Elimination, not addition — Kelford Labs Daily

“Attempting to appeal to everyone is a waste of time and money: focus your marketing efforts on your Probable Purchaser. By spending your limited resources reaching out to people who are already interested in the types of things you offer, you’ll maximize the effectiveness of your attention-grabbing activities.”

— Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA

Do you know what you’re supposed to focus your marketing on?

Or are you trying a little bit of everything?

Here’s one of the questions I ask my clients to help them know where they should focus their energy:

I ask, “What element of your business, if it were to suddenly go away, would eliminate the most value?”

So, if you have a list of services, which service going away would be most harmful to your customers?

If you have several products, which product, if it suddenly evaporated into thin air, would take most of your customers with it?

Or if you have a super thorough process, which component of your process, if you suddenly stopped following it, would damage your service delivery or output the most?

The answers to these questions probably popped into your head immediately, because it’s easier to work by elimination than by addition.

And often, the answer to, “what should I focus on?” is right in front of us.

We just can’t see it because we’re distracted by everything we shouldn’t be focused on.

But by identifying the element of our business that provides the most value to our very best clients, we gain a clue to the value we should be demonstrating the most.

Because that’s the whole secret to marketing:

It’s not a mystery. It’s simple.

Marketing is just demonstrating our value at a distance.

And choosing what value to demonstrate starts by identifying where our value truly is.

And we do that by thinking about the value we’d never want to lose.

Kelford Inc. shows you the way to always knowing what to say. Marketing positions and messages for hands-on entrepreneurs.