How to Not Suck at Marketing: the 3 Ms

Most people get marketing wrong because they don’t understand the fundamentals. The three essential components of marketing are your market, your message, and your medium.

[1:30] The very first thing you need to get solid on is your market. 40% of your success in marketing is about the market, another 40% is your message, and only 20% comes from your medium.

[1:55] It’s important that you focus on a niche and really drill down on one specific market. When you niche down you become a specialist and can speak that market’s language.

[3:00] Value building boils down to helping your market to achieve and define their goals. Most people go wrong by trying to serve too large a market. Small business owners are not a niche because of all the different variations that can occur between businesses.

[3:30] Jobs, Pains, and Gains is a formula that you can use to understand what your niche really needs. What jobs do they do, what are the pain points that you can help alleviate, what are the things they want from their business that you can help them achieve?

[5:05] This isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it thing. You will be constantly refining your idea of who your market is. It’s vital that you get clear on your market before you do any sort of marketing.

[6:45] If you’re going to advertise or network it’s important that you understand what your market wants and that you convey that message to them. This is your value proposition statement.

[7:30] Your value proposition statement is not something that stays static, it’s something that evolves and gets better and better over the course of your career. Refine the message by listening to your clients.

[8:20] The medium is where many bookkeeping professionals go wrong. The first thing you have to think about is where your market spends its time. They are going to be in a number of places and you want to intercept them wherever they are. Get in there with a value-first mentality.

[10:25] Don’t throw away your existing clients once you identify your niche if they don’t fit. Start to market to new clients in the niche you’ve chosen and allow your business to evolve over time.

[11:00] Get focused and learn the ABC’s of marketing because it’s going to save you a lot of time, it’s going to save you a lot of money and stress, and most importantly, it’s going to attract those quality clients.