Make Marketing Suck Less

Michelle Mazur [00:00:00]

Are you making marketing harder than it needs to be by over marketing your business? There are a ton of web celebs who will tell you that you need to be everywhere so you can make it easy for your right client to find you.

Or are you easily distracted by the latest marketing craze, so you're always chasing after a new shiny tactic, thinking that's going to be the thing that explodes your audience growth.

If you're nodding along and saying “yes”, this episode is for you because you're making marketing harder and suck much more by doing way too much marketing.

Instead, this episode is an inside peek into one of the strategies I teach in the ExpertUp Club called “Do Less But Better” Marketing. So let's dive in.

[00:01:04]

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 Three Word Rebellion and your Rebel Truth Telling guide to building a business that gets noticed.

[00:01:34]

Too many times we think, “Oh, I need to be everywhere”, and that, my rebel friend, is a trap. But when we think it, we say “yes" to all the podcast interviews without even thinking about, “hey, do these people actually have any listeners to their show?”

Or we're on every social media platform and trying to create content like a blog, a podcast, and a YouTube channel. And frankly, if you are juggling client delivery, sales, marketing, and everything else it takes to run your business plus your life, you don't have time to do that kind of marketing, where you are everywhere trying to do all the things.

Instead, you need to simplify and focus your marketing with a “Do Less But Better” Marketing Strategy. Years ago, I read Greg McCowan's book “Essentialism”, and there's a graphic in the book that just stuck in my head that illustrates the non essentialist approach versus the essentialist way.

The non essentialist has a goal and tries many ways to achieve that goal, not really focusing on one thing, but all the things, and finds themselves really not making any progress.

The essentialist has a goal and is laser focused on the one thing that leads to the goal. When you have split focus, split energy and try to do too many things, you kind of half ass all of them and none of them work. It's like the example of I'm going to be on Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook and I will post the same things, but then I don't stick around and engage and then wonder why like, “oh, why isn't my audience growing here?”

Well, audience growth comes from engaging not with just your own post and responding to commenters, but engaging with other people's posts. It's social media, right?

But if we're doing Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook, we don't have time to stick around and engage. So none of those tactics actually work. And the flywheel that we spoke about in the “Five Reasons Marketing Sucks” episode never gets going. You never build momentum because you're not able to focus on making the one marketing strategy work.

So what does a “Do Less But Better” Marketing Strategy look like?

Before I tell you, let's demystify what strategy is. I feel like this is a big mysterious thing, but it's actually not. It's fairly straightforward, but that doesn't mean it's actually easy for you to create.

Strategy, essentially, is about setting a goal, knowing what to measure in order to see if you are making progress on that goal and the actions you'll commit to that help you move closer to the goal.

A “Do Less But Better” Marketing Strategy sets a goal. It could be a revenue goal, It could be an email list goal, it could be some other kind of concrete goal that you want your marketing to help you with. You set the measures that might look like the number of consults or new subscribers. And then you define the actions you will take to achieve the goal.

So a great marketing strategy should really have no more than three marketing tactics that you're committing to, to achieve those goals. And those tactics actually have different jobs they do for your business and for your marketing. But before I tell you exactly what jobs your marketing should do for your business, we're going to take a quick break.

{00:06:04}

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Just go to Drmichellmazer.com/marketing to take the assessment now.

{00:06:28}

And we're back.

There are three jobs that your marketing and your message does for your business. And marketing and messaging have the same jobs because messaging powers your marketing. Without a message, it is impossible to market well, it's impossible to market effectively.

So the three jobs your “Do Less But Better” Marketing Strategy will do are grow, engage, and offer.

Grow is all about being discovered, growing your audience and building brand awareness. It's about reaching the people who don't know you yet, so that's that unaware segment who don't know that you exist.

Engage is about building relationships, engaging the hearts and minds of the people who know you and getting those people ready for your offer, right? So this is where nurturing and persuasion can happen. This is how marketing works to drive our sales process.

The final job marketing does is Offer, inviting people into your sales process. Surprisingly, there are these three jobs and all you need are three different marketing tactics to fulfill those jobs because a lot of marketing tactics can actually pull double duty between grow, engage and offer.

So here are the three types of tactics you need.

Tactic number one is a way to be discovered by new people and grow your audience. Now, my friends, this is where you are probably doing way too much stuff. If you are on multiple social media platforms or you're doing a ton of podcast interviews, or you're trying to do SEO, yeah, those are all strategies that can grow your audience and build brand awareness.

But you really want to go all in on one.

Whether that is a specific social media platform, a specific borrowing other people's audiences strategy, or search engine optimization, or JV partnerships and affiliates, it doesn't matter. Just choose one and go all in on that one thing.

And then you need a tactic to engage and nurture your audience. So this is where we're creating and putting out their core pieces of content that could look like a podcast, that could look like a blog or a video. The mistake you make is when you try to do all three of these things, when you only need to do one and get really great at doing the one.

The final way is you want an email list or a great CRM so you can follow up with people, stay in touch. That way you can make offers and invite them into your sales process.

So, for me, the marketing strategy that I have been using to grow my audience, I am completely focused on LinkedIn at the moment. So if you want to follow me there, I'm Dr. Michelle Mazur. I'd love to connect with you.

So that is the place where I am getting in front of new people. The way that I'm nurturing people, you're listening to it. It's this podcast, right? I am nurturing people through this podcast and then I have my email list, which I nurture regularly, and then make offers for my one on one work or a workshop or the Expert Up Club.

And that's it. That's the strategy I'm working in. And yes, I have my goals. And yes, I know what I'm measuring to see if the strategy is working or if I need to tweak.

So what strategy is right for you?

Well, that depends. You definitely want one that you somewhat enjoy, that doesn't suck the life out of you and plays to your strengths. And creating this marketing strategy is one of the core things we do in the ExpertUp Club because I want experts and established business owners to simplify their marketing.

And by the way, the club will be back this Fall, so watch this space if you're interested in joining a fantastic community of experts who are simplifying their marketing and creating a message that results in clients.

And in the meantime, ask yourself, number one, do you actually have a marketing strategy with a goal, with measures and metrics and an action plan? If not, spend some time thinking about your goals, how you would most like to market your business? What's easy on your energy? How could you do less and make marketing suck less?

If you do have a marketing strategy, could you simplify it? That is the second question. Can you simplify what you're currently doing because you don't have time to stop and start and stop and start with your marketing. It's time to do less but better and give up on tactics that don't do the job for your business.

[00:12:29] 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.

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The Rebel uprising podcast is a production of Communication Rebel. Our production coordinator is Jessica Gulley-Ward of Juggling Logistics. Our sound engineer is Stephen Mills. Rebel Uprising podcast is recorded on the unseated traditional land of the coast Salish Peoples, specifically the first people of Seattle, the Duamish people, original stewards of the land past and present.