Make Marketing Suck Less

Michelle Mazur [00:00:00]: Once upon a time, you created a new offer. You launched it, and at first, it sold like gangbusters. People are clamoring for it. You have a wait list for it. They're excited, and you feel like this success train is just gonna roll forever. You figured it out, finally. Except it doesn't. And at some point, the sales, they just peter out.

It's so easy to blame the offer, to think, oh my gosh, I need to tweak this thing to make it more appealing so people want it again. Sometimes, you might even throw the whole offer out the window and think, ugh, it's just not gonna work. I need to create something new. But before you do this, I want you to listen to this episode. Because what if it's not your offer at all? What if your struggle to book calls and get people interested in your product, your program, your service has nothing to do with what you're offering. And that is what we're diving into today. So let's do this.

Michelle Mazur [00:01:26]: 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 [00:02:14]: When I first created the Expert Up Club, the founding member launch was absolute fire. 22 people raised their hands and said, “Yes! I want in. I want to be a founding member.” But then the next launch, it was just eight people. It's acceptable. The one after that, three. Then I had two or three launches where I only enrolled one or two people into the Club. Now, normally, this is the point where someone would say, “Oh, it's the offer. It must be the club. There's something wrong with it. People don't want it.”

Michelle Mazur [00:03:01]: But here's the thing. I knew it wasn't the offer. The people inside the community loved it. They were clarifying their message. They were getting the word out about their work. They were doing less marketing and seeing results. And here's the deal. If you have an offer that you've sold to at least 5 clients and they've gotten results, you have an offer that works.

Michelle Mazur [00:03:29]: Full stop. There is nothing that you need to change about the offer itself. The real problem, the problem that I had, I didn't have the messaging dialed in. And let me show you exactly what I mean by walking you through the evolution of The Expert Up Club's Why By statement. I feel like this is the most concrete place to show how the messaging needed to evolve. So, as a reminder, what a Why Buy statement is, it's the most compelling reason to work with you. It's one sentence long. It's like the elevator pitch for your offer.

Michelle Mazur [00:04:13]: It's also something we create inside The Expert Up Club. So if that is interesting to you, be sure to get on the interest list because I'll be opening up private tours on March 25. You can go to drmichellemazur.com/list. Alright. Let's talk about the Why Buy statement when I first launched The Expert Up Club, And this was super shitty. It was, join the only community that helps you define your message, confidently share it in your marketing, take more strategic action, and get recognized and hired for your work. Now does it describe what the club does? Sure. Absolutely.

Michelle Mazur [00:04:58]: That is still what we're doing inside The Expert Up Club. But is it compelling? Is it the most compelling reason people should work with me or join The Club? Not really. It tells you what it is, but it really doesn't hit on why it matters. By 2023, I made a slight evolution by calling it join the premier community for expert business owners that supports you to clarify your message, confidently share it in your marketing, take more strategic action, and get recognized and hired for your work. Oh my god. That's still way too long. It's not all that better, but, hey, you know, still eight people joined The Club. These were my early adopters.

Michelle Mazur [00:05:47]: Then I tried get personalized support to get known and hired for your work. Okay. This is probably my least favorite one because it felt so generic. I felt like there are a ton of programs promising this exact same thing, and it didn't capture what members were actually getting out of The Club, because I saw my members, dropping marketing tactics that weren't working for them, getting more focused on who they serve and how to communicate with them and how to make their message compelling so people wanted to work with them. So finally, in September of 2024, a full fifteen months after I initially launched The Expert Up Club, I landed on market less while creating more demand for your business and expertise. And I was like, yes. This describes, number one, what the club is deliberating on, marketing less. I knew I had the data to prove that my members were marketing less.

Michelle Mazur [00:06:59]: And I know what you want is to have more demand, more interest in your offers, more opportunities to share your expertise. And it only took me fifteen months to get there. And this is where the GEO framework, going back to the Grow, Engage, Offer framework that we talked about in episode 383, GEO is not just for marketing. It's also for your message, because you need messaging that works for all three phases to make the marketing for your offer effective. So in this Grow Your Audience phase, the messaging is really meeting people where they are, understanding where they want to go, what do they actually desire. You need to speak their language and not your expert language. Like, clarify your message and confidently share it in your marketing. Ugh.

Michelle Mazur [00:08:05]: They're not saying that. Nobody's saying that. And then you get to create these micro stories that really create that, Hey, you're talking to me. The next phase, the Engage phase. This is the most important phase for messaging, Because in this phase, it is all about getting people ready for whatever your offer is, whether that is one on one work, whether that is consulting, whether that is a program, whether it is a course. It doesn't matter. We still need to nurture and engage. We still need to help them understand what their problem is and why it happens and the impacts that it has.

Michelle Mazur [00:09:00]: We need to show how our solution, your solution, is different from what they've tried before, how it's different from your competition, and how it's better than not doing anything at all, which is really our natural state. And then we get to clear up any misconceptions they have about our expertise, about the work we do that is creating friction from them taking the next step. And, really, in this Engage phase, the marketing tactics are so straightforward. It really is the messaging that drives people forward and makes them raise their hand to say, like, “Yes, I'm interested in exploring whatever it is your offer is.” And then that final phase is making the offer. This is where the Why Buy statement comes in. Right? So inviting people in without feeling spammy, making it the next natural step. And this is so much easier when your engage and nurture messaging is working because then you're setting the whole thing up, just like a natural step.

Michelle Mazur [00:10:15]: Bottom line is, if you're great at sales, you have this great offer, it has sold well in the past, but currently you don't have enough people to sell it to, your offer is not the problem. You have a messaging problem. You haven't figured out how to talk about what it is you do for people in your marketing in a way that creates demand, creates buzz, creates interest. But once you figure this out, everything changes. And you know things change when, number one, people show up to your sales calls, and they're actually ready to work with you. Like, they know what your offer is all about. Number two, it makes inviting people into your sales process so much easier, because it's just this natural next step in the conversation you have created in your marketing. And your marketing starts working for you instead of exhausting you, because now you're not spinning your wheels and thinking, oh, my gosh.

Michelle Mazur [00:11:27]: What do I need to write? What do I need to say to make these people interested? They're just showing up because your message is doing the job it needs to. These three reasons are exactly why I created The Expert Up Club. Because if you're in that place where you're thinking like, “Oh my gosh, if I could just book more sales calls, if there are just more people interested in my work,” I don't want you to change your offer or, God forbid, create a new offer. Because in a few months, you're gonna find yourself in the exact same place you were before thinking, oh, sales have dried up. Like, what's going on? I guess it's the offer. So instead, look to your messaging because the job of marketing is to generate interest in your work. Marketing only works when you have a message to amplify. So how you talk about what you do gets people to take action.

Michelle Mazur [00:12:31]: I don't care how many blog posts, social media posts, podcast interviews you go on. If you don't know what to say to generate interest, that shit ain't ever gonna work for you. Instead, focus on making the messaging work. It takes a little bit of time, but it is worth it. And if you wanna save yourself a whole bunch of time, we are opening The Expert Up Club, March 25. So be sure you're on that interest list. And in The Club, I'm never gonna tell you to have a message that's something that you're not because, at the end of the day, I know your experience matters, your expertise matters, and it's the reason why people choose to work with you. So if you are getting your clients' results, but you're just not seeing enough people be interested in working with you, it isn't an offer problem. It's time to focus on how you're talking about it.

Michelle Mazur [00:13:36]: 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.