2025’s Marketing Lessons — Kelford Labs Weekly
The most exciting marketing ideas of the year.
Over the past year, I’ve written over 100,000 words in this newsletter. Which is about the length of a 300-page book.
That much writing has shaped my thinking on a few topics, and it’s given me the opportunity to explore new ideas and new approaches to marketing.
- I realized that most marketing optimization was actually procrastination.
- I dug into an alternative to the marketing funnel that puts you in control.
- And I recognized that promotion is actually about engaging with process.
So as we begin to close out the year (this will be the last Kelford Labs Weekly for 2025), I wanted to share the marketing lessons I found most practical for myself this year:
Optimization is Procrastination:
“To scale, we must have something to grow. And nothing times anything is still nothing.
You can’t scale a business without customers, you can’t grow a service offering that doesn’t have clients.
So we can’t procrastinate on doing the hard work of selling a single person by focusing on selling to everyone instead.
Get one client first, and let them lead you to more.
Instead of trying to get them all at once, and getting nothing at all.”
The Lesson: Before you try to scale or optimize your marketing operation, you need to get started.
You need to have gained at least one client as a result of your efforts.
You need to focus on selling before you focus on scaling.
There is No Funnel, Only Distance:
“Seen this way, there is no sales funnel, no top or bottom. There is no need or urge to ‘fill the funnel’ or focus on ‘top of funnel activities.’
No, there are only prospects and clients and their particular Distance from us. And at each Distance, we are in control.
That’s the key here: When you see your content as operating at a distance, across time and space, it puts you back in the driver’s seat. It’s not about merely mass messaging as many people as possible and hoping some become clients by sheer dint of numbers.
It’s about selecting the prospects we want to reach and crafting messages that exert our own creativity and control over our process.
We call this process, and the tool we use implement it, the Marketing Rangefinder.”
The Lesson: When you look at your marketing as the work of moving prospects one step closer at a time, instead of making the sale from far away, you focus more on what matters to them, not just what matters to you.
And by focusing on that, you end up motivating them to move closer, instead of ignoring them or scaring them away.
Promotion is about Process:
“So in those moments where I struggle to promote myself, to put myself out there, to be in the spotlight, this is what I’m going to lean back on:
I don’t have to do ‘publicity,’ I just have to engage with my own process, publicly.
That’s all my marketing needs to be. My LinkedIn posts and videos. My speaking appearances, my networking, my newsletter.
Marketing isn’t about talking ourselves up, in that crass and uncomfortable way. It’s not about saying, ‘Look how great I am.’
It’s about showing, about pointing at our process and saying, ‘See? Isn’t this interesting? Isn’t this valuable?’
And we do that by engaging with our process publicly.
That’s how we promote.”
The Lesson: Our process is what sets us apart, and it’s what makes our marketing stand out, too.
By focusing on what we do and how we do it, we demonstrate to our ideal prospects that we’re the best option for them.
Because our process prioritizes the same things they do.
Thank You
Thank you for being a subscriber, and for reaching out with your thoughts, questions, and feedback.
This year, I got to hop on calls with subscribers and talk through messaging challenges, newsletter content ideas, Marketing Rangefinder applications, and many more questions specific to readers just like you.
I’m always eager to hear from readers, and at this time of year, I’m especially interested in how I can make this newsletter even better next year.
So, what did you find most useful about the newsletter this year, and how could it be even better?
I look forward to hearing from you!
– Joel
Reply to this email to tell me what you think, or ask any questions!
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