Vaguely Dissatisfied With Your Marketing?

Over the past month, I’ve been increasingly encountering Founders and CEOs who are dissatisfied with their business’ marketing.

This probably isn’t earth shattering news, everyone would like to be playing the marketing game better.

Everyone wants more customers and revenue.

The more interesting thing was this:  while people were knew they were dissatisfied with their marketing, they weren’t clear on why.

They said things like:

“We are pumping out content, I think it’s really good, but I am not sure if it’s giving us a lift.”

“We are doing what all the experts say we should do, but it’s hard to tell if it’s working.”

“It feels like we are doing a lot of things, but if you asked me which thing I think is most moving the needle, I’d have a hard time pinning it down.

“We’ve hired a marketing agency and I think they are doing a good job, but I’m not entirely confident they  get us.”


I’ve experienced this feeling during my career. It’s not uncommon, unfortunately.

There are a number of reasons for this:

  1. Unless you know what it’s supposed to look like, it’s hard to decipher from the overwhelming amount of marketing hype and buzz
  2. Marketing is often just part of the puzzle, if it isn’t couple with a robust sales effort, it likely won’t produce to the level you want
  3. When you see other company’s success stories, they often leave out all trial and error and the amount of incremental work it took to produce that success.
  4. Marketing automation vendors do a very fine job of selling their solutions as THE SOLUTION to your marketing issues. (Spoiler alert - they aren’t!)


So how do you go from being vaguely dissatisfied about your marketing to being totally confident about it?

It starts with a shift in thinking: moving from looking at sales and marketing as separate pieces to seeing them holistically as part of a growth engine.

Getting really clear on where you are now and where you want to be.

Then developing 5 key pieces of understanding:

  1. Knowing what your solutions mean to your customers (not just what they get from you)
  2. Getting clear on the business you are really in (it’s often NOT what you do)
  3. Identifying your IDEAL customer who will fuel your next-level growth
  4. Mapping your customers’ journey from awareness to repeat business
  5. Designing your inbound and outbound customer flywheels


When you have these components nailed, everything starts to make sense.

You start communicating your value with tremendous emotional impact.

You talk to the right customers.

You know exactly what content you should be creating.

You know how to structure your outbound sales and inbound marketing so they support each other.

Too often we are in a rush to just get the web site done or launch the next campaign that we skip these crucial pieces of understanding. But in doing so we, make it hard to get our growth engines humming.

So how do you make this understanding happen?

Stay tuned! I’ll be talking more about this over the coming weeks.

Until next time,

Steve

SteveAugustCoaching
Helping Founders Build Rocket Ships

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Steve August
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