Marketing = Communicating your message clearly.
Effective Marketing = Communicating your message clearly to people who care.
It’s Not What You Do, It’s Also How You Do It!
I was talking to an author recently who was disappointed about the quantity and quality of leads her book was generating. We set up an introductory call to discuss what she was already doing and what was the gap between what was happening and what she expected. Her opening statement was, “I followed all the instructions and completed [Name of Bookwriting Program] and have done everything on the list of their marketing plan, but I don’t have any results to show for it. Do you do anything different?”
Some additional questions elicited the following information:
- She followed the template provided to the letter when writing her book so it was fairly generic and could have been written by anyone in her (competitive) field;
- Her marketing plan was “set and forget” – she did things once and moved on which meant that any assets she created were gathering dust on her website after the initial push;
- Her target market was so broad that most of the people who saw her offer didn’t care.
It helped that I was familiar with the program she was using and I know people who are getting great results from both their book and marketing efforts, so I was confident that it wasn’t a flaw in the program, but in her implementation and her answers reinforced my conviction.
An Unpleasant Truth: HOW you execute a plan or follow a program matters just as much as WHAT you do. This is not new news. Most self-motivated people have seen people make the same mistake (or done it themselves) with exercise, diet, meditation, online courses and more. I know I have!
You’ve grasped the theory and gone through the motions of execution once… Or maybe a few times. Then you lose motivation or run out of time. If you’re honest, you admit that it’s you, not the program itself.
When it comes to personal disciplines (exercise, diet, meditation, reading, study etc) you can’t outsource them. Accountability (like a personal trainer or coach) may help, but you still need to show up and do the work. When it comes to business matters, you need to be honest: do you want this outcome enough to do the work well or hire someone else to do it for you?
Consistency and Commitment Matter
Business success, like most other success in life, isn’t just a one-off occurrence. It’s the result of consistent, commitment and hard work. This takes serious commitment to blocking out time for market research, developing ideas, and thinking through your strategy. When you look at your calendar does it reflect that kind of commitment?
I had this discussion with the aforementioned author and she admitted that she hoped that the program would not require her to do more than go through the motions and watch the sales roll in. When that didn’t happen she blamed the process.
You can go through every checklist on the planet and tick all the boxes…
You can do all the right things once or twice…
You can pat yourself on the back and sit and wait for results…
OR
You can commit to excellence, dig in with thought, effort, and consistency, automate as much as possible, and watch your results gain traction.
Creating a Marketing Machine for Your Book (and Your Business)
Like most of my clients, I’m busy and I hate wasted effort so I’m a big fan of creating assets and processes that can be used over and over again. That’s why I love Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing program. Some people I’ve shared this with have gone ahead and bought it, looked at the program, and asked me to implement it for them then teach key staff members what to do, others have set everything up themselves, and then taught their staff how to run it, yet others have become addicted to the process (as I did) and have set up a side-project of direct response magnetic marketing implementation
