Many coaches, consultants and other service business owners believe there is a step-by-step ‘right way’ to do marketing. But you and I both know that’s not true. It’s actually a recipe for frustration as we try to jam our business into something that likely is not a fit.

Too many business owners spend all their time trying to fit their square peg business in a round hole, chasing the wrong audience or focusing on marketing that really doesn’t matter.

When you’re using a formula it is based on the assumption that we all have these cookie cutter businesses.  The truth is that effective marketing is part art, part science and includes a lot of testing, tracking and deep understanding of your ideal clients. There’s no easy plug-and-play system that will work for all businesses all the time… instead, it’s about knowing what uniquely works for you.

I’ve shown you how to begin tracking what marketing activities are working with three simple questions. Then we also covered three ways to begin improving your efforts (Including some great insights and examples to get started).

And finally, I discussed three common mistakes many service business owners make when trying to market their services.

Now that you have a good understanding of what’s working (and not) in marketing your business, we’re going to talk about how you bring all of this together into a custom strategy that delivers results for your business.

Step 1: Start With YOU

This may sound very counter-intuitive when designing a marketing strategy, yet starting with YOU is actually one of the secrets to designing a killer marketing strategy.

In the past month, I’ve been working with a client who felt really stuck in her marketing.

She knew she needed to blog, but just wasn’t excited to do it. Focusing on writing content for search engines was killing her creativity and trying to follow all the rules on social media made her feel stuck.

As a result, every time she sat down to work on marketing, the activities felt really hard and heavy. She was dreading doing them.

Why? These weren’t a good fit for her! She’s fun, engaging and a bit sassy with an off-beat sense of humor. Video, in-person events and 1:1 connections work so much better. When we switched her focus to those marketing activities (with messaging unique to her), everything fell into place and clients began lining up to work with her.

Here’s the thing – you have unique skills, experiences, talents, passions and a preferred way to work with people.

All of that goes into making up your unique style and completely influences which marketing activities are suited for you.

By starting with YOU, you’ll select marketing activities that you feel confident with and that will make a huge difference in how you implement your strategies.

Step 2: Know Who You Serve

How does YOUR ideal client describe their problem?

How do they describe their feelings?

Do you have their exact words written down?

If not, it’s time to go find them and listen to what they have to say. Take notes, write down their feelings and their exact words.

This will change your business forever.  

Clients want to know you get them. You understand where they’re at, what they struggle with and that you have a solution for them.

The best way to do that is by using their own words.

And as an added bonus… this makes all your marketing so much easier because you already have a lot of words to use. You’re not having to work hard to come up with the perfect words – just go back to your notes and pull out key phrases.

Step 3: Create A Signature Offer

As a service-based business owner, a signature offer is KEY to standing out from the crowd and showing your ideal clients that you can take them from their current problem/pain to their desired result.

When I was in coaching school, I had a lot of instructors tell me that the best way to get a client was to offer a sample coaching session.

So I did just that. I went out and offered lots and lots (more than 100) sample coaching sessions.

I had a bunch of GREAT coaching sessions with people… but at the end it was very awkward to sell them on my service.

My offer was very generic and didn’t have a clear outcome I was helping my clients achieve. So, very few of them would hire me because it wasn’t clear what they’d get for their money, time and effort.

Having a signature service makes you memorable and helps people understand why they need to work with you and not someone else. Be clear on exactly how you help and why they need you.

Step 4: Develop Your Marketing Strategy

Once you’ve gone through the first three steps, you have a clear idea of HOW you want to market, WHO you’re marketing to and WHAT you’re offering.

Now it’s time to bring it all together into your own personalized marketing strategy.

This is where the art + science come into play.

Now it’s time to take your HOW, WHO and WHAT into selecting your ideal marketing activities that deliver real results to your business.

•         Stop trying to follow what everyone else is doing.
•         No more wasting time with activities that aren’t paying off for your business.
•         Avoid keeping up with the fads that don’t deliver results.

Instead, you’re armed with great information about what’s working (and not) AND you’re ready to commit to a custom strategy that works for you.

Bottom line – this step will require a lot of testing, tweaking and learning. This is how you start to make your marketing work FOR you.

Let me know!

I’d love to know what you’re going to do after reading this blog post. Comment below with the first thing you’re going to do to massively increase your marketing results.

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