Your Marketing Is Outdated. Your 3 Circles Are Out of Sync.

The rules of online marketing just changed, and most founders didn’t get the memo.

Here’s what Founders need to know:

• Hype marketing isn’t as effective as it used to be. People bought into it and were left scarred by the discrepancy between the marketing promise and product delivery. Don’t oversell.

• The trust recession is real. Your audience wants to see ‘the receipts’ (proof that you can do what you’re claiming) before they buy. *If you’re new to business, read this article: The Chicken-Egg Dilemma. You Already Have The Magic.

• Ads are not working like they used to. The cost-of-living squeeze around the world has made buyers less likely to make impulse purchases. Appeal to logic and rationality in your organic marketing.

• Now that organic is back in fashion, the social streets are getting louder. Precision in targeting, messaging, and value is needed to cut through to your people.

• Be prepared for hand-to-hand combat (I’m kidding, sorta) to get people into your funnel. Founders, it’s going to take going the extra mile. The name of the game is: Relationship Building. No more standing on the sidelines.

• Dominate a format rather than a platform. Written, spoken, or visual. Pick a lane, get dangerously good, and repurpose. Deep insights with wide distribution will create a winning horse. *Not sure where to start? Take the Founder’s Voice quiz. It’s the foundation of magnetic marketing.

• Shop your format to newer platforms. First-mover advantage is real on social media.

  
  
  
  

Here’s an exercise that every Founder should be engaged in on a daily:

If you’ve read my other articles, you’ve heard this before: McDonald's isn’t slowing down it’s marketing. Coke isn’t taking weeks off marketing.

Watch and learn from the big players.

In my language, there’s a saying: ‘When the King’s son or daughter is being instructed, ordinary people should be taking notes’ (*paraphrased).

Marketing isn’t optional. It’s feeding your business. Keep the pipeline full.

Founders who win treat marketing like oxygen, not an optional task on a to-do list.

Imagine that you have 3 circles that need to overlap just right for your business to reach its current potential, without adding anything extra.

The last part of that sentence is important: don’t get caught up in new and shiny pursuits until you figure out this formula.

Without this formula, we’re continuing to build more and more things on top of something that isn’t working well. No bueno!

Your job as the Founder is to keep testing or moving these circles until they click into the 100% position.

This means sometimes you’ll make a move that increases that percentage, sometimes you’ll decrease it and other times your efforts will have zero effect.

All of it is data-rich feedback, if we take the extra step to understand WHY.

⚠️ It’s not an indication of your entrepreneurial ability when things aren’t moving upwards. This is the process of landing on what works BEST.

Bring a curious and experimental mindset to your marketing, and you’re already ahead of the pack.

These are the 3 circles to question continuously:

01 The Market /Target Client

1. What is the very painful problem that you are solving?

2. Who are the people with this problem who will do anything to solve it?

3. How do you know your answers for no.1 and 2 are correct?

🎯Find the pain and solve for the cause of the pain, not the symptom.

This distinction is important.

For example, as a marketer, my prospects often want the pain of not having clients or of having inconsistent clients solved. No clients is a symptom. If we try to fix this, we enter tactics land. Reels on Instagram. Video on LinkedIn… you get the point.

The problem could be poor marketing, a bad offer, a mismatch between the marketing and the offer, no transformation promise, or a service no one needs…

Also, without identifying the real problem that you solve, the offer and the marketing are lukewarm. It’s not enough to move people to make a buying decision.

When you can show the transformation path from problem to solution in a crystal clear way, the rest becomes easier.

“You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.” - Elon Musk

02 The Offer

1. Is your offer an obvious cure for the painful problem you’ve identified? Is the value undeniable?

2. If you raise your sign in a busy social street, do your target prospects immediately know that’s what they’re looking for? Is it irresistible?

3. Do you have the social proof that signals a proven solution?

A common mistake for new founders is putting everything but the kitchen sink in their offer, thinking that more will justify the price or value.

This is wrong. Not only does it create a fulfilment standard problem later on, but it’s also difficult to market. Which of the 11 bells and whistles of your service do you focus on?

In reality, the client doesn’t care about every additional thing that could be part of your offer.

They care about the one thing that solves the problem. Could you deliver that in a beautiful package?

03 The Marketing Message

Simply hijack your target client’s thoughts.

🚫 Please don’t attempt to take their minds to a different venue.

Enter into their train of thought.

Then use marketing to elevate your solution's position in their mind.

• Nike’s ‘Just Do It’ tagline. Picture yourself sitting at the edge of your bed early in the morning, thinking about how much you don’t want to take that run, and at the same time thinking I need to do this…'Just Do It’. It’s discipline but with a cool factor.

• Apple’s positioning is products designed for the creative to achieve more. They’re appealing to the person who already thinks of themselves in this way. This is the identity of their target customer.

Think about the last time you were in a bookstore. How did you decide which book to buy? 9.9999/10 times, I bet you select a book title that appeals to the way you were already thinking about that topic.

It’s even more obvious when we flip the script. The book you don’t buy has a title that you don’t identify with, whether it’s a values mismatch, a totally different world view or just plain undesirable to you.

📌Practical tip: Improve one thing at a time and track the outcome.

Each test will provide information that improves the quality of your decision-making over time.

Move each circle until all 3 circles overlap to create the best possible business result.

This exercise helps provide structure for the business development process.

“The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty.” - Proverbs 21: 5

Pick one circle today, design a test, run it for a sufficient number of days to get data-rich feedback, and then adjust.

I hope that saying, ‘most people give up when they’re so close to success’, becomes a practical insight through this exercise.

Most people quit inches from breakthrough. Don’t. Pick a circle, run the test, then run the next one.

Let’s get to work.

Blessings,

Business Communications Strategist

Founder-led Media

P.S. *This post is part of my 30-day challenge: For 27 days, I’ve been posting daily on this Substack. It’s a new platform for me. I’m taking massive action to generate data that I can use to make decisions after 90 days. #Test-Trial-Evaluate I’ll share my findings so far after day 30. Subscribe if you wanna know.