Why you might be stuck.
When I started my first business in the mid-2000s I created a marketing plan to market my products.
You know the drill.
I created blurbs about the products, sales copy and catchy titles for the blog posts I wrote promoting my products.
My email-marketing welcome series talked a lot (very much so, in fact!) about my products.
I spent hours crafting compelling copy — at least to me (lol) — for emails designed to sell those products and felt worse than horrible when NOT A SINGLE person bought anything. At all.
Humiliation coursed through my veins for so long and for such a degree that I gave up email marketing all together. Why bother, I thought? The time suck and emotional costs were more than I wanted to pay.
Of course I continued email marketing but it felt like a chore. I felt stupid doing it. I was lazy, I thought, or just too dumb to get it.
The more I entertained thoughts about how stupid I was the more negative thoughts I had, until I had convinced myself that even my products stank.
I broke my own heart so many times I\’m still surprised to find it beating today.
So my heart — the very same one I crushed over and over again — breaks when I hear people say things like:
“… I’m just not cut out for this. I must be lazy or something.”
… “I guess I’m just not talented enough to run my own business.”
… “I’m so frustrated. This is HARD.”
… “I don’t think my product/service is any good.”
I get it, and I’m here to tell you that it does not have to be this way.
Forget talent. Forget #growthhacks.
Great marketers are not born fully formed out of the ether… we are made.
Years and many marketing mistakes later I figured out why my email marketing sales copy failed to sell anything. In the process of fixing my email marketing I gained a passion and energy level for marketing unlike anything in my life.
From my own experiences, there are basically two simple reasons why you might feel stuck on your email marketing.
You never create your own unique selling proposition (USP aka marketing message).
In other words your marketing copy sounds a little too generic.
Or a bit too \”scammy.”
Or like you\’re copying someone else’s words and not marketing from your own unique voice.
Or (worst of all), like you\’re boring your potential customers.
You lose interest and stop marketing altogether.
All of this makes sense, unfortunately.
These two reasons go together — a lack of a USP and a lack of interest in marketing — of course.
I see this all the time with clients. Much of their marketing sounds awfully boring, and they can hear it themselves, and pretty soon they get discouraged and quit.
That is a dreadful place to be. Please don’t quit. Because the truth is that anyone can get good at marketing.
So what\’s the solution? Sell outcomes/fix problems/spread joy.
The answer is to infuse some mind-blowing outcomes into your marketing message. Call it fixing your prospect\’s problems, if you want. Or maybe you want to delight them in astonishing ways. So be it
The answer is to add to these outcomes or problems your fixing a few of distinct traits (we call them differentiators) that offer your solutions delivered with a style all your own.
Then later you can rewrite all your copy to reflect your newly found awesomeness. Because it is awesome, what you want to do. Helping people find solutions to their problems reflects your heartfelt desire to want to help them.
But we get stuck when we sell our skills, which feels a lot like we\’re selling ourselves. And it becomes impossible over time to keep doing this.
Why? If you\’re at all like me, each failed purchase or lost bid feels like a personal indictment.
Selling my skills = selling myself.
Failed sale = I\’m a failure as a person.
It took me more than a decade to figure this all out.
I know from my own personal experience that rewriting your skills and assets to showcase how you will solve your ideal customer\’s problem(s) frees you from selling yourself.
Heck, you can even stop talking about yourself as it relates to sales entirely.
Here\’s one very true thing I know in my bones: Only people with a confident skill set can focus on offering a solution to a prospect\’s problem. Think about it. Confident email marketers know the sale is about the helping the customer, 100% of the time. When I feel confident I can help clients all day long and never get tired.
Here\’s another true thing I\’ve learned from repeated failure: I sold products when I had no idea how to fix my customer\’s problems. And in talking about \”my products\” and \”my skills\” and \”my qualifications\” all the time, I drove away prospects and got bored and tired of email marketing in the process.
Really, you\’d be shocked at how just switching from selling skills or products to selling outcomes will completely change the sound of your email marketing message from “yawn” into “Yes! Sign me up for that!”
Here’s to transforming your customer\’s lives by selling your outcomes.