Personalize Your Plan for Fame

The illustration depicts the many roads to Rome, but Rome, in this case, is fame. And being known by the right people at the right time for the right things is really what marketing your firm is all about: a little bit of fame.

Phases of Fame

Here’s what this looked like over time:?

• Before the mid 1990s: A prospective client would ask, “I wonder what firms do good work in my town?” Each of them had a reputation, so it wasn’t that difficult to figure out, but even more than that, each firm had a local reputation that they really wanted to uphold, so there was a built-in accountability because you might be sitting at a different table in the same café Friday night. In that world, the moat was a geographic one. You were either nearby or you weren’t, and long-distance relationships in marketing were only for the big firms in NYC or London.
• Early days of the internet: A prospective client would ask, “How can I find someone to help me, right now?” Google had some semblance of a system that was harder to game. Your potential client didn’t need to know about you so much; they just needed to know what to look for. Google was a matchmaking service. They introduced you to an expert, you did some exploration, and the relationship was born. Your reputation was helped with maybe some awards or some favorable press, but it was still pretty simple. Heck, if you needed a boost, you could always do an AdWords spend, which (at the time) carried a reasonable cost.
• When social media came around, before it became a cesspool (excluding, I think, Linkedin, or not?). There’s not much to say about this phase. Overlaying a marketing plan on your social media presence (other than LinkedIn) was always a fool’s errand. It helps with recruiting for your team, but otherwise it gives you the illusion of doing something, but mainly it’s a lot of trees falling in the forest where nobody hears them.
• Now, the days of confounding complexity. Here’s where we are now. More on that below. All of a sudden there are too many options, we don’t stick with one of them long enough, and it’s easy to just give up.

Illusionary Attribution

Remember not too long ago when digital marketing was going to usher in a new era of attribution? Soon we’d know what to do, what results we could expect from our time and money, and our CRMs would be chock full of actionable insights on “lead attribution.”

Total and utter bullshit. Marketing, now, is more confusing than at any period in the history of humanity. We have some rough idea of what works, only to double down on that tactic and wonder why the results don’t match. We hear from a peer at a conference who swears by their one tactic, we try it, and wonder if we just misheard.

Simplify Within the Complexity

What’s the message in this mess??

1. Keep your plan very simple. Don’t mix too many tactics.
2. Execute it with admirable discipline. You are not allowed to write a marketing deck. If it doesn’t fit on one page, it ain’t happening. You know this. I know this. The people you have appointed to write the 39-page deck know it.
3. Make it your plan and not somebody else’s plan.

On that last point, it really has to fit your personality. Here’s an example, and it’s just an example. Say all your peers are telling you that you must be active on LinkedIn, and they quickly add that there are ways to play that game that’ll yield much better results. “Don’t just post and be yourself, but hire someone who has figured this stuff out and then work the plan.” So you quit resisting and decide to hire someone who tells people how to do that for a living.

But it just isn’t “you.” It feels fake. It doesn’t fit who you are. You hate it when you’re on the receiving end of that stuff, and so you don’t apply yourself like you should. And as you might imagine, it doesn’t move the needle.

The message in that example isn’t that cold LinkedIn outreach doesn’t work—the message is that it’s not a fit for you.

Here’s another example. Someone tells you that the only way to build a sustainable marketing plan is to have an email list. But writing doesn’t come naturally to you, and besides that you’re targeting the fashion industry and it’s pretty unlikely that someone is sitting at their desk anxiously waiting to read an email about marketing in the fashion industry.

A Simple, Proper Plan

Let’s expand that list above. If I were going to design a specific marketing plan for you, whoever you are, here’s what I’d do.?

1. Make sure it fits your industry. How do the buyers consume things? Where do they spend time? Maybe it’s listening to a podcast or attending trade shows or skimming LinkedIn or whatever.
2. Overlap that with something that’s within the wheelhouse of your particular personality. Are you a talker, a writer, a thinker, a dreamer, etc.
3. Pick only one thing. If you are surrounded by a driven, mature, entrepreneurial team, here’s where you can divide and conquer, with each person selecting one thing, but a different thing. If you master that one thing and then want to do more, fine, but don’t half-ass several things.
4. Make sure that the choice feels like a challenge that combines a certain amount of terror andexcitement, but mainly ensure that you’ll learn a lot while doing it. What you learn in doing this “thing” must pay off on whatever curiosity you have. For me, here’s a screenshot of the articles I’m working on. The illustrations are all done, I’ve finished the research, and I’m slowly outlining some thoughts. Then when I sit down to write the weekly email, I’m so excited to spend some time with a subject and learn, learn, learn. It fits who I am and I keep learning.
5. Be disciplined. And here’s the reason why: figure out how to consistently drop opportunity into the funnel, and you’ll eventually figure everything else out. And if your business fails because something just doesn’t fall your way, you’ll be fine with it because you gave it your all. The inverse of this is also true: if you don’t figure out your new business problem, nothing else matters.

Think Differently About What’s Possible

One of the things that can make all this less daunting is to think about how some of the smaller things you might already be doing, or could spin up quickly, might lead to bigger things in a sort of roll-up effect. Here are some crazy ideas to get you started:

• Most of us aren’t very smart unless we’re on the phone with a client or prospect, where our minds are finely tuned and we’re “performing.” Have someone else read through a transcript or listen live to the well-worn statements you make, consistently, and write them down. Later on, expand them. Why do you believe those things? Why do clients nod and react positively when you share that insight? Now turn them into a 5,000 word narrative kind of booklet, buy a copy of the Vellum app, turn someone loose illustrating it, and then output it as both a booklet to have printed on one of those nice commercial HP color printers and a Kindle title. List it on Amazon, but mainly give it away to prospects.
• Sign up for one year with a podcast booking agency and get on 24 podcasts where the audience overlaps with your ICP. Make some connections, learn how to be a guest (which is the best way to learn how to be a host), and then start your own podcast. Don’t worry about audience size—just think about how you can reach out to prospects for a public conversation, using the podcast as the platform to do that. They’ll love the spotlight, everybody will learn a lot, and you’ll build some relationships that might lead to work (but don’t be pushy about that part of it).
• Instead of randomly posting on LinkedIn, write out the ten biggest mistakes you see your clients making. Not about how they work with you, but how they miss opportunities with their clients. Make it a weekly series. And then maybe turn that into the booklet idea, above.
• Find the conference programs for three popular events in your space. Now compare the topics that they covered; not the keynotes, but the breakouts. Note how the topics changed every year. Now take a stab at why that happened and what it means. Start an email conversation with those some program managers and see if something comes of it. Write about the trends, and try to predict what might be coming around the next corner.
• Maybe forget cold email. Instead, use one of the online tools to turn that email address into a physical mailing address and send someone a handwritten note. Or your booklet. Nobody does direct mail in our space, which means it’ll stand out.

I’m just making stuff up, here, and maybe none of these are great ideas, but you have to do something, and that something should be different and fun and educational, for you and for your audience.

We all want to get to Rome, but there are many viable paths that’ll get us there.