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Deirdre Martin: There are loads of people in the marketing space who'll happily take your money hand and all. I'm sure you've met them. Web designers, social media agencies, paid ads people, you name it. It pisses me off so much because spending money on marketing when your brand strategy hasn't been done is a complete and utter waste of your time and money. You see every LinkedIn post, website rebuild, podcast appearance, new logo update, every speaking slot, it all amplifies your message. But if you haven't done the deep work, then buyers still can't tell exactly what they should hire you for. So all that money and effort is broadcasting confusion. Brand strategy should come before marketing because it defines the message, and marketing then Dials up the volume. Somebody should be telling you that before they take your money. the problem starts when marketing is expected to attract clients from the message and decide what the message is all at the same time. Marketing's job is to put your message out in front of your ideal buyers. And it will do that, faithfully, even when the message it's spreading hasn't been properly decided. Think of marketing as a microphone. Whatever you plug into it, it just comes out louder. A specific message gets louder, a vague one is going to get louder too. The microphone has no opinion whatsoever on what you've handed it. So when a founder tells me LinkedIn is working, but it isn't really reliable. I look at who their ideal client is and whether this person might actually even be on LinkedIn. And then I'd look at the words that the buyers are meeting before I'd suggest considering even looking at another channel. And a quick way to see whether you have your messaging dialed in is to answer this one question. What do you want the right buyer to remember you for? If the answer needs a long explanation, more reach. Will spread that same long explanation, but people won't remember it. So sure LinkedIn won't be reliable, And this is where reaching out to a social media marketing person or a website person or an ads person seems like a perfectly sensible investment, but it can send you in the wrong direction. And you might be thinking, But Deirdre, I need to raise my profile. Yes, you probably do. Being known by the right buyers for a specific expensive problem has a monetary gain for you. And I completely understand why raise my profile becomes the brief. One of my clients used those exact words when he first came to me. I came to you because I want you to raise my profile. He'd correctly spotted the symptom. His business was dependent on referrals and he wanted a wider route into the market. Profile gives you recognition. Brand memory needs one more decision. What should a buyer associate with your name? That decision is so important because the more often buyers see you, the more often your message gets tested. You see, when people hear a persuasive message repeatedly, it can cause them to agree with it at first, but
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past a certain point, people become bored and then they'll start to produce these counter-arguments. So, from a business perspective, every repeat exposure is a chance for a buyer to understand your message or to pick holes in it. And that's the risk with paying for marketing before paying for messaging. The buyer sees you more often, yet every encounter results in them trying to figure out what the fuck it is that you actually do, what's the problem that you solve, and why your approach is worth choosing. So a room full of relevant buyers who remember you for one costly problem can do way more for your pipeline than broad recognition ever will. Spending money on ads to get more leads will expose the same weakness faster. They put more pressure on whatever happens when the lead needs to take the next step. One founder I've worked with, got loads of leads from working with an ads expert, but they weren't the right leads and hardly any of them converted. And that is a message problem with a price tag attached to it. The leads were coming through, but they weren't all the right buyers. And those who were couldn't see the value in what was being sold. Sending another batch of leads towards that same explanation would create a larger pile of wrong or undecided buyers. And this is also why a new website or another run of content can half work You're taking action, and when you take action, you generally get a little bit of traction, right? Referrals still close because trust arrived before the pitch. But when a colder buyer reaches your offer and asks a basic question and the whole thing comes back to you, that's where it's still clear how unclear the messaging is. could somebody on your team explain the value of the offer in one breath without ringing you first? Again, if the answer is no, the message has to be decided and settled upon before you try to multiply it with your marketing. And I can hear the objection. The message is fine. It says what we do. But let me tell you, my friend, accuracy is a very low bar for messaging. We provide risk assessments and strategic cyber advice may be perfectly accurate, but a buyer can read it twice and still have no clue when to call you or why your company is the right choice for them. Good messaging comes from a sequence of decisions and a shit ton of editing. The first decision is psychographics. I want to know what the buyer is worried about when he's driving home from work. What he's already tried before, why he wants to succeed, what that success looks like, and so much more. Demographics may tell you that he's a co-founder of a fintech in his late 30s. psychographics tell you he wants to build a brand that becomes a global household name, and to get there, he refuses to become the sort of salesperson he disliked in his corporate life. That difference changes the message completely. The next decision is brand archetype. That sets the role the brand plays in the buyer's mind. Are you the calm authority who
reduces uncertainty? Or the challenger or disruptor who forces harder decisions? The answer changes how the company behaves before it changes any of the words and the messaging. And then tone of voice decides how that archetype sounds. Most cyber businesses that I've come across have inherited their tone from the sector. So the website looks and sounds like a policy document and the LinkedIn content sounds like a corporate brochure. It's mostly very professional and super polished. I don't think I've ever seen a cyber founder in any of their messaging have any swear words or anything like that in it. But fuck yeah, it can, right? choose your archetype on purpose and with purpose. Your buyer should recognize the same business coming through in your messaging, whether it's in a proposal, a social media post, an email from any of the team, a sales conversation, that same archetype should come through. The next decision is deciding the offer. Your offer gives the buyer something definitive to purchase. It spells out the result they'll get, the steps that they need to take to achieve it, and what their life will look like at the other side of that. A list of services or features leaves a potential to assemble all of that themselves. And if that's what they have to do, they usually won't bother. Once you're clear on who your buyer is, you have your brand archetype, you have your tone of voice, and you have your offer. only now are you ready to write the words that buyers will see. I'm a story brand certified guide, and one of the ways that I like to do this is to work through five foundational sound bites: problem, empathy, answer, change, and end result. it's the peace framework, P E A C E. So the problem names the issue that's already costing the buyer. empathy shows that you understand the fear or frustration or sadness they're feeling as a result of the problem. The offer is the answer to the problem and gives them a credible, doable next step. And the change describes their transformation or how their life or business is going to look afterwards. And the end result is the future that they will whip out their credit card to buy right now. When you have clarity on what all of those things look like, your next task is editing it so that a 12-year-old could grasp it and relay it to somebody else. the real test of a message is what happens when you're not there to explain it so that other people understand. This was literally the work that I did with one cybersecurity founder over the past year. We worked on the business, we worked on the messaging, we did the whole lot: positioning, packaging, offers, you name it. And his revenue grew from 95,000 to about 385,000 in one year. Another founder estimated that non-billable business development was taking at least half his time closer to 70% of his time. He had plenty of marketing activity, but he was paying for every conversation twice. once to create it, and then again in time to explain what the buyer had already seen. So if you want to know whether this is happening in your business, Add your marketing spend up and then add up how much you are per hour and how many hours you've put into creating content, being on podcasts, writing newspaper articles, writing anything that you've contributed to, speaking slots that you've done. All of the preparation around all of those things, and then divide that by the number of clients that you can trace back to any of that work. And if the client number is zero, you already have your answer. If you can't trace the route, well, then resist the urge to turn up the volume just yet. Now, even when you're settled on your messaging and it's super clear, it can still come undone in a couple of ways. So watch out for this. The first is deciding the message once and then not go near it again, but loads of changes are happening in the business. So whether you're adjusting prices, introducing another service, adding a retainer, or hiring other people to deliver. A while later, the marketing is still describing that original version, the OG version of your business, So whenever the offer or the buyer changes in a meaningful way, you need to look at your messaging again. The second is handing the whole thing off to a marketer and asking them to do it. Marketers are great, copywriters are exceptional, but even the best marketer or copywriter can struggle to articulate your messaging if you haven't been involved. They still need you to decide what your brand is about, who it's for, what the buyer is being asked to actually buy. If you skip that part of the conversation with them, you may get professional and polished words back. possibly a lot of AI slop because they're literally pulling it out of the sky. But they'll just be amping up that same uncertainty. So before you spend another minute or cent on reach and marketing, test the message you're already putting into the market. I've linked my free brand story messaging builder below. Use it on the message you're putting into the market right now. If figuring out the problem is the hardest part, your buyer research is maybe a little bit light. If figuring out the answer is the hardest part, you need to make some decisions around your offer. And when you've dialed in your messaging, your marketing will help your business explode. But if you're in the first camp and you've been paying for reach on messaging, you've never finished, that's okay. You can't know everything, but now you know. So do the messaging work and then turn up that volume.