How To Succeed In The Three Biggest Marketing Challenges

I like to think of myself as a pretty good salesperson for my professional services.

After all, I’ve been doing it for 34 years, reading hundreds of marketing books, thousands of articles, and studying with the best marketing gurus.

But marketing remains a challenge for me and most freelancers. If not, we would all have more clients than we could serve, we would be paid high fees, and we would never have to worry about where our next clients would come from.

And we wouldn’t need the thousands of marketing coaches and consultants like me who offer services of all kinds to help you attract more clients.

So why is marketing so challenging?

There are many marketing challenges, however if you look at marketing closely, there are really only three great challenges that give us more problems.

Learn to meet those challenges and your marketing will be more successful, easier, and more fun.

Here are those three marketing challenges:

Challenge n. ° 1. Clearly communicate the value of what you offer. Someone won’t buy your services if they don’t see the real value to them. Your message cannot be vague or confusing; it must be clear and beneficial.

One way to focus on the value of your service is to define the three main attributes that your service possesses. One or two is not enough; five or six tend to dilute your message.

So, for example, a sales training company might want to emphasize that their training is guaranteed to increase sales, improve sales confidence quickly, and can be delivered virtually in 45-minute online modules.

That is easy to understand and obviously beneficial. That kind of clear and valuable message is likely to generate attention, interest, and response.

It seems simple, but not that easy to do. In my experience with thousands of freelancers, their messages tend to be vague, unspecific, and weak in terms of value.

And if that value isn’t clear, prospects won’t respond.

Taking the time to work on your message, tweak it, and test it until you get a favorable response is one of the most important things you can do in your business.

To be successful in this endeavor, you need to get inside the heads of your ideal clients and ask them what they want the most, what problems they frequently struggle with, what doesn’t work for them, and what could make their work easier and more productive.

Jaynie L. Smith of consultancy Smart Advantage says that 90% of companies don’t really know what their customers value the most. It’s no wonder marketing messages are so bad.

You can improve your marketing messages by reading and doing research (ask Google), sending questionnaires to your customers (Survey Monkey), or running a virtual focus group (via Zoom Video). Ultimately, you want to know their biggest challenges and what they value the most.

When you have that marketing intelligence, it will be much easier to create powerful marketing messages.

This is challenging because it takes time and deep thought. But if you realize its importance, you will invest your energies to create a powerful message that makes your service attractive, interesting and attractive to your ideal clients.

Challenge # 2. Make your business visible with repeated impressions of your message over time. It may take several impressions before someone responds to your marketing message.

Just today, I noticed a message from one of my top-level connections on LinkedIn. When I checked the message, I noticed that he had sent me a total of 13 messages over a period of one year.

The messages were really very good. They had the right tone and excellent calls to action. It’s just that I don’t pay much attention to my LinkedIn posts and had completely missed the first 12!

He understood the value of repeat impressions over time and had developed a system within LinkedIn that had allowed him to send a unique, personalized message every month for a year. Very impressive.

If you had only sent one or two messages, it is very likely that you would not have seen them.

Again, my experience with most freelancers is that their marketing visibility is random and inconsistent at best, non-existent at worst.

As you may know, I have been emailing my list almost every week for 21 years. That is visibility. It really is quite simple, but not that easy.

If you want to be effective in your marketing, you must identify marketing strategies that allow you to get your message across to your potential customers consistently.

And again, this is a challenge. What is the best marketing activity for you, your personality and your talent? How can you fit something into your schedule and do it consistently, not for a few weeks but for years?

The question is not just what marketing strategies to use. Networking, chats, blogs, email newsletters, webinars, social media, and direct outreach can all work.

The more important question is what strategies will work best to you and how exactly you can implement those strategies without spinning your wheels.

You are looking for proven step-by-step instructions so you can assess whether a strategy is right for you and something that you can fit into your schedule on a regular basis. Remember, sporadic deployment is a waste of time.

Implementing visibility strategies requires commitment and perseverance. Is growing and being successful in your business important enough to make that kind of effort? If so, you will be able to find the best strategy for you.

The final challenge may be the most important of all to overcome.

Challenge n. 3. Maintain the right marketing mindset and attitude over time, despite setbacks. If you can’t maintain the 3 Rs of Success – Responsibility, Resourcefulness, and Endurance, your marketing will never achieve the results you want.

These 3Rs are absolutely essential.

Responsibility it is the posture in which the ball stops with you. You are the only one who will find a way to attract customers and you will not give up until you find that way. You will not make excuses or blame circumstances, but you will be responsible for making the results happen.

Inventiveness it is the ability to use your talents and abilities to quickly find smart ways to overcome difficulties and find solutions. And to be resourceful, you can’t be filled with doubts and fears of failure or rejection. A responsible person is committed to finding a way; a resourceful person tries every possible way until he discovers the best way.

Resilience it may be the most powerful trait of all. It’s what allows you to bounce back from adversity, setbacks, and even failures. And if you are working to attract great customers, you will inevitably experience all of that many times over. People who are not resilient don’t even try, let alone succeed.

All these essential qualities are in short supply. But if you work to grow those qualities persistently, over time, they will help you succeed with the first two challenging things in marketing: messaging and visibility.

Despite these three marketing challenges – messaging, visibility, and mindset – there is good news.

Improving your skills or abilities, even a little bit, in any of these three challenge areas will increase the effectiveness of your marketing.

There is no perfect way to tackle all three challenges, and you can’t do it in strides that get you there overnight. But you can work on all three slowly, persistently, making small gains each week.

When you improve your messages, you will start to see a better response when communicating with your potential customers. Marketing then becomes a game that begins with the question, “How can I communicate my value more clearly and powerfully?”

When you increase your visibility, You will also notice a better response because, to some extent, marketing is a numbers game. Your question might be: “How can I get my message across to more suitable people this month?”

And when your responsibility, resourcefulness, and resilience improve, You will see that playing becomes easier and more fun. The 3Rs are the fuel that allows you to persevere through the first two challenges.

Where do you start

Start by admitting where you are now and then commit to a objective (your WHY to be in business in the first place), a objective (something specific you want to achieve), and taking action (the actual steps you will implement to get there).

Yes, marketing is a challenge. But meeting those challenges is worth it.

Regards, Robert