Make Marketing Suck Less

Michelle Mazur [00:00:00]: All-or-nothing thinking is a scourge when it comes to messaging and marketing for your business. What I see far too often is business owners spend a ton of time, energy, and even money creating a new marketing asset.

So let's say you create a new lead magnet to grow your email community. You'll spend hours creating that lead magnet, writing the welcome sequence, creating the landing page for it. It could take you weeks or even months to finish that project, and then you'll put it out into the world. And if you're not seeing the results that you hoped you would get, you just throw up your hands and think, “It's not working. I'm going to scrap the whole thing.”

What do you say if we don't do that? What if there is a better way to approach it? One where you're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but instead, you tweak and evolve. And this is exactly what we're going to talk about on today's episode of the podcast.

So let's do this.

Michelle Mazur [00:01:23]: 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 [00:02:01]: Back in 2019, I launched a quiz, And this quiz was a year in the making. It took me a year to figure out what questions I wanted to ask, what results this quiz would produce. And then it took me a ton of time to create those questions and the results page and the welcome sequence and the landing page, it was a lot of work.

And what I wanted this quiz to do for my business was to grow my email community. So I launched it into the world. And what I saw at first was that people loved the results of the quiz. That was clear to me. I could look at my well, back then, it was Google Analytics. Now I use Plausible Analytics, and I could see that people would spend 6 - 10 minutes on the results page drinking it in. And not only that, after it had been out there for a while I would see people take action.

Michelle Mazur [00:03:19]: They would buy the 3 Word Rebellion book. They would become my clients so the results, they were clearly doing the job of leading people to my work. But what was this quiz not doing? It wasn't doing the thing that I wanted it to do, which was grow my email community. I couldn't get people to take the quiz as much as I wanted to. And for a long time, I just kinda threw the baby out with the bathwater. I decided I wasn't going to promote the quiz instead of tweaking and evolving it. That was a problem because it was a good quiz. So two episodes ago on this podcast, I took you through the P.E.E. Process for Marketing Experiments, and P.E.E. was my clever yet funny acronym for plan, execute, and evaluate. So if you haven't checked out the P.E.E Process for Marketing Experiments, go back and listen to that episode because it will take you through how to think about creating a marketing experiment so you can figure out what works and double down on that and ditch the rest. So a quick recap.

Michelle Mazur [00:04:50]: The P in the P.E.E. process is Plan. You want to plan what your marketing experiment is. The first E is Execute. So, actually, do that experiment, take action, And then the final step is to Evaluate. And if you want to tweak and evolve your marketing y message, it's the Evaluation step that you have to pay attention to.

Going back to the quiz that I created in 2019, the first question I asked was, what's working? wWhat is successful? Are there any glimmers of success with this lead magnet? The answer was clear to me. YES. People love the results, And it was trickling down into my business that people would hire me. They would by the book. So that is success.

Michelle Mazur [00:05:56]: But what felt hard, which is the next question I always ask myself was the promotion piece, and I was having a really difficult time promoting the quiz consistently. And you and I both know, even if it's for something free like a lead magnet we still need to have a marketing plan around it. We still need to promote it. And when I start diving into, like, well, Why? Why am I not promoting this thing? I came to what the problem was. It was the name of the quiz itself It had a terrible hook. It was something like, what's your rebel road map to exponential impact and audience growth? Something like that. I don't know if that's quite right. I never liked it.

It never felt like it just rolled off my tongue. It never felt like it was easy for me to promote, so then I wasn't marketing it. Right? So I thought, okay. And this took me a long time to come up with a new quiz title. And thanks to my friend Linda Sidhu, who I had a conversation with, she made some suggestions, and I finally landed on a hook that I really liked, which was, What's Your Unconventional Strategy For Audience Growth? To me, anytime I talk about audience growth, then I can work in this quiz? It just makes sense. So that is what I tweaked. Now there is a tendency to want to tweak multiple things when you're trying to figure out what works. Because there's a lot of times you're like, Maybe it's the hook? Maybe it's the headline? Maybe it's part of the lead magnet itself or a part of your marketing strategy?

Michelle Mazur [00:07:42]: Let's say you're doing it and you're not seeing results you want, like, maybe it's your posting strategy. Maybe you're not interacting enough. So there's a lot of things that you can be like, Okay. Might be this. But what I would caution you to do is to pick just one. Pick just one thing to tweak and evolve and start the experiment again. And by the way, I am currently running that experiment on the quiz. So if you wanna check that out, you can always go to therebelquiz.com. Take the quiz and bask in the results because those are really good. I'm really proud of what I created, and now I'm able to promote it again.

So to recap this process of tweaking and evolving, once you have created something and you launch it out into the world, the first question in order to evaluate is ask yourself, where are you seeing glimmers of success? What is actually working? Because if nothing is working, then maybe it is time to ditch that lead magnet.

But if you are even seeing a glimmer of hope, a glimmer of success, it could be worth it to tweak and evolve because you've spent so much time creating this marketing asset or so you've spent so much time with this marketing strategy or tactic that if you're seeing some results, that's a clear sign that you should tweak and evolve.

Michelle Mazur [00:09:25]: And that leads you to the second question. What feels hard about this? What feels like it's not working? Because if you can identify what feels hard to you, what's making it hard to execute on your marketing plan for it, your promotion plan for this marketing asset? Well, then you can change that one thing, which is the first step - just pick one thing to change and then run the experiment again to see if you get different results. You do not need to change everything about your marketing or everything about your marketing message. Because if you do, you'll never know what truly works. Remember, you don't need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. You spent time creating something for your business that you can market again and again. It deserves the time and attention that it takes to tweak and evolve and to make it into a real asset that works for your business.

Michelle Mazur [00:10:44]: 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.