Are you Marketing READY or Marketing WILLING?

There’s a big difference between being ready and being willing.

I’ve found, through decades of working with my clients, CEOs and entrepreneurs, that most are definitely ready to do marketing, they’re ready to re-brand, or tweak their brand, and they’re ready to do it.

That being said, in many cases, they’re not willing. If you’re ready, but not willing, nothing is going to happen!

If you find you have a lot of false starts with your marketing; if you find you’re having a lot of false branding starts with your business; you’re very frustrated with your business not performing the way you want it to, then your comments might sound something like this:

“I just don’t understand why people can’t just take it from here.”

“I don’t know why our marketing is not working. I don’t know why my brand is not clear.”

Someone who is ready, they’ll say they’re ready to do it – but here’s how to find out if they’re ready but not willing:

You’re not willing if you’re not open to embracing change. There are going to be changes.

What does embracing change look like? You need to:

1. Be open to looking at your business in a new way.

2. Be open to the possibility that your brand does not represent you, and that you have to make some changes. You might even need to start a new identification process – it’s going to feel like starting over from a foundational level.

3. Be prepared to know that your marketing strategy or strategies are not effective. How do you know that they’re not effective? Because you have to do a profitability analysis for each marketing strategy, and you can’t be wedded to a particular marketing strategy just because it’s popular.

What do I mean by you can’t be wedded to a marketing strategy just because it’s popular? Let’s take social media as an example.

Instagram is currently the marketing darling of many businesses. I must admit, I love Instagram! It’s fun; it’s intriguing; it features creativity; and it’s quick. It forces you to really know your brand, because your bio space is so limited!

By the way – that brand bio can change on a dime by adjusting the website in your profile to reflect what you’re up to minute-to-minute, which is so important for attracting potential clients to your business.

Instagram gives you a chance to truly show people who you are—visually and verbally with video now! There are so many wonderful things to do with Instagram, so I absolutely love the platform!

But to be effective, you have to ask yourself: is your target market on Instagram? Can you reach them that way?

You can find out by looking at the analytics of your Instagram posting—the “Insights” tab on your business account can provide you with valuable data for your marketing.

What is the best day or days for you to get the most views? Time? Age group?

If the market you’re reaching isn’t your target market, how can you tweak your Instagram marketing that speaks to your target market? Even though you may not be primarily working with them now, you need to tweak some things if you want to attract them!

Are you open to creating marketing messaging that speaks specifically to your target market – even if you aren’t working with them primarily right now?

Don’t be intimidated by ages – issues with marketing span every age demographic! In fact, the most common marketing and branding issues are so pervasive across demographics, I’m writing my next book about it: Generation Why Not®?: 7 Principles to a Purposeful Life, Driven by Attitude, Not Age.

If you pre-order the book now for $33, you’ll be enrolled in a complementary 12-week course called Miracles, Money, & Mindset, which details for you how to implement the principles of Generation Why Not®? You won’t want to miss this opportunity – next year, the course will retail for $297, and won’t be available with the book purchase! Start 2019 off with the best foundation for your business!

Register me for Miracles, Money, & Mindset!

What are some of the values of Generation Why Not®?

• You are open to possibility
• You believe anything is possible
• You know you are a co-creator with the universe
• You embrace the unbending Universal Laws
• Your intentions are based on abundance, not lack or fear
• Your commitment to what you want and desire is greater than your commitment to fear
• You value clarity of purpose – clarity on the right actions

When you are truly living the core values of Generation Why Not®?, you can bring your personal brand into alignment with your business brand – which is the first step to building the best foundation for your business.

Once the foundation is in place, aligned with you, your mission, and your business, you’ll finally have clarity on your marketing strategy. Bringing everything into alignment is crucial – you’ll be lost in “marketing madness” without alignment of your brand purpose, intention, and messaging!

Before you’ll be ready to get down to the reason why your branding isn’t working, you need to take the time to ask yourself some core questions about your purpose and intention for both yourself and your business.

Maybe your branding is working, but you’re not seeing the return of investment that you’d like to see. Sure, you have lots of pretty Instagram posts, but the time you’re taking to create and post on a regular schedule isn’t bringing you the income you need to thrive – and it’s taking you away from your primary business!

This is where you need to do those qualitative analyses on your marketing strategies: check out Insights on your Instagram posts or Facebook boosts; monitor your Twitter feed for 2 weeks to count your mentions, likes, and replies. Once you have all the data compiled, review it with a fine-toothed comb. And, how much time, energy and money are you spending on these marketing strategies? What is your ROI (Return on Investment).

You’ll want to measure things like time of day, day of the week, age/gender breakdown, income breakdown—whatever key factors you believe are important to your demographic, name them and track them! The only way to accurately judge results is to identify and measure your branding and marketing actions.

Remember, you can’t manage what you’re not measuring!

Whether you’re a solo-preneur, mom-preneur, author, speaker, or CEO, you must measure everything you’re doing with marketing so you can see what’s working and what’s not. When you identify your marketing strategies that are working, calculate what the profitability is of those strategies.

Can you increase the profitability of your working strategies? Are there areas of your marketing strategy where you can reduce your investment somehow while maintaining the same results?

And for the strategies that aren’t working, or aren’t profitable, can you tweak it to bring it more into alignment with your brand? Maybe it’s a brilliant strategy, but the messaging is off, or the energy of it doesn’t ring true with your business brand.

Ask yourself what your ideal client might be seeing in that strategy that isn’t in alignment with you or your brand, and identify how you can bring it closer to your authentic brand identity.

Here’s another example: speaking is an outstanding marketing strategy for all of my clients – even the introverted ones! The introverted clients who don’t want to speak in person in front of a large group can give a webinar. (If you are introverted, by the way, I do media training with all of my clients to get the jitters out!)

Speaking is fantastic – a marketing strategy that everyone can use.

Now, you might be saying to yourself, “But Ruth, I’ve given five speeches in the last month, and I’m seeing no conversion! No book sales, no new clients, and no services sold. Speaking doesn’t work for me!”

That’s fabulous information! Why?

The people who booked you to speak at their events obviously understand your value, or they wouldn’t have thought it worthwhile to ask for you to speak to their attendees.

So why isn’t the audience seeing your value?

There could be two reasons:

1. Is your message inconsistent with your personal brand and business brand? (For more detailed information on this subject, check out this blog post from a few weeks ago on identifying your personal brand and your business brand.)

2. You do not have the conversion skills, language, and strategy to convert the audience into taking action.

And, by the way – conversion isn’t just saying at the end of your speech, “If you want to read more, buy my book!” There are key strategies to organically convert potential clients to actual clients without directly asking them to buy your book or service.

As you can see, you must be both marketing ready and marketing willing to get the results you’re after!

Ruth

P.S. I would love to help you with your branding and marketing strategies and show you ways to monetize your expertise, time and energy!
Join me October 19-21, 2018, in LA, Calif. Here’s the scoop to live events