Make Marketing Suck Less

Michelle Mazur [00:00:00]: I know. One weird trick to make marketing suck less sounds like every clickbaity title ever.

But this is actually a weird trick that I have never seen another marketer or messaging strategist discuss. And to me, it's one of the most effective ways to improve your own marketing without actually working on your marketing.

I know that sounds counterintuitive, and I know it works. So what is that weird trick? You'll just have to tune in to find out.

Michelle Mazur [00:00:43]: Welcome to Make Marketing Suck Less. The podcast that knows marketing is freaking hard, especially when you're a solo business owner trying to juggle it all.

I'm your host, Dr. Michelle Mazur, author of the 3 Word Rebellion and founder of the Expert UpClub.

Forget the latest marketing fads and tactics promising social media stardom. I'm here with research-backed strategies to help you clarify your message and get twice as effective with your marketing.

And while I can't promise you'll ever love marketing, I'm here. to make you hate it a tiny bit less.

Michelle Mazur [00:01:20]

In high school, I joined the speech and debate team. And the reason I joined was because I was terrible at speech and debate. No skill, no natural ability. I basically decided to do something I was terrible at competitively in order to improve.

Yeah, I was a really strange child.

And I did improve through loads of coaching from our head coach and from my peers. But what made me better? What gave me the biggest breakthroughs when it came to speaking was not all the practicing that I was doing. It was not all the coaching I was receiving. It was not even through the competitions and getting feedback from the judges.

It was helping other people.

What? Right? That seems strange.

I could watch some of our best speakers, and I could see what they were doing and what made it effective. And then I could also start seeing some of the ways that these tiny little tweaks could make them even better. And then a funny thing happens when you're able to see what works and what doesn't for other people, you're able to see more clearly what works for you and doesn't.

Just like I got better at speech and debate from giving feedback to other people, you can get better at messaging and marketing when you're giving feedback to other people.

That's my one weird trick.

Be generous in your feedback with others. You'll start seeing subtle waves to improve your own work. Wild.

So why does that happen?

I think it might have something to do with a concept called psychological distance. And according to Wikipedia, psychological distance is the “degree to which people feel removed from a phenomenon.” Distance in this case is not limited to physical surroundings but rather could be abstract.

So when you're thinking about your own message, when you're thinking about what's working in your own marketing, we're way too close to it. Right? Like, it's hard to see it clearly because we're just in it. But when you have the distance you can see what works for other people.

I see this all the time with messaging. People will come to work with me on their 3 Word rebellion and their Client Decision Journey, and they'll say, “Michelle, I do messaging for other people all the time. Why can't I do it for myself?”

And it's because we don't have that psychological distance. we don't see our own work clearly.

It's the old metaphor of that you can't read the label inside the bottle.

I also see this when I'm working with clients or in the Expert UpClub, and I'm editing my client's copy. And one of my clients called me Occam's razor of copy editing because I can see what they need to do so clearly to make their message more effective to make their marketing more effective.

So another great example of this is in the Expert UpClub. One of the things that is available to all members is to get feedback on copy that they're working on. It could be a sales page or a couple of emails from an email sequence, a social media post, a landing page, their website. It doesn't matter. Once a month, they can post and get my feedback on it.

There was one time, it was a late Friday and one of our members posted a sales page. I was fried. I was like, no. I'll just read through this and get feedback on Monday. And then an amazing thing happened. I logged in first thing Monday morning and at least 6 of our members gave feedback, and it wasn't like, “Oh, this is great!” “You go girl” feedback.

It was specific. It was the type of feedback I would have been giving her.

They did an amazing job supporting each other. So that when I dived into my own feedback, I could focus on the nit-picky things that make a huge difference, but aren't the biggest priority when the messaging isn't quite right on a sales page.

So that is the power of being able to give someone else feedback. It is going to make you better at your own messaging and marketing.

So don't be afraid to support people.

And if you want to be among a community of people who are doing the work of defining their message and showing up to promote their expertise on a regular basis, I would love you to explore the Expert Up Club.

We are having an open house on September 20th, and I'm going to be giving you a behind-the-scenes tour of the resources that are available to members to get known and hired for their work. You'll also have a chance to meet some of these members. And these are the people who say that marketing sucks less now. You can get all of your questions answered about what it's like to be a part of the Expert Up Club. So come join us. I would love to meet you.

You can register at drmichellemazur.com/openhouse.

So I hope you'll join us so that you can take advantage of the collective intelligence of the Expert Up Club to improve your own marketing and messaging because the best way to get better at marketing is to help other people.

Michelle Mazur [00:07:51]

If the Make Marketing Suck Less pod is making your marketing more effective so that your clients can find and hire you, please share the show with a friend.

The easiest way to do that is through pod link. 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 Make Marketing Suck Less podcast is a production of Communication Rebel. Our production coordinator is Jessica Gulley-Ward. The podcast is edited by Steven Mills, executive producer is me, Dr. Michelle Mazur.

The make marketing suck less podcast is recorded on the unseated traditional lands of the coast salish peoples, specifically the first people of Seattle, the Duwamish people, original stewards of the land, past, and present all.