Growing Your Business – Is Your Marketing Broken?

Have you been feeling that although you’re doing everything you are told to do your marketing efforts are well… a lot of efforts for not so many results?

You’re not alone in this feeling. It is one of the concerns and question that I get the most from modern experts and entrepreneurs with a mission and a message and I have condensed it into: “Is my marketing broken?”

Of course, I wouldn’t be me if I were not to add the “… and-how-do-I-fix-it?” part.

The first thing you’re going to check is that you have these elements in place. It is what I call the “glue” that puts all the pieces of building a successful business together. (You can check them here: https://anarosenberg.com/how-to-grow-my-business/).

That will establish that we are on the same page when we say that we have done “everything”. As you can see, “everything” does not include viral videos or any of the latest fads. What it does include are the real essentials that a client-based business needs to thrive.

Now that we’re on the same page and while you are putting these pieces together, I want to share with you what exactly is going on in the people helping industry and the expert industry. That is going to explain why the feeling that your marketing is not working for your business as much as it could.

Some years ago it was revolutionary that experts even learn about marketing and becoming proficient in that language.

Experts as we are, we also love to learn so in our industry the trend to learn how to “grow your business” rapidly caught on. For my taste, it has even gone a little bit too far because people are becoming “marketing experts” instead of learning how to communicate the value of what they offer in their business so that people get it, which is what marketing really is.

Many of those “marketing experts” come to the conclusion that to make money they need to teach other people how to make money so you get more and more “business coaches” who have never had a successful business…

I said it.

Now, back to the real experts who want to make their business work. They learn things like how to put together a marketing message and they all show up in already crowded spaces and discover that is not enough…

Why?

Because there is something missing BEFORE people can even see or hear their marketing messages.

They are literally invisible to the people they could be helping the most.



The Starting Point

Let me explain…

This is pure human nature. When a human being is in front of another human being for the first time they “position” the new person in one of these 4 categories:

1. Provider of resources (what we’ll call “friend”) – Think back to the beginning of our time on this planet. We quickly needed to determine if the person in front of us was going to “give” and even “feed” us.

2. Enemy – This is a person who “takes away” from us. We won’t listen to anything a person has to say, including their marketing message if our brain has switched to the fight or flight response.

3. To be ignored – The reality is with over 7 billion people on earth most people fall into this category. We wouldn’t be able to operate otherwise.

4. Potential sexual partner – It is quite clear what this means. Now let’s take it to the business growth space. This is the category some experts occupy in the minds of their potential clients and they end up with clients that do not invest in a long-termed working relationship.

IMPORTANT DISTINCTION - Only the experts that make it into the “resource provider” category have a chance to be seen and heard.


The solution?

A positioning strategy first to give your good work a fair chance to be seen and to give yourself a fair chance to be seen, respected and well paid for your expertise.

Once an experts lands into the category of “resource-provider”, they are still going to be classified according to the kind of resources they provide and at what level they provide them.

What does it mean to you and your business?

It means that in a crowded market place with people having shorter and shorter attention spans - research shows that our attention span is less than the attention span of a goldfish – an expert needs to have a strategy to instantly position themselves as a Leading Authority in their space.

Then and only then, their marketing message can be seen and heard loud and clear by the people who can become their best clients.


Next Step

There is an art and a science to position an expert as a Leading Authority and to get you started take this first step… Go back to all those marketing efforts and see if they are not landing you in the enemy or to be ignored categories. If you are asking before giving, if your sentences start with “I” or “my”, if you are “taking away” and not providing resources first, clean that up. Any of those automated messages in social media asking for followers, for retweets, even for people to hire you, delete them. (What I mean is asking people to hire you as soon as they meet you).

If you want to go a step further, look at your social media profiles and content through the 4 initial positions we have discussed. What changes would you try to land on the “resource-provider” category? One last tip to help you with that: remember that adding value is about helping people get closer to the outcomes they want to achieve. Those are the resources you should be providing (resources to help them get closer to where they want to go faster).




Till next time… remember your awesomeness is portable. You can take it with you anywhere.
With love
Ana