20 Profitable Pieces Of Marketing Advice

1.People love "free". Use it to build trust. (E.g. Content creation, lead magnets, the help you give during a sales call).

2. If your heart isn't in the product you're selling, how will you convince others to buy? Find something you believe in.

3. Competition is a non-issue. Customers aren't maximizers (looking for the best), they're satisficers (do I believe this person can solve my problem?).

4. Selling to previous customers and to a tribe that trusts you is 10x easier than selling to people who've never heard of you.

5. Distribution is not marketing. Marketing is about selling and that starts with research. Think of marketing as qualitative market research instead.

6. The best way to convince people is to demonstrate you can help them by... actually helping them (for free).

7. People don't have short attention spans. Your content just sucks (according to the audience).

8. Don't sell features. Do the cognitive work of translating it into a benefit. If you don't, you're leaving that work to be done by the lead. (They won't.)

9. You can't target "anyone living on Planet Earth". Figure out how much money you need to make per year, divide it by $100. Now, you know you need X people per year who'll give you $100 one time in a year. Multiply that by 1000 and that's how tiny your SAM (Serviceable Available Market) can be.

10. If you don't choose a niche to serve, the universe will force you (e.g. can't pay the bills anymore). Don't let it get that far and just do it from the start.

11. The best product doesn't win. The best product out of the ones the prospect is considering (the consideration set) wins. (I.e. you don't have to beat everybody, just the ones in the consideration set.)

12. People are lazy. If it seems like you're genuinely trying to help them and your product is good, they'll do business with you. (Think about how relationships work, did you carefully consider every man/woman on Earth, or just the 10-20 ones with whom you had a connection?)

13. Become a micro-celebrity to the people in your niche. When they think of solving their specific problem you want them to think of you.

14. Getting new customers is much more important than keeping customers despite what everyone tells you. You will never stop churn; and even at 0%, a lack of churn can't grow a business. Even happy customers can outgrow you, and that's okay. Acquire new customers before you need them.

15. If people only want to work with you, you've effectively eliminated competition.

16. People are much more motivated by the prevention of significant downside than they are by the prospect of significant upside. (Loss aversion.)

17. What generates results today may not tomorrow.

18. What doesn't generate results today might tomorrow.

19. Don't create demand. Identify existing painful problems on which your people are already spending large amounts of money.

20. If you have a starving market, you can screw up almost everything else. If you don't, doing everything else right won't save you.

Bonus

21. Price and the quality of a customer often don't scale linearly. Sometimes 2x cheaper means 4x more headaches (customer support etc.), and 2x as expensive means 1/2 the issues.

22. Niche is pronounced as niche and not as niche. Saying niche or even niche is not the correct pronunciation of niche.

Thanks for reading. Hope some of these gave you some ideas that you can apply to your own business. If you're into content about solopreneurship and marketing fundamentals, I write about that daily here.