Make Marketing Suck Less

Michelle Mazur [00:00:00]: You've been told that if you are consistent, if you post every day on social media, you publish a blog post once a week, and you email your list regularly - then good things will happen to your business.

Things like clients, opportunities to share your experience, being asked on other people's podcasts, and all the cool things that will help your audience magically grow just by showing up.

Unfortunately, this is a myth. The myth of consistency.

This type of consistency has you focused on the wrong things, that makes marketing a frustrating experience for you. So today on the pod, I wanna talk about the two types of consistency and which one you need to be focused on in order to make marketing a whole lot easier. So let's dive in.

Michelle Mazur [00:01:13]: 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 Up Club.

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 [00:01:54]: The equation works like this: if you publish your podcast consistently, you'll get the clients you'll want. You'll make the money you want. You'll grow the audience you want, and that same equation applies for any marketing tactic, don't care if it's Instagram, blogging, LinkedIn.

If you show up consistently, you'll get the clients, the money, the audience, and the opportunities.

But if you miss a week “Oh my gosh. What will happen? None of those things are going to happen for you.” But the good news is that's not true. The frequency type of consistency, it puts a ton of pressure on you to constantly be creating, publishing, and marketing. And if you're not showing up regularly, you're not going to get results. And that's not how marketing works. Because consistency focused on frequency tends to be less strategic. It tends to be focused more on putting stuff out into the world then thinking about how your marketing and what you're saying in your marketing is leading people to work with you. That's where this 2nd type of consistency comes in.

Michelle Mazur [00:03:23]: It is the type of consistency that we rarely talk about in online business, in a world that is obsessed with tactics, the tactic of showing up all the time is the one people will teach you and not this other one.

And, frankly, I've never heard another marketing or messaging person talk about this before. So I'm gonna say it because you don't have time to be dinking around with marketing that doesn't actually lead your audience anywhere. You don't have time to screw with that. Like, it's a waste. It's not strategic. It's not gonna get the results that you want. So here's my radical and rebellious belief about marketing.

Michelle Mazur [00:04:13]: Every piece of marketing you put out there, whether it's a blog post, a social media post, being interviewed on somebody's podcast - you should understand exactly how that piece of content can lead people to your business, and most people don't understand that.

Imagine that you could post a picture of your cat or imagine that I'm posting a picture of my cat. I know how that is actually helping people make a decision about working with me. I know how it fits into my marketing and messaging strategy, so that everything that I put out in this business, including this podcast is in service of getting people ready for my work. Like, YES! I want you to get a lot out of this podcast. I wanted to help you make marketing suck less. I want you to have aha’s.

That's important. But from a business owner's perspective, for me, it's important that I know why I'm saying something.

And it's important for you to know exactly why you're saying what you're saying in your marketing, that you know why you're posting what you're posting and how that post leads people to working with you. I feel like this is a huge missing piece of our marketing.

And that's where the second type of consistency comes in. It's the consistency of being on message. And when we think about being on message, it's probably stirring visions in your head of politicians, like politicians out there campaigning, they have a stump speech that they give again and again, they basically say the same things because they need to drive the same points home. When they get off of message, they get in trouble by their campaign advisers because it's not driving what they want their campaign to be known for.

And because they have a strategic purpose for everything that they are saying in their speeches, they know that they can get their point across, hopefully. Sometimes it doesn't work for them. Sometimes they have the wrong message for the wrong audience, but that's a whole topic for another day. So you need to have that same type of strategic purpose. And I'm not saying that you need to say the exact same things every single day, but you should have a set of messages that you come back to time and time again, messages that grab your right client's attention, messages that help your clients diagnose their problem, to make sure that they have the problem you solve, messages that dispel misconceptions about your work, messages that incorporate your unique point of view and how you solve your client's problems, and of course, you want messages that invite people in to that sales process with you.

Like, for me, one of my key messages, the hill I will die on, is that messaging and marketing go together. You can't have one without the other. You can't be effective in your marketing, if you don't know what to say. Like, if you don't have a message, marketing is not going to lead to results. And I mean, in a way, this podcast on consistency is a variation of that theme. Because most marketers will tell you it's all about frequency as consistency, and I'm here telling and you're like, no. It is about the message. The message is what makes the marketing work. And here's the beautiful thing.

There are benefits to that type of consistency and how it can make your marketing easier for you because that's what you're why you're listening to this podcast to make marketing suck less, not more. But before I break down the three big benefits to your business of message consistency, let's take a quick break.

Michelle Mazur [00:08:59]: If you're loving this podcast and craving a bit more marketing and messaging insights, then I think you would absolutely enjoy the Make Marketing Suck Less newsletter.

It is a companion to this podcast where every single week, I share one idea, one strategy, one piece of research that is designed to make marketing suck less, and I've never shared it before on the podcast.

Yep. This is exclusive to the newsletter. So if you love the podcast, I think you will love the Make Marketing Suck Less newsletter. So go ahead and subscribe to it at drmichellemazer.com/newsletter.

Michelle Mazur [00:09:53]: And we're back. So let's talk about the three big benefits of message consistency.

Number one, you get to repurpose your content. Like, you get to create great posts, great emails, great podcast episodes, and repurpose the same things over and over again. You get to reuse your content in different ways. And sometimes, that can be literally copying and pasting a post that you shared on LinkedIn three months ago and resharing it because it worked well or maybe you end up tweaking the hook or telling a different story in that post.

But once you figure out, “Hey, this piece of content works well,” you should be reusing it again and again. So that's a huge benefit. It's going to save you time in the long run because you're not always creating content from scratch. You know exactly what to say.

The 2nd big benefit, and I think this is the most important benefit, is that people will start remembering what you freaking say. People need to hear your message multiple times. I think the statistic used to be seven times, I'm sure it's probably way more than that. So there was a study by the Yankeolvich Group in 2007. And during that time, they said, we see, like, 10,000 marketing messages a day.

That's a lot of marketing messages. I'm sure it's probably more by now, but let's just say, we're inundated with 10,000 marketing messages a day. And according to the Advertising Association, our brains are only capable of processing, like, 100 of them.

So even though you feel like you're saying the same thing over and over and over and over and over again, your audience is not hearing it. They might hear it once and think, “Oh, that's interesting”, and go on their day and forget. They might hear it again and think, “That's a good point, I should think about that” and then go on their way. And the cycle repeats until it sinks in, and they're like, “Oh, I get it now. Like, you have my attention now.”

So you've got to repeat yourself, repeating your key messages because people aren't paying attention. And I know the theory of the spotlight effect that you think, oh, wow. If I say this, then everybody's gonna know I've said it, everybody's gonna know that I'm reusing it, and that's just not true. People aren't paying attention to you. So when you're at the point of saying, like, “I've said this so many times”, you need to say it, like, 1,000,000 more.

But it's going to make marketing easier for you because what you're creating, the messaging stitching itself, the post, the blog post, the podcast, the lead magnets, all of it - this is an asset that you can reuse.

And then the 3rd brilliant benefit of this type of marketing, the final one, is that when you are consistently on message if you take some time off, people don't forget what the fuck you're about. They actually still remember you.

Like, I have taken time off from this podcast when I needed to. At the beginning of the year, I had an episode about Minimum Viable Michelle and her marketing plan. And I talked about what happened in my personal life that caused me not to be able to produce this podcast for a while and cause me not to be able to post on social media. And we'll link that up for you in the show notes if you wanna check it out. But you know what? I took a couple of months off from doing most marketing, I still emailed my list, But I came back, and people still remembered me. “Oh, this is the girl that talks about messaging and how messaging and marketing are related.” They didn't forget who I was or what I was about because I've been consistently on message for years.

There's no mystery. People remember me. So that's the type of consistency that you want in your business, consistency of message because it allows you to be less frequent. And if you're one of those people who I'm a big fan of the Muppets and I think of the Muppet animal, if you have that animal energy where you just go with the flow and when you're in that creative space, you produce a lot, it allows you to create in that way and not be consistent with frequency as much, but consistency with message, we'll still get your work remembered.

So, finally, don't worry so much about frequency. Don't worry if you miss a day or two of posting or you miss producing your blog or you don't email your list for a couple of weeks, go for consistency of message instead, and that, my friend, will make your marketing suck less.

Michelle Mazur [00:15:28]: 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, our 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.