I’m taking a break from working on my substack essays and I saw a friend ask, “how do I get better at marketing the work that I do?” and I feel an answer coming up so I figure I might as well write it down.
I would say the first step to getting better at marketing is to do an audit of the marketing that’s appealed to you. What are your favourite products, goods, services, brands, ideas, stories? List them out! What do you admire? How did you learn about them? What do you like about them? Evaluate your own behavior as a customer. Talk to your friends about what they like, why they like it, what’s helped them, pay attention to all of that. Your own behavior is full of great clues to learn from. Be sure to work backwards from the stuff you’ve actually bought, or otherwise spent real time and energy on.
2. Develop a good understanding of what is good about your work. How does it help people exactly? Who have you helped? How do they talk about it? How do people talk about it with other people? What is the customer/consumer/user behaviour? What are the pain points, frustrations? Here things can get a bit tricky – sometimes the painful thing to come to terms with is that your work might not actually be as good as you think it is.
Now when I say good I don’t mean like, morally good, or aesthetically good, etc. I’m talking about product-market fit, good in the eyes of the people that you want as your customers. Sometimes this process teaches you that you’re working on the wrong problem, or the wrong formulation of the problem. This is where you end up digging into your personal motivations. Why did you do the work that you do? What brought you into it? Who were you hoping to help?
(The tricky-tragic thing about a lot of what goes on in the world is that some people overoptimize for what the market seems to want in the short run, which can make you a lot of money, but might not bring you satisfaction because you compromised on your values, etc. I’m against this, which is why the tagline of this blog is “slow marketing in a growth-crazed world”, and why I recommend playing long games.)
3. Examine your presentation. How are you currently presenting your work to the world? Are you describing it using the language that people naturally use to talk about the problems they have, and how your work addresses it? The most elegant way to reach more users – it’s not perfect, but it’s generally effective – is to delight your existing users, and then use their delight as a beacon to find the others. “I’ll have what she’s having” is a very powerful thing.
As I’ve said elsewhere, often the most valuable work I do as a marketing consultant is to have a lengthy conversation with someone about their work, go through their blog, site, etc and look for stuff that is where the value is – it’s often hiding in some paragraph on the third page or something – and then bring it up front and center. Admission: I haven’t actually done this for my own marketing blog yet. I’ll get to it eventually…
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This was a quick 5 minute sketch, I’ll maybe edit it later – the cute thing is that it’s recursive, meaning I can improve this blogpost by re-reading it with its own questions in mind.
Further reading:
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Stuff I tell my marketing clients
(this might later be branched off as a separate blogpost)
You should have a website. It doesn’t need to be complicated. A simple one-pager goes a long way. Tell us who you are, what you do, what you care about, and how/why people ought to contact you. I also think you should have a youtube channel, because the discoverability is great, and it gives people a chance to get a sense of your vibes.
Describe your ideal customer, and inversely, describe people who wouldn’t be ideal customers. (It can be tempting to be kinda mean about this, but try not to be! It’s actually a more useful exercise if you try to imagine good people who are nevertheless not great customers, users, clients, etc.)
Do some freestyle rambling about what you do – whether in writing, audio or video. Talk to someone else about it. Record it so you can revisit it later and look for valuable stuff. I’ve been doing this a long time so I do have a sensitivity to it, I can provide a lot of value for people by identifying good phrases, etc. But you can also do this for yourself and I do generally recommend it.
I now make it a point to start every consult by asking, “tell me what it is you’re working on, then tell me what it is that you’re hoping to accomplish.” I then pay attention to what they say and how they say it, and look for where the excitement is, where the nervousness and hesitation is, etc. As Steve Jobs said, “it’s the meta-data”.
tbc