“Stop the willpower madness”
Marketing efforts don’t fail. They stop. Like New Year’s Resolutions, our marketing efforts simply peter out and fade away over time.
But what should you DO?
What are you actually supposed to do to get the clients you really want?
Your marketing won’t work
Your marketing isn’t going to work. At least, not at first. It’s something I call “The Principle of Expected Failure”.
Best practices are the floor
It’s frustrating when potential clients balk at your prices, even though you’re great at what you do. Even though you know and follow all the industry best practices.
You’re not being paid to suffer
A lot of us were raised to believe that, if we’re having fun or doing something we find easy, we’re not really working. And that feeling can stick with us even as business owners, consultants, or creators.
You’re writing it, not reading it
“I can’t write about that, everyone in my industry already knows it.” A friend recently said that to me. They were worried that the marketing content they were working on was too rudimentary, too basic to be impressive. Have you ever worried about that?
How I’ll get what I want this year
I used to think the secret to getting what I wanted was to have an ambitious goal, to state it publicly, and to exert as much effort as I could in that direction, as fast as I could. But I was wrong. That doesn’t actually work.
Start as close to the end as possible
For anyone who struggles with coming up with topics for their content marketing, I can relate.
What is there to meet about?
Frequent marketing meetings are often a sign of marketing struggles. Of course, when marketing is struggling, we tend to meet about it. But the meeting itself is part of the problem, or at least a symptom of a greater one.
The future isn’t real
When we think about “the future” of our business or our marketing, we’re not considering real events. We’re imagining what might happen. No matter how skilled we may be at marketing, our vision of the future is quite literally a figment of our imagination.
Holding on by the eyelids
The business world often tells us to be aggressive. We’re told to project strength and hide weakness. But if there’s one thing that’s clear from my study of high-stakes decision making, strategy, and conflict it’s this: aggression is weakness, and calmness is strength.
Getting better at the wrong things
The astronaut Chris Hadfield once provided perhaps the most important lesson in all of business, life, and marketing: “No matter how bad a situation is,” he wrote, “you can always make it worse.”