Business Tip for Culture Makers #314: Save Marketing You Love

What if everything — even advertising! — is a learning opportunity?

What if there are possibility models and live-action, inadvertent marketing teachings everywhere — even in your inbox?

Let’s learn from what we love.

You know how you sign up to lists and emails and then your inbox hates you for it…?

Every once in a while, when you get superb emails that thrill and delight you, or super-excellent piece of marketing that inspires you, tag it. Save it. Immediately.

Right there and then in your inbox, tag or categorize the email as “non shame-y marketing” or “inspiring copywriting” or “stellar” (or, or, or) and save it.

It will disappear from your inbox (good!) and get saved to a folder.

Use that tag over and over again and you’ll develop an archive of material to review and learn from.

Then, every month or so, sit down and read the marketing you saved.

Deconstruct them.

• What’s working?
• How did they do that?
• Is there a structure or an approach or vibe that’s making this marketing so inviting?

You could even print them out and mark them up and look for the patterns of what you like.

• Did they start with pain points (probably not)?
• Did they start with a vision?
• What excited you and made you want to lean in rather than out?

Make mental notes of the patterns you’re attracted to and the tactics that impact you…

…and then apply those frames and tactics to your own work.

Knowing what You Love Gives You Patterns to Replicate and Concrete Tactics to Try In Your Own Marketing

I find, for example, that I love concrete, tangible examples and languages.

I love metaphors and analogies because it helps me visualize tricky concepts.

I love stories of how people (not the coach) applied the work and got results. (Rachel Rodgers owns this game. I LOVE HER EMAILS.)

I also love it when people name a phenomenon or experience — like literally give it a name, like, say The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand, ahem — and make me realize it’s not just me, it’s A Thing.

(Tara Gentile is a superb example of this. I always learn super useful things about patterns and collective experiences of entrepreneurs from her sales emails.)

I also find that I recoil from marketing that leads with a problem and am attracted to marketing that starts with a common set of values or vision.

As a result, I try to lead with vision rather than pain in my own emails and sales pages, too.

Another thing to do:

1. Start saving everything from one or two advanced, exceptional marketers in particular for 2-3 months.
2. Then sit down and look at all those emails, in order.
3. What you’ll likely see: how they put together a launch, what their publishing/email marketing rhythm is. Now you’ve got a map of a sales funnel – and that tells you how you might build yours, too.

Side note: when you’ve got no dollars for marketing courses or coaching, this is a way to figure it out on your own. Look for the patterns across time.

Watching how others you admire do what they do is instructive.

You can see what  a marketing sequence looks like as it builds up to launch day — and that’s particularly important to get, on a visceral level, if your own sequence looks like this:

make-a-thing –> announce it with an email and some social media posts –> hope for the best.

(Tara Gentile says that’s not marketing, that’s throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it sticks.)

I’m personally still unlearning this make-announce-hope habit and now more proactively and consistently planning out my sales and all the communications lead up to it.

Now, I’m planning events or programs 2-3 months out and starting to market for them at that time, and build in frequency towards the very end.

I don’t do huge, high-pressure launches. I think they’re dehumanizing for both audience and seller and take too much a toll on the launcher…and that matters to me.

(I’m not interested in success formulas that burn us out. I feel it’s an internalized form of violence.)

But when I start talking to people long in advance of the deadline, they have time to prepare their budgets and their calendars, and I have time to educate rather than convince, and I don’t have to do those gruelling, scary, 5 day launches.

So go ahead and learn from others —

go ahead and clean up your inbox by tagging things into folders (yay!) —

feel free to keep signing up for those email lists —

and save and tag marketing that lights you up and figure out what exactly you like about it…

…so you can create that outcome, too.

This Business Tip for Culture Makers is part of a series. You can find more of them here.

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