Make Marketing Suck Less

Michelle Mazur [00:00:00]: You are the business owner who gets results for your clients.

You're masterful at what you do and yet so many times you are passed over and overlooked for someone with half the expertise and experience. What is the deal with that?

I wish we lived in a world where the people who are best at what they do are the ones who are consistently known and hired instead of the charismatic few who did it for themselves and now they are shouting it from the rooftops that they can do it for you too!

How do we overcome being overlooked?

How do we go from seemingly invisible to in-demand?

That path is unconventional and we can't follow what the successful few do.

We need to go our own way.

And that's what we're diving into today.

Michelle Mazur [00:01:12]: 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 [00:01:53]: The unconventional path to creating demand for your work. For me, it starts with a very strange inspiration. My husband and I love to play the game “spot the character actor” while we watch television. We often say, wait. Wait. Wait.I've seen that person before. They look so familiar. And we pause, jump on to IMDB and figure out who that person is and what we've seen them before.

Now I am a big fan of prestige TV. No Real Housewives or Love Island for this girl. Give me Succession, Severance, For All Mankind, Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad. All of those are my jam. And there's one actor that I have seen in a lot of these shows I watch.

Michelle Mazur [00:02:50]: And it's the red stapler guy from Office Space. You remember the movie Office Space. And I see that guy so often on television. I scream like, “Hey, honey! Look, it's the red stapler guy again!” Man, he gets around Hollywood. He has been in Berry, Succession, Perry Mason, The Good Wife, Brooklyn 99, The Simpsons. I mean, at this point, what actor hasn't been in The Simpsons. Right? Fargo, the TV show, Get Out, the movie. The dude is in freaking everything.

So you think you would know his name? He's everywhere playing every kind of character you could think of. Wouldn't his name be as ubiquitous as Tom Cruise, Samuel L Jackson, or Meryl Streep? And honestly, I had to Google his name for this episode. The actor with all of these accomplishments, the red stapler guy, his name is Stephen Root. Ever heard of him? Probably not. But if you watch TV, you have definitely seen him.

Michelle Mazur [00:04:03]: He is known for his craft. He is known for being an excellent character actor. That is his area of expertise. And even though I don't know his name, you don't know his name. The people who matter know him. The casting people, the agents, the directors, everyone who could hire him. And that's the key for you too. Now if Steven Root was an online business owner, he would be amongst us overlooked experts.

Michelle Mazur [00:04:47]: The people who are exceedingly good at their craft with years of experience, study and skill. And by the way, if you haven't heard the last episode on the Overlooked Expert Phenomenon, go listen to it. It's linked in the show notes and it's literally the episode right before this one. So what can we learn from a character actor like Stephen Root? That basically you don't have to chase celebrity to create demand for your work and your brand of expertise. The web celebs that we have followed and teach an outdated formula that is not meant for experts like us. And frankly, I don't think what they're teaching works for anyone anymore. That formula just simply doesn't work. And what they teach is basically this, grow your audience, have a highly leveraged offer, build your team, make $1,000,000, run ads, sacrifice the quality of your work because you're serving so many people.

Michelle Mazur [00:06:02]: Like that is the predefined version of what success looks like in the online space. That is the blueprint for you to follow. And hey, if that's for you, if that is the kind of business you want to run, if that is the kind of work you want to be doing, go for it. Also, really surprised you're listening to this podcast, but thank you for being here. But experts are much more like the character actor Steven Root, who has carved out his own path to success. You can be in demand like him, appreciated and seen by the right people who will promote you and hire you. You can create a business on your own terms. For the overlooked expert, the solution is not climbing the visibility pyramid that I talked about last time.

Michelle Mazur [00:07:04]: It's not joining a 25K mastermind in hopes that the web celeb shouts out your business or affiliating for that web celeb so some of their glow rubs off on you. It's not about posting to social media 5 times a day so you can grow a following of Instagram people who never see your shit because the algorithm doesn't shine on you. Instead, your solution to overcoming being overlooked is going to be unique to you, but it will contain familiar components. It starts by marketing less and not more. If you want to be known by more of the right people, you've got to start marketing less. And this means figuring out exactly what works for you, your business and your own sanity. It starts by stopping doing marketing you hate. That's the big secret to make marketing suck less.

Michelle Mazur [00:08:20]: Do less of it and don't do marketing you hate. And if you don't wanna do a specific tactic, you don't have to do it. One of the best things that I've seen while leading the Expert Up Club is watching our community members stop doing certain marketing tactics. On average, people who join the club drop between 1 to 3 marketing tactics that weren't working for their business. And while a lot of them are social media related, some of them are not. Some of them are realizing that organizations you belong to don't work to bring in clients or that emailing your list every single week is not moving the needle to get people to work with you. Less is more. But not only that, not just marketing less, we have to market better.

Michelle Mazur [00:09:20]: And how we market it better is by making your message matter more to the people who want to hire you. Personalizing, tailoring that message to your right fit client by using their own voice, their own words, but then moving them into seeing your unique solution and how they can benefit from your expertise. And the final component of all of this is doing this together because growing a business and an audience is easier with a community of coconspirators. Because what the web celebs don't tell you, they didn't get to their fame and fortune and millions of followers by doing the tactics that they teach in their courses and programs. That's not what they did. They collaborated with others. They found other co-conspirators who promoted their work. We need each other.

Michelle Mazur [00:10:28]: Overlook experts need to band together and help get the word out for each other. Because when you find your own unique mix of marketing, messaging that matters more to the right people and not the masses, and a way of collaborating with like minded people, that's when you start carving out your unconventional path. That's when you can be more like Steven Root than Brad Pitt because it's not important that everyone knows your name. In fact, they don't need to know your name, but the right people who are most likely to hire you will know exactly who you are and what you can do for them.

Michelle Mazur [00:11:23]: 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.