When most people think about marketing they think about funnels, websites, traffic, lead magnets, email list, copy and more.
These are essential components to building a successful online marketing business but they are not primary. Let me explain.
What’s keeping the majority of people from succeeding in the online space is this dogged obsessions with the tools of marketing and not the substance of marketing.
The person running the business.
You see, business is an extension of who you are as a person. The best place to build your marketing is from the inside out.
Before you go out there and try to implement all the marketing strategies take some time to first make the internal shifts first.
Otherwise, your marketing will not garner the results you are looking for.
So here are the three steps you can take to help you fix the internal problem that’s keeping you from successfully marketing your product or service.
Before we delve into the strategies this article is primarily for three types of people:
1. You are professional and you’re working on a full-time career and you’ve made all the attempts online and have not been able to make it work. You’ve not been able to transition.
2. You’re an entrepreneur and you are hitting a revenue barrier in your business and are looking to scale. You’ve tried all the strategies and hack but can’t seem to get past this wall.
3. Lastly, you are an influencer, creative and you want to move forward in your career and you are trying to get to a higher level. What am I going to share with you in this article is not a quick solution.
Here are the three keys to marketing pretty much anything.
1. Clarity
When you have a clear vision of where you want your life and business to go, you don’t need to do much. It’s literally going to come to you.
Here’s a little formula that I use with my clients to help them get clarity.
What + Why + Who = How + When
The key is to figure out what you want, why you want it, and who do you need to become in order to get the result you are looking for.
You have to figure out the longer-term vision for your life, like why do you wake up every morning? What do you want to see happen in 5-10 years from now and who you need to become to achieve this? Once you figure this out you’ll be able to persevere and not give up on your business. When you get to this level of clarity, all the unknowns will fall into place. Clarity has a way of bringing into focus what’s important.
2. Identity
There’s a lot of of talk about authenticity these days in the marketing world but most have no clue what it means to be authentic. Marketing at the end of the day is all about connection; it’s the ability to connect with your market. You can’t connect with your market if you have no idea who you are and what you stand for. Value matching can only occur when who you are on the inside and what you stand for is animated through your marketing. We’re living in the age of automation and most people are looking for genuine conversations. It’s important that you figure out your identity by clearly communicating your why and philosophy to the market. Don’t share what you do, but who you are.
3. Positioning
How you are perceived in the marketplace is what will determine if you will succeed in the online world. This is what I call value-based positioning. I see most business owners get the positioning wrong and wonder why they can’t get any traction in their marketplace. Value based positioning tells the marketplace you are different and you will naturally be seen as the go to person in your market.
Labelling and perception are everything in marketing. How the market perceives you is how you will be labelled. Most entrepreneurs are selling based on price and convenience, which devalues their positions. They are seen as a commodity and hence don’t illicit any emotional attachment to the brand. Remember, your value is only as good as your perception. You can’t separate the two.
I know we haven’t addressed specific marketing strategies and tools, but if you can figure out these pillars, the tactics, strategies and tools of marketing will start to work for you.
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