It’s not about you, it’s not about your blog

Welcome to the Market Inside Out Podcast with Suzanne Longstreet, Emma O’Brien and Michelle Tresemer. It’s time to defuse the marketing mine field for entrepreneurs.

The Vicious Marketing ‘Psycle.’ [00:20]

Emma: Marketing to me was just this soul-destroying thing I had to do, that made me feel bad about my business… It made me feel like a loser. Marketing really made me feel frustrated and like a loser, because I, just writing a blog, was marketing. So I would spend all this time writing a blog, and then I would put it out there, and then nothing would ever happen. It’s like working hard and then crickets and then the cycle, it’s just like, “This sucks. I hate marketing.”

“This sucks. I hate marketing.”

Why you get into that ‘Psycle.’ [00:56]

Michelle: Yeah. I spend most of my time now reframing [for clients] what you just did. That whole blog thing you thought, “Oh, I need to do a blog.” And it has zero to do with a blog. And the second you just stay focused on your ideal customer, it fixes everything. It’s not about the blog.

If you were to just think, “Hey, is this going to reach my ideal customer?” You would have said, “No, it’s not. Maybe I should do this other thing. Where are they? Maybe I should pick up the phone instead, which would have been more effective.”

April Dunford’s Fax Anecdote’ [1:25]

Emma:  April Dunford, who is one of my heroes; she’s a positioning expert in the tech space and wrote a great book called Obviously Awesome. On an AMA someone was asking her, what’s the right channel to use?

And she’s like, [paraphrased] “Look, it really just has to do with the best channel for your audience.” She goes, “We once did this launch, and we were trying to reach car dealerships. And they were the one segment that our campaign was just not performing whatsoever. It was like we could not reach these guys.” She’s like, “So I wanted to find out why the hell are these guys so unresponsive when all the other segments are working?”

She went down to a car dealership….And she heard this noise in the background and the guy’s like, “Hey, we got a fax!” They run in the back and they grab this fax and they’re all excited. And they read what’s on the fax. And she’s like, “I’ve got you!”

She goes, “So we ran a secret campaign, and the channel was fax.” She’s like, “And we gave it a secret name, because no one would expect a tech company to run a fax campaign, but that was the only channel that these guys were actually reading. And it was the best performing campaign of anything, because they found the medium that the audience actually used. And in this case, it was a fax machine. It was not Facebook or LinkedIn. It was a fax.

Michelle: I’m always amazed when the clients get annoyed, because they’ll ask me what they need to do. And I’ll be like, “Well, your target market isn’t on these networks.” They will need a phone call. You need to go to these trade shows. You need to send them a frickin’ package to stand out, like go snail mail. It’s okay.

Suzanne: It’s not about the blog. It’s not about the content. It’s not about you….It’s about them and what they need.

“It’s not about the blog. It’s not about the content. It’s not about you….It’s about them and what they need.”

How to Break the ‘Psycle.’ [3:50]

Emma: [To Michelle] “…when you’re talking to a client, what’s a good exercise? What is a thought process to go through, to think about how to reach my ideal customers?

Michelle: I actually have an entire exercise just for this with a segment called: ‘A New Twist on an Old Avatar.’ It’s got all eight digital channels, and we walk and talk through it as if you’re talking about your ideal customer avatar. Everyone has that, right? If you don’t, use this Ideal Customer Worksheet to think about and sketch out your ideal customer avatar.

We then give it a twist, and we say, “Okay, if you’re targeting busy moms who are working and exhausted, how do you use your website to reach them? How do you use email?” And we brainstorm using this Tactical Brainstorm Worksheet. Sometimes it’s not email; sometimes it’s a text message.

Then we go through social and paid campaigns. We brainstorm all the ways that you could possibly reach your ideal customer. That’s always a big point of surprise, because half the time it’s not content.

“We brainstorm all the ways that you could possibly reach your ideal customer. That’s always a big point of surprise, because half the time it’s not content.”

You might think, “Okay, busy mom. She does not have time to read my blog post. She does not give a crap. She needs the bullet points.” So, your content is going to be headlines, bullet points, maybe a video instead, or podcast.

Today’s big takeaways for Defusing the Marketing Minefield: It’s Not About You

• Marketing doesn’t have to be a soul-destroying experience.
• You get trapped in the ‘psycle’ when you choose a medium for the medium’s sake.
• You break out of the vicious ‘marketing psycle’ when you focus on your customer, your target market, your ‘ideal customer avatar.’
• How you do that is by sitting down and doing a tactical brainstorm. It’s not about content, it’s about what your ideal customer needs, what they’re up against, where they are, and how you can help them.
• It’s really about the person (ideal customer) and not about us. “It’s not, I. It’s, they, my ideal customers.”

Thank you for listening to the Market Inside Out Podcast with Suzanne Longstreet, Emma O’Brien and Michelle Tresemer.