Troubleshoot your business Part 4: Marketing

This is part 4 of the Troubleshoot your business series, where we look at your offers - what you’re selling. You can read Part 0 Introduction here, Part 1 Niche here, Part 2 Brand here and Part 3 Offers here.

In the Tornado Method, marketing lives at the start of your Revenue Engine - the sequence of marketing, lead nurturing, sales and delivery which is how your business makes money. Everything downstream from marketing depends on how well your marketing works.

Let’s look at your marketing, and how well it’s doing.

The most important things you need to know about marketing

Marketing is a big and potentially complex subject. And as with all big and complex subjects, my favourite way of dealing with it is to break it up into smaller parts.

Marketing and Lead Nurturing

In the case of marketing, we’re going to break it into two parts:

Marketing: what you do to get their attention

Lead Nurturing: what you do once you have their attention.

The purpose of marketing is to get people to connect with you - either by calling you, or downloading a lead magnet from your website, or walking up and introducing themselves. As soon as that happens, they’ve turned into a lead, and our lead nurturing can start.

Breaking marketing up into two smaller parts is a really important thing to understand. Once you’ve grasped it, you know that your marketing is all about getting attention.

Inbound versus outbound marketing

All marketing belongs in one of two categories:

Outbound marketing is about getting out of the office and going to potential clients. Think cold calling, networking or the dreaded coffee meetings.

Inbound marketing is about getting content out into the world, and waiting for people to come to you.

On the face of it, inbound marketing is the way to go, because who likes cold calling, right? But there are pros and cons to each. I’ve written about the pros and cons before, but in short:

Outbound marketing is faster but requires that you keep doing it.

Inbound marketing is slower but can build up a lot of momentum.

Just one more thing before we get into troubleshooting.

Channels to market

One of the key terms used in marketing is channels to market. A channel to market is simply where you market. LinkedIn is one channel to market, X-Twitter is another. Networking event another, and (dreaded) coffee meetings yet another.

The important thing to know is that some channels (like LinkedIn) are huge. If, for example, you’re marketing on LinkedIn and you don’t feel you’re getting enough attention, keep in mind there are almost a billion people there - and it can take time and effort to master each channel to market.

With this in mind, let’s troubleshoot your marketing.

Troubleshoot your Marketing

You can do this exercise on a piece of paper, or you can use this Google sheet. Here’s what you need to do:

Part 1: Describe your Marketing

If you’ve spent any time on marketing, you probably have a detailed description of what you do. Let’s make sure we have the very basics by answering just 4 questions:

Now we can rate how well you’re doing.

Part 2: Rate your Marketing

In keeping with the importance of marketing, there are 10 questions you need to answer to determine where potential problems may be.

The questions are effectively in groups, and you need to get each group working (or correct) before moving on to the next group.

Rows 13-14 are about your website. These come first, because your website is usually where people first go to learn more about you. While building a kick-ass website, you may as well optimize it for SEO.

Rows 15-17 are about your channels to market. Mastering one big channel (like LinkedIn) takes time and effort, so don’t give up too soon. Make sure you have good ratings here before moving on to the next group.

Rows 18-19 is about what you’re doing. Channels like LinkedIn are noisy, so you have to show up frequently and consistently to get attention.

Rows 20-21 is about how well your content is working. If your rating are low, you may want to think about what you’re putting out.

These groups of questions are effectively a recipe for building marketing that works:

Build a kick-ass website. Optimize it for SEO.

Learn where your ideal clients hang out, then choose 1 (max 2) of those as your channels to market.

Show up consistently and freqeuently.

Tune your content until you get the results you want.

If this sounds too simple to be right, think about this:

These 4 steps build on each other. If you don’t get a previous step right, the next one won’t work.

So start small, make sure each step is working well (or is as right as you can get it), and then move on to the next step.

Part 3: What now?

When you have your average at 7 or above, your marketing is probably delivering the results you’re looking for. Congratulations - you’ve cracked one of the biggest problems solopreneurs struggle with.

If not, you have work to do. Follow the 4-step process above, get each step right, and you’re on the way to getting more leads than you can handle.

Your homework - and your challenge 😁

Now it’s over to you. Once you’ve done the work, email me and let me know what you found. Was it insightful? Did you struggle with any of the questions? Did you add any of your own?

I’ll see you next week.