven Mills. Our executive producers are Sean and Tara McMullin. The Rebel Uprising podcast is recorded on the unseated traditional land of the Coast Salish peoples, specifically the first people of Seattle, the Duwamish people, original stewards of the land, past and present.