6 Questions For Inspired and Profitable Marketing Every Time

The cat’s out of the bag! There is no one-size-fits-all formula for marketing your business in a way that gets people to sit up and take notice. It’s all about experimentation and refining your instincts for what works and what doesn’t. But if inspired, profitable communication is your goal, here are 6 questions to ask yourself as you develop your marketing:

#1  What are all the ideas I have about this? Take out a brown paper grocery bag, tear it open, grab a sharpie and write down all the things that have occurred to you about your offering. Mind maps are great for helping you find winning marketing angles and also for letting you express your weird half baked ideas that are better left on the cutting room floor.

#2  What’s the best way to structure this? Most people dive into writing their marketing without an outline or structure. This is a mistake. Before you write copy, go meta and think through the sections of your marketing piece. Block out where your headlines go. Block out what sections are important, and what people need to see first. At the end of the day, copy is an argument for why someone should buy from you. No matter how creative you are, it needs to follow a certain logic for it to sell.

#3  What facts do I need to nail down before I announce this to others? Make sure you are clear about fact like pricing, payment plans, program title, who it’s for, who it’s not for, and the main promise. Often, being indecisive about these things cause our marketing to get gummed up and beige. Clean it up by making decisions about your offering before you sit down to write your marketing.

#4  How can I make this more theatrical? Most well-intentioned people’s marketing is awful because it’s far too earnest and lackluster. Read: boring. This is a mistake. Marketing is theater. Think of your business like a show. What can you do in the opening scene to get your audience fascinated by what’s about to unfold? What’s your first line, that triggers their curiosity?

#5  How am I feeling about this offering? Emotion is everything. If you are approaching people with apology energy, lack of confidence, or boredom, forget it. Why would anyone want those elixirs? This doesn’t mean you won’t have butterflies when you ask for business. But it does mean that you need to monitor your own emotional state going into an ask. See if you can find the place within you that knows your offer can change people’s lives for the better. The place that knows you will be transformed after you ask 100 people to buy from you in the next 30 days. The place that sees the spiritual dance in asking and receiving money for your good work. Go looking for that place.

#6  Will this melt their brains? If you’re used to your marketing working, good for you. Raise the bar: break the rules and get out of any rut that may have developed. The truth is, success can make you overfed, lazy and entitled. Too many people who have the hang of marketing drop anchor there, and make mediocre communications that no longer touch, move, or inspire people like they did when they were rising and hungry.

At the end of the day, there is a lot of garbage marketing out there. It promises a mythological world of cheap, fast, easy and convenient. But just because the western digital world is littered with that stuff doesn’t mean you have to add to the heap.

A lot of people – read: your potential clients — don’t actually want cheap, fast, easy or convenient. They want truth, connection, relationship, and to live their lives like one big adventure. They don’t want you to fix them, because they don’t see themselves as broken (and are turned off by the very suggestion that ‘buying will set you free’… because they know that’s not how life works).

Words create worlds, so make sure the questions you ask yourself are the ones you want to live into.