Audio Lesson Four: WHERE
drop bait where the fish SWIM
To review, we now have a documented plan that reminds us:
Who we’re marketing to
Why they are motivated to buy from us
What we have to offer to get them into our sales funnel
Hopefully by now, you’re noticing that this is getting easier and easier. More intuitive to guess the next steps. Because it’s all based in foundational elements of proven marketing strategy. And it’s rooted in actual truths about you, your audience, and your ability to deliver value to them.
The rest of the story practically writes itself.
Let’s move on.
(If you haven’t completed Audio Lesson Three, or the corresponding section in the worksheet, turn back now or go all the way back to the beginning, if you must.)
oh, the place you’ll go
I shouldn’t need to remind you at this point, but I will. The goal is NOT for you to be all places at all times…nor to be all things to all people. You’ve done the difficult but important work of narrowing your audience to a definable niche; you are now rewarded with only having to be one thing for one group of people. And you should be able to easily identify the one best place to go find them, mingle with them, and offer them solutions to the issues they are struggling with.
This is all about eliminating waste. And let’s make no mistake, it is a waste to create content for, or make selling overtures to, people who aren’t inclined to work with you, and to broadcast these pitches in venues you aren’t likely to find your audiences in the first place.
And it makes no sense to spend hours creating content or sales pitches for people who won’t see them, won’t read them if they do, and won’t be inclined to be influenced by them.
What’s the point of that?
Nope. We’re going to keep you focused on a single market, with a single marketing medium, in a single content community.
For almost everyone I coach and train, there really is one, best answer. You’re this close to finding yours.
HAVE YOU FIGURED IT OUT YET?
I bet for many of you, you already have this figured out. It wasn’t brain surgery to get you here, but you did need the guidance and confidence to get here on your own. You needed to give yourself the permission to say no to a lot things so you can start saying yes only to the right things.
That’s the central premise of the book Essentialism, by Greg McKeown. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. Subtitled, “The Disciplined Pursuit of Less,” you might’ve guessed it’s a foundational principle to not only this audio course and my approach to marketing more generally, but to my entire life. Maybe it won’t be a match with your own personal philosophy in the general sense, but it certainly will apply to your approach to marketing. If this course has resonated with you at all, it’s one of the best reads you’ll find, and it’s the first book I recommend to my coaching clients.
But back to you. And your marketing plan.
Where are you going to spend your time networking with prospects, delivering “content filling stations,” and becoming known as the thought leader who commands industry attention, premium fees, and domain authority?
Go ahead. Blurt it out.
The answer should be something like “LinkedIn.” Or “Facebook.” Or “YouTube.” Maybe even “Instagram” or “TikTok.”
It could be “Conferences.”
“Social media” is a wrong answer here. Social media is not one thing…it’s many. Maybe even infinitely many, the way things are going.
You can’t keep up with all of that. And neither can your audience.
More importantly, they almost certainly do not live, work and play on all of those platforms, as I challenged you to think about at the conclusion of the previous lesson.
If you can show me a buyer who spends just as much time on TikTok as they do on LinkedIn, I’ll show you a unicorn. Ditto Facebook and YouTube. We all have our preferences.
Including your audience.
Some examples, if you’re still struggling
Let’s use the Thought Leader Collaborative as an example, the learning platform and networking community I co-founded with Jay and Heather Harrington. We know it’s not for everyone. But what we also know is that a great many sales professionals, service professionals and consultants spend a great deal of time on LinkedIn. And they go there with the express purpose of both making and encouraging business decisions.
They may also be on Facebook. But they don’t go there to talk business. They go there to be with friends and family. They spend their “professional” time on LinkedIn.
A global pandemic only drove these individuals there in greater numbers, and with greater urgency (as other forms of marketing, networking and business development got put on indefinite hold overnight). No more events. No more lunches, cocktail invitations, or conferences. LinkedIn was it. And will be “it” going forward, to a large degree.
Nobody needed to teach these people how to use Facebook. But they did need to learn LinkedIn if they wanted to compete for opportunities on the world’s largest B2B digital networking platform.
That’s where we came in. But we stayed narrow. It’s not LinkedIn learning for everybody. Or even “social media training” for sales professionals.
It’s LinkedIn for Lawyers. And it’s more than training. It’s community. It’s networking. It’s dialogue and discussion. It’s coaching. It’s peer advisory and knowledge sharing. And, yes…it’s training, at times.
Then lawyers wanted us to invite other service professionals into the community: accountants, consultants, architects, engineers, insurance professionals. So we did.
Your audience has its own water cooler. Go there. Deliver your content. Share your Whats generously and with an abundance mindset. Convert your subject matter expertise into thought leadership…and thought leadership into new business.
And, if it suits you, consider joining us in the Lab.
HERE’S THE HOMEWORK
This is a one-word assignment.
Complete the following sentence, and write this down under Where in your worksheet:
I will focus my marketing and networking activity on _________________ .
That’s your Where.
It’s also your permission slip to stop doing everything else…whatever’s not generating tangible return on investment.
This discovery generally concludes the main takeaways of this audio course, but we have two more lessons left…plus a bonus lesson!
You should see it clearly now. You will focus on a single content platform, for a singular audience, who can be found in a single community. And everything else is a distraction and a waste of time. Stop doing it.
Let’s move on to Audio Lesson Five: HOW. I’ll walk you through the steps you’ll need to map out a plan to put all of this into action. That’ll come tomorrow. So take the rest of the day to breathe a sigh of relief. Everything just got easier.
See you next time.