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5 pm on what's becoming a tedious and rainy Thursday night.
You're sitting at your desk, anxiously looking at yet another reporting dashboard.
As you parse all the jargon-filled graphs, you are once again grabbed by that feeling of despair: "if that's not working, what should we do?"
"What's our next move?"
You feel like you've tried it all: LinkedIn, Product Hunt, G2/Capterra, Slack Communities, Demand Generation.
Heck, you even hired that 10k/mo LinkedIn Ads agency last summer, thinking they'd bring you the growth you needed.
When you take into account the 30k that you paid them, it's all even.
With a bit of shame, you remember that 4k/mo cold outreach agency that did the same the summer before.
"What's the key to all of this?", you ponder, "H come marketing seems so easy on LinkedIn, but so hard in reality?"
"Should we go harder on demand generation, or ramp up our paid spend even more? Maybe if we switch creative agencies our creative will convert better."
You don't know it yet, but now's the time for the hard-to-swallow pill.
As you reflect back on your last few months or even years, you get filled with fear, and an impending sense of doom: did you really do any marketing?
You did everything the LinkedIn gurus told you to do - is it time to stop listening to them?
"How do brands grow?"
"Why do people buy?"
"Who should I trust?"
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I can answer those questions.
1 - Brands grow by being mentally and physically available.
In other words, memorable and easy to get.
2 - People buy because whatever you have to sell solves their problems.
If it doesn't, you'll have to create a problem for them or convince them that it does indeed solve a problem they already have.
3 - You shouldn't trust anyone on the internet who has something to sell - me included.
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But hear this out: you most likely haven't done any real marketing work to date.
What you've done is saw together a Frankenstein monster that you call marketing: part ads, part email outreach, part webdesign, part community building.
Now that monster is alive, and it's frightening.
Marketing isn't a collection of tactics - it has 3 parts: Diagnosis, Strategy, and Execution.
Most companies do #3 without ever thinking about #1 and #2.
This is what I help them do.