You’re creating something new. Or thinking about it.
How do you launch it? How do you create a powerful promotion strategy for it? How do you get the word out? How do you make sure your new thing is a success?
Marketing. It’s unavoidable. It’s necessary. It’s changing.
The rules are changing. The game is changing. The old ways aren’t working any more. Have you noticed?
There’s a new way. It’s not easier, but it’s so much more powerful.
The tried and tested marketing model
Here’s how the old way goes…
- Define your ideal customer
- Make something you believe that customer would pay for
- Wrap that something in marketing that will hit that customer target
- Sit back and watch your sales grow
It’s been around a while. It seems entirely logical. And it’s what most people teach (and profess to use).
And it works really well…
…if (and this is a big fat hairy if), you already know who your customer is.
And I don’t mean theoretically (like you sketched it out on some funky worksheet), I mean you actually, literally, really, experientially know who they are. Because you’ve sold stuff to them already.
I once created a brand new 3-month coaching program in two weeks, concept to launch. We sold it out with 2 emails, in 3 days. Nailed. We were stoked.
But. We already knew our customer really well. We’d run an online conference 18 months previously, with the exact same customer, so we knew who they were. Precisely.
What happens if you don’t know your customer?
Indeed.
And further, what happens if you don’t know what the product is either?
The old method works really well because it’s operating within small margins of error. Existing companies use it to great effect when they research a new product, because they have years of experience with their customers.
The assumptions aren’t too hairy. It’s not a leap into unknown abyss, it’s a calculated step down a well mapped corridor.
But when you’re creating something radically new, when you’re birthing something that’s on the edge of your own comprehension, when you’re working out what-in-the-hell-it-actually-is as you go, the old marketing method doesn’t work.
In fact, it’s spectacularly ineffective.
Because making something genuinely new is inherently unpredictable and risky. And despite your best efforts to map it all out using marketing blueprints, you can’t predict the unpredictable. You can’t make the risky safe.
The claim that you can use old predictive marketing for genuinely new entrepreneurial creations is one of the most widely spread myths I see in business. It doesn’t work.
Here’s what to do instead
It’s really simple (but not easy).
- Reveal yourself – who you really are – and what you really care about, radically
- Create your work, say what you have to say, and share it, continually
- Allow your natural, organic, authentic tribe to show up
- Make things that serve them, and grow the tribe
Your natural tribe is just that. Natural. It already exists. They’re already out there. You don’t get to choose them. Just like you don’t get to pick your family. You get to discover them, as you discover yourself.
When you reveal your own essential shape, then you create space for the reciprocal shapes to find you.
The more you reveal yourself, the more your tribe will reveal itself to you. The more you discover yourself, the more your tribe will discover you.
And then you just make stuff that supports the tribe to grow, and your business grow.
There’s nothing standing in your way
The powerful thing about this new way? There isn’t a whole lot of preparation necessary.
You don’t need a plan (there is no plan).
You don’t need a website (just share your stuff on facebook).
You don’t need a product (you’re the product).
So, when there’s not much in the way, it tends to illuminate the inevitable excuses that we’re making to ourselves. The excuses that obscure the fact that we’re afraid.
It’s scary to disclose yourself.
But that’s the game. It’s powerful, it’s new, it’s real.
How can you start playing?
