The status quo of modern marketing isn't designed for you and me.The hard truth is that most marketing strategies are designed for massive corporations, while small businesses, consultants, coaches, and other experts are left feeling that the advice they’re given just doesn’t fit—and they’re right. We have two choices: we can struggle to force our businesses into an ill-fitting mold, or we can reinvent a system that works for us and allows us to thrive. I don’t know about you, I prefer door number two. 💌 Reach our team at hello@smco.studio. 🌟 Ready to work together? https://sarahmoon.net/get-started
👀 Have you made this mistake?
Hello Reader,
Over the years, one of the most common trouble points our clients have experienced is that that created their brand positioning AFTER creating their pricing and modality for their services. In fact, I've even flagged pricing problems that would cause clients to lose money if their business grows. (Marketers typically can do this math in their heads pretty quickly.)
Brand positioning should be driven by a deep dive into your mission, your why, your audience's core problem/aspiration. Unfortunately, most folks jump ahead and create the modality/pricing and reverse engineer the marketing.
This is doing things the absolute hardest way. (We hate the hard way, folks.)
This is why with my consulting clients, many meet my suggestions around pricing with the objections: "My audience can't afford that," or "My clients won't pay for that." Their value equation is wonky (technical term) because they've accidentally galvanized their audience around a price point, not value, a mission, or a transformation.
I wrote about this on the blog this week through the lens of different modalities:
What do pricing and business models have to do with digital marketing? A whole lot actually!
You see, when you get crystal clear about the transformation you facilitate and, ultimately, your mission and values, what you’re doing in terms of actual nuts and bolts business practices often ends up misaligned and infringing on your brand integrity.
As a result, that means that our clients have to really do some rethinking that challenges the (this is a good thing!). And, some of the newer, more innovative ways of working come up. This is because what they realize is that they need to create more spaces for “brain work,” that is the thinking and creative untangling you need to do to really make an impact.
(You can read the rest here.)
That's why I, marketing person, push people so hard to answer those big questions and then look at their pricing/packaging/offerings,/modalities/whatever and see if the two sync up. And make changes if they don't. These may be big changes, they may be tweaks. You may need to build a new audience — but there's a way to do that, and it's not has hard as you'd think. (Seriously, it's not!)
Talk next week,
Sarah
Founder/CEO, SM&Co
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Hi! I'm Sarah Moon!
The status quo of modern marketing isn't designed for you and me.The hard truth is that most marketing strategies are designed for massive corporations, while small businesses, consultants, coaches, and other experts are left feeling that the advice they’re given just doesn’t fit—and they’re right. We have two choices: we can struggle to force our businesses into an ill-fitting mold, or we can reinvent a system that works for us and allows us to thrive. I don’t know about you, I prefer door number two. 💌 Reach our team at hello@smco.studio. 🌟 Ready to work together? https://sarahmoon.net/get-started
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