Money talks

Marketer: We want you to work on our new campaign.

Artist: Great! What’s the budget?

Marketer: Ha ha ha! There’s no budget. It’s “user-generated content.” You’ll get paid in exposure.

• Marketoonist, user-generated content creep

There’s a lot of noise out there.

Your marketing is designed to make noise about your product, and cut through the noise from others.

The problem with being focused on making noise, is that you will get some noise back - and this distracts you from the real signal - making money and delivering impact.

In terms of noticing what’s working - money completely levels the playing field.

People can take meetings, do free trials, accept samples, agree to tests, do an introductory lesson, “Like” your post, tell you your ideas are great, and more.

It’s all hot air until you get paid.

What you’ll also find, is that only a small fraction of the noise provides legitimate clues towards what will enable that.

When you start marketing something - it can be really easy to fall into the trap of posting frequently for “engagement” and “awareness” or so your customers know you’re around.

Yet if it’s not selling product (it almost always isn’t) then it’s not something worth noticing.

This is why the third part of Find-Offer-Notice is so critical. You’re continually looking for ways to find potential customers, offer them something of value, and then notice what parts of your offer are working.

The beauty of this approach is there’s always another move you can make. There’s always something better you can be doing to be finding customers and offering them something.

Unless your product is hot garbage that no-one will use ever, marketing always enables further moves that get your product in front of more potential customers.

Sometimes there’s discomfort in asking for money. Some of this can be offset by sending people to a payment page or sending them an invoice, but you’ll also need to work through the belief in yourself and the value you bring. Know it well and be upfront about what that value is.

Awareness, views, reach, “Likes”, and web traffic are all nice things to receive. Some of them are clues towards what is working and what is not working. But don’t mistake it for activity that gets you paid.

Sometimes putting out an offer that’s unpopular and off-putting will perform better - because while most people won’t enjoy reading the offer - the people who will pay you to solve the problem for them will be beating down your door to get it done for them ASAP.