Before You Waste Another Minute On Yet Another Marketing How-To

Stop being a homeless marketer, knocking on people’s doors begging for the magic wand to fix your lead generation problems. Jumping from blog post to blog post, from ebook to white papers, from podcasts to video courses, and yet nothing is working.

You may also think that marketing automation is the autopilot you’ve always dreamed of until you pay for it and get a rude awakening that it also requires enormous time and effort.

The problem is today’s instant relief mindset, fueled by marketers trying to get visitors to their websites with promises of oceans of leads and mountains of customers.

Most marketers who produce content to educate others have good intentions, the problem is these are out-of-context how-tos and training resources. They are random acts of marketing.

HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Kit Example

This kit is not new, I’ve seen it before but it popped up in my email inbox this morning so I’m using it as an example.

HubSpot’s kit includes:

• An introductory guide to internet marketing
• Blog post templates
• A search engine optimization (SEO) guide
• A social media publishing calendar template
• A landing page optimization guide
• “Science of Email’ report
• Annual “State of Inbound” report

These are good resources and you should download them and check them out.

The problem is, this type of content saturates the web. The instant relief mindset makes people look for quick fixes to their immediate problems and resources like these appear to be what they look for. Yet when they download it and read it, they realize they don’t know what to do with it.

For example, blog post templates included in the kit. What in the world are you supposed to be blogging about in the first place to use these templates with?

These are building blocks, without proper context they are nothing. NOTHING.

Let me be clear. Resources like HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Kit are necessary, but they don’t work if they are not part of the overall inbound marketing strategy.

Everything you read, watch or listen to online to learn how to do something simply will not be effective, you will be disappointed.

HubSpot’s kit, webinars you participate in, ebooks you download, blog posts you read, all of this, and everything else is building blocks that require a strategy to set the context for your business.

Your Business, Your Context

The building blocks are always the same, but the context in which they are used is always different. HubSpot’s kit does not say “for Joe’s Coffee Shop” because it’s applicable to all businesses. Yet Joe’s Coffee Shop provides its own context (its own strategy) to put these building blocks together to attract and convert Joe’s ideal customers – Strategy A from the diagram.

On the other hand, Mary’s Hair Salon wants to attract their own ideal customers, so they set their own context with their own strategy  – Strategy B.

Yet, on the other hand, HubSpot has its own customers to attract and convert. They set their own context and strategy – Strategy C.

Inbound marketing isn’t hard if your efforts are focused in one direction.

You need to switch from an instant relief mindset to long-term care to provides predictable and lasting relief for your pain.

Instead of spreading yourself thin going a mile wide and an inch deep, go an inch wide and a mile deep!

Before You Read Another Marketing How-To

Ask yourself, what’s my strategy? Or rather, where’s my strategy? I’m pretty sure you don’t have one, most businesses don’t have one because they either don’t know how to create one or are afraid of creating one. It’s really not your fault, for the most part, there’s no solid framework for creating an inbound marketing strategy out there. That’s why all marketing how-to content does not mention creating a strategy and how to create it. There are blog posts I’ve read that skim the surface – barely. They cause more harm than good because they do not emphasize the critical – CRITICAL – importance of a solid strategy.

If you’re a marketing agency and you engage in random acts of marketing on behalf of your clients, shame on you. That’s why your churn is high and you can’t retain your clients. I’ve written about this on the Local Search Association’s blog a while back. When 11% of marketing SMBs find internet marketing to be “not effective” and 2% claimed they didn’t do any at all, according to BrightLocal report, that really says something about the industry. At least we know that 13% of marketing SMBs are honest, not sure about the rest though (sarcasm, but it’s true).

What’s your context?