The book
The Entrepreneur’s Secret Path to More Leads, Customers, and Sales
It has never been easier to put your message in front of the right people. That’s why the message itself is now the reason most marketing fails.
This is a practical guide for entrepreneurs and the sales leaders who run their marketing. It shows you how to find what’s wrong with your message, fix it, and lead your marketers to better work.
The big idea
For most of advertising history, the hardest and most expensive part of marketing was getting your message in front of the right people. So most marketing strategy is still about who to talk to and how to reach them, and companies hand the message to “creatives” at the end.
Today, a few dollars buys an audience more precisely targeted than anything Fortune 500 companies could buy a generation ago. Yet the rate at which businesses survive and thrive has barely budged.
Once reaching customers is easy, marketing fails for one of two reasons. Either the product isn’t good enough, or the message isn’t. If you’ve built something people buy, it’s almost always the message.
Your marketers can’t fix it for you. What they make depends on what you give them, and they can’t know your customers the way you do.
The good news is that you already know what you need to craft a message that sells. You just need someone to show you how.
What’s inside
Part I
How marketing persuades, why the message usually matters more than execution, and why you usually can’t hire someone to fix your message for you.
Part II
A chapter for each of the five problems behind most marketing that doesn’t work, with what to do about each.
Part III
How to document your message, turn your insights into the core stories behind every ad, build a marketing plan, edit your marketing assets, and test and scale like a professional marketer.
Who it’s for
Figuring out how to create a customer is your most important job, and no one else knows your customers as well as you do. You’ll learn how to:
You know how to close. This book shows you how to:
You already have all the knowledge and insight you need to fix your message.First Fix Your Message, Chapter 4
Free chapter
You’ll learn why the same talented agency can produce a hit for one client and a flop for the next, what each of the three kinds of marketers does well, and why most strategy firms still use tools designed for a store shelf. Tell me where to send it.
Already read it?
The Advanced X-Ray Audit checklist I use with clients to evaluate a message, and the workbook for documenting yours.
About the author
Over 25 years I’ve worked as a direct response copywriter, an agency strategist, and a director and VP of marketing at larger companies, helping hundreds of clients from startups to Fortune 500s. The book is the process I use with them, written down.
If you’d rather not do it alone, most of my clients start with the Core Message Blueprint, eight hours of facilitated sessions that turn what your team knows into a written message.