Kelford Labs Weekly: Deceptively simple marketing

Most things in marketing are deceptively simple.

Consistency. Focus. Pace. Demonstration.

Consistency is simple: All you have to do is do the same thing over and over again.

Focus is simple: All you have to do is less and less every day.

Pace is simple: All you have to do is take your time and be patient.

Demonstration is simple: All you have to do is show your prospects what it’s like to work with you.

And yet basically nobody does any of this.

Not because it’s complicated, but because it’s simple. We humans have this horrible tendency of dismissing the simple and craving the complicated.

Why get enough sleep and drink enough water when you can huff green powders you bought off a podcast?

Why make long-term investments for tomorrow when you can make risky bets right now?

Why write a newsletter every week with a narrower and narrower focus when you could invest a few thousand bucks in a shady lead generation service?

Like so many things in life, the toughest thing to understand and appreciate about marketing is that it’s actually really simple: it’s just hard.

Because here’s the thing: getting enough sleep is difficult! Drinking enough water is tough! Being patient and waiting for returns on long-term investments is actually very hard.

Just because it’s simple, that doesn’t mean it’s easy—that’s what makes it deceptive, after all.

There’s no point in beating ourselves up if we find the simple stuff hard, because it is. But there’s no need to make it more complicated just to make it feel easier.

Because, frankly, it’s easy to create a complicated analytics dashboard you’ll never use. It’s easy to spend a fortune on ads that nobody will ever notice. It’s easy to pay a lead generation service to send you glorified spam.

That stuff is complicated, which makes us assume it’s bound to work. But what you’re paying for is mostly just a bunch of overhead disguised as insight.

On the other hand, it’s hard to write a consistent newsletter or blog. It’s hard to cut out service offerings that the market isn’t responding to. It’s hard to turn down wrong-fit work in the pursuit of focus, and it’s hard to decide what you should even focus on.

But all that effort is aiming somewhere, making it far more likely to yield results.

We shouldn’t deceive ourselves. Consistency, pace, focus, demonstration—these things are simple, but difficult.

But taken one at a time, they compound. And they do get easier as they become habits.

So, first, determine what you can do a little bit of for your marketing, over and over again every day. Like working on a short blog post you’ll publish once a week.

Then, give yourself way too much time to see results from it. Like, a year.

Then, figure out what you’re going to not do make plenty of room for it. Like cutting back on scrolling LinkedIn.

Finally, use this new habit as a way to demonstrate what you do for your best clients. By delivering real value in every post.

It’s just that simple, and just that hard.

So don’t be deceived by the deceptively simple, it’s harder than it looks.

But it works.

Read More:
The Easy Part is the Hard Part
The Sacrifice of Focus