Make Marketing Suck Less

Michelle Mazur [00:00:00]: Remember the horror movie The Blob? You know, where this big, massive, gelatinous blob just rolls through a city sucking up everything in its path. Buildings, peoples, trees, pets, it doesn't matter because it's the blob. Well, marketing can feel exactly like that. This huge amorphous thing that, if you are not careful, will suck up all your time, energy, and mental health in the process. But here's the good news. There is a way to defeat the marketing blob. It's all about putting some structure to it. Because once you understand the structure of marketing, the blob doesn't have a chance. So let's dive in.

Michelle Mazur [00:00:52]: 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 [00:01:42]: Let's talk about why marketing feels so huge, so big, so massive and confusing, and why it is like that amorphous blob sucking up all your energy. I mean, think about it.

Just think about all the ways you could possibly be marketing your business and all the ways people on social media and the interwebs are screaming at you to market your business. LinkedIn, TikTok, Blue Sky. Should you be borrowing other people's audiences? Do you wanna guest post? Maybe a blog? How about launch a podcast? And then how are you inviting these people into your work? Is it a roundtable? Is it a private tour? Are you doing consults? Is it something else? It's a lot. It's overwhelming, and it can feel like a big old mess in your head. Remember, we do have a tendency to want to add more to our marketing when, really, we should be doing less. So how do we straighten out this big, old mess in your head? Well, what helps is having a structure and an intention, knowing why you're doing what you're doing. Because at the end of the day, marketing only does three jobs in your business. And if you are doing tactics that cover all three jobs, you're golden.

Michelle Mazur [00:03:15]: You don't need to add any more. But before we dive into how to give your marketing some much needed structure, I want to tell you about a free resource that I created for you specifically designed to help you defeat this marketing blob. It is called Market Like An Expert. It's a 7 day email based crash course that will teach you everything you need to know about how to market your business effectively without losing your damn mind. It will allow you to do less marketing and see better results, which means your lead generation is going to get easier. So you can grab that at drmichellemazur.com/mle, or just open up your podcast app right now and click the link for Market Like An Expert and join the free course. Alright. So now let's talk about how marketing actually works.

Michelle Mazur [00:04:19]: Because everything I do in my business and marketing for myself and everything that I do for my clients, whether it is Done For You Messaging, whether it is helping them create their marketing strategy or running the Expert Up Club, It is all guided by this one framework, and I call it GEO. And it is your defense against the marketing blob. So GEO stands for Grow is the G, E is Engage, and O is Offer. And GEO, just remember that, encapsulates all three jobs that marketing needs to do for you. So let's talk about each of these and why they are important. So the first job marketing does is to grow. Right? This is all about growing your audience, growing your relationships, and building brand awareness. There's a whole big wide world of people who don't know you exist yet, and many of these people have the exact problem you solve, who you could be helping, but they just don't know that you are there.

Michelle Mazur [00:05:43]: Right? They need to be able to find you. So this phase is all about planting the seeds for people to find you, for people to read something you wrote and be like, “Hh, she has some interesting things to say”. And listen up. I don't care if you're a B2B consultant, course creator, or membership owner. All of us need to get in front of new people for the health of our business. So if you are a B2B consultant, you need to be growing your referrals and strategic partnership, having those relationships that can help you meet the right client. But if you are a course creator or if you're like me and you have a community or you need more people to make your business work, then you might wanna think about borrowing other people's audiences or social media or SEO. The bottom line is you've got so many options to get in front of new people.

Michelle Mazur [00:06:48]: It's really about figuring out what works for you. So just know that growing your audience, your relationships, building that brand awareness is marketing job number one. Now marketing job number two is E. It's the 2nd stage of the GEO framework, and E stands for Engage. Now, folks, this is where it gets interesting. Once people find you and they think, she seems cool. She's saying something interesting. I'd like to meet this person who can solve my problem.

Michelle Mazur [00:07:31]: Then, once they are aware of us, our job, our marketing's job is to engage and nurture them. This stage is so crucial because and it's really crucial for your messaging, which we'll talk about in a further episode. But it is crucial because it gets people ready for your work. Your messaging really needs to be dialed in here so you are building a case for your offer. And where it can get tricky is that as experts, we love to solve a problem. We are so happy to focus on the “how to”. Right? Telling someone, like, how to fix the issue that they're having. But this phase isn't about that.

Michelle Mazur [00:08:22]: It's about what people need to know to be ready to enter your sales process, what misconceptions they have, what is your unique solution, your point of view, dispelling any misconceptions. So I wanna do a quick example of this. So this is from one of our members of the Expert Up Club, Bev Feldman. She is a Kit strategist, Kit, formerly ConvertKit email strategist. When she first joined the club, she shared an email sequence with me, because they get once a month, you get feedback on copy that you're working on. And it was for a new offer, and I was going through the sequence, and I was like, great. She's really showing what this is and why it's important, and then she had a section about how to do it, and I was like, nope. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Michelle Mazur [00:09:11]: We are not showing people how. I don't want you to give the impression they can easily do this themselves. It is easy for her because she's an expert in Kit, but it's not easy for your people, And so the how comes when they hire her expertise, and she can just do it for you, and that feels much better than trying to figure out the back end of your email service provider. Right? So when we are engaging, we really need to focus on what am I saying to get people ready to work with me, and how am I building the case for the work that I do, and why people should hire me over someone else. Alright. The final stage of the GEO framework, O, which stands for Offer. Now if you are doing a good job nurturing your people, getting them ready to work with you, you know what they wanna know next? How the hell they can work with you? How are you telling them what your solution is, what your offer is, how they can engage with you? So in this phase, you are now inviting people to work with you. And this is a phase sometimes it's really hard for us to transition into.

Michelle Mazur [00:10:37]: That's where messaging becomes really important, and we'll talk about that soon, but this really can be about how you are inviting them in. So it could be through email or personal outreach. Maybe you have sales calls or private tours or round tables. Any opportunity you have to invite people into your offer falls into this phase. Because once they say yes, once they say yes to booking a sales call or asking for the proposal or going on a private tour, especially like what I do for the Expert Up Club, now they are in your sales process. So this is the transition point between marketing and sales. Once they say yes to your invitation, you are now in sales. So this is the GEO framework.

Michelle Mazur [00:11:32]: This is the structure that you as an expert need to help you defeat the time sucking, soul sucking blob of marketing because your brain does love structure, and having GEO in your back pocket will make marketing feel less overwhelming to you. Now over the next few episodes, we're going to deep dive into each of these phases to help make your marketing suck less. But remember the structure. Remember GEO, Grow, Engage, Offer, because this is the framework that is going to allow you to market more effectively, to do less marketing, to see better results, getting more people who are interested in your work and who want to hire you. And that structure makes your marketing suck less.

Michelle Mazur [00:12:30]: 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.