Stop Self-Promoting And Run Marketing Campaigns

Self-promotion is a never-ending chore of trying to attract as much attention as possible. Instead, run marketing campaigns to achieve specific outcomes.

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Discomfort With Self-Promotion Is Common

It’s a good idea to explore why you’re uncomfortable with it.

I spoke with someone recently who gave up their efforts to build a consulting practice because they couldn’t get comfortable with promoting themselves.

They felt to make an impression they would have to shout over the voices of others with ever-greater self-aggrandising claims. That wasn’t something they were willing to do so they called it quits and got a job.

I remember feeling somewhat similar when I got started. I hated the self-promotion part of the job.

I didn’t even share the content I had created for my blog with the people who opted in to follow me on social media. I didn’t want to be seen as too spammy or self-promotional. I believed if my content was good enough, people would find it.

I was a devout follower of permission marketing. I didn’t want to annoy people by sending them content they hadn’t explicitly said they wanted.

If you’re in a similar position, it’s worth exploring why you’re uncomfortable. It’s probably the result of some misguided beliefs.

If You Know Something Incredibly Valuable, You’re Happy Share It

A lot of the internal conflict about self-promotion centres on a simple truth.

You don’t believe that the content you’re sharing is valuable to the potential recipients.

If you discovered a remarkable way to save hundreds of dollars when booking flights, you would be happy to share it with others because you knew it added value (hint - use a VPN and select a different country). It might even reflect well on you for sharing that content.

If you’re feeling conflicted about sharing content, there’s a good chance that deep down you know it doesn’t add enough value to the audience. Or, to be blunt, you haven’t discovered anything you feel is worth sharing. Instead of doing the hard work of making these discoveries, you promote content you’re not truly invested in.

Fortunately there’s a better way of thinking about this.

It’s Not Self-Promotion, It’s A Marketing Campaign

Break it down like a marketing campaign and you will feel more comfortable

I wrote in one of my very first posts, you’re not becoming a consultant, you’re starting a business. This means you need a service to sell and you need to promote that service to your prospective audience.

Calling All New Consultants - Sell A Service, Not Yourself

In short, you are the business and your services are the products. You need to promote those products. To do that, you need to run a marketing campaign to attract an audience.

There’s no other way around it.

You shouldn’t be thinking of it as ‘self-promotion’. You should be thinking about it as a marketing campaign.

A marketing campaign has several key elements

1. A clear goal (awareness, engagement, conversion, loyalty, advocacy).

2. A unique message.

3. A smart way of illustrating that message.

4. A means of adapting that message to each channel.

Most importantly, in a marketing campaign, you need to persuade members to change their minds about something. Be mindful that this might provoke a backlash.

FeverBee’s Marketing Campaign

A Short Breakdown of FeverBee’s Marketing Campaign

Back in 2016/2017, my consultancy faced something of a conundrum. The sector was becoming increasingly busy and our old positioning rooted in principles of psychology was being co-opted by others (that’s a challenge when any marketing campaign succeeds). It felt like it was becoming increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd.

So over the next couple of years I ran what was essentially a marketing campaign to reposition the consultancy.

Step One: Establish The Goals

I felt like we needed to create a unique position in our industry which would create clear delight between ourselves and others.

This included three goals.

1. Align ourselves to the needs of prospective clients. What did top industry professionals at companies with $100m+ in funding or revenue need?

2. Create a moat around our positioning. Pretty much anyone can claim to be an expert in psychology or strategy. We needed to create a positioning which had a higher barrier to entry.

3. Open up new opportunities. We wanted to position ourselves with something which opened up new opportunities for services we offered and types of content we could create.

I knew from our research at the time that one of the biggest challenges clients had was measurement. Many people struggled to know what to measure to show success and how to measure those outcomes. We spoke with plenty of people in our industry who didn’t have an analyst to help them do the work. When we began asking our key clients, we had plenty of messages like this:

I also knew that many people really weren’t doing much with the data they were collecting. The decision to rebrand ourselves around the concept of ‘data’ would make sense.

Step Two: Acquire The Skills

The first step was to acquire the skills. I personally spent the best part of six months completing various data and statistics courses to bring myself up to a solid level of understanding.

Aside: I suspect a lot of people skip this step - which is a shame! This is the moat others can’t easily cross. Having real expertise is what helps you stand out.

I won’t claim to be an elite expert, but I feel I have a good understanding of how data can be better used to achieve the goals our clients need.

You might remember that upgrading your skillset is the first part of building a loyal following.

How To Stand Out And Build A Loyal Following in 2023

The great thing about learning a new skill is it always opens up a whole angle of creating services and content which other people can’t match. You can take any topic, add the lens from your skillset to it, and track the results.

Step Three: Develop The Theme

This is the key difference between self-promotion and a marketing campaign.

As mentioned, if it feels like self-promotion, it’s probably because you’re not giving the audience something they find truly valuable.

Your messaging shouldn’t be ‘I am [something]’.

It should be ‘[something] is the best approach’.

If you persuade people of the latter, the former is implicit.

The best way to promote yourself this is to highlight a truth that most people are unaware of and support it with clear evidence.

The Hard Part

The hard part of saying ‘[something] is the best approach’ is you have to highlight what it is in oppositional too. You have to create the disconnect between what people do/believe today and what they should do/believe. Otherwise, you’re going to struggle to overcome the ‘so what?’ factor.

If we’re saying ‘data-driven is the best approach’ we have to answer the obvious question’ ‘as opposed to what?’.

What’s the enemy of data-driven approach? In this case, the enemy is intuition, anecdotal evidence, and conventional wisdom. That’s the enemy for us.

The conflict between the current state and the desired state will lead to your best promotional messages (and your most controversial ones).

I tested the messaging at a couple of smaller events and it seemed to resonate well. We also included it in other content we were creating. It seemed to resonate well so we could develop it into clearer marketing messages.

Step Four: Develop The Promotional Messages

Now we had to convert out big theme (data-driven is best) into promotional messages.

Your best promotional messages will be those which can clearly show why your approach is better than the current approach using evidence.

My main promotional messages followed several tracks:

1. Better ways to measure: There’s a better way to measure communities using advanced statistical methods. We can prove the ROI at a statistically valid level. This article was especially popular.

2. Outdated beliefs. Many of the things we believe about communities are disproved by data. Much of what we believe about onboarding, engagement rates, and why people are interest in communities is wrong.

3. Prove it. I began regularly sharing real data from client projects and sharing real-world outcomes of our services. Most of our most popular posts over the past couple of years have been about data. In this case, my message was sharing examples of how we used data to help clients achieve better goals.

Very quickly it became obvious that some areas resonated more than others.

Interestingly, people didn’t seem interested in messages highlighting why many approaches to community were outdated, so I quickly dropped that. Instead I focused on sharing statistical techniques to measure success and examples of where we had shown success.

During this process I didn’t feel any conflict about sharing this information. That’s because it didn’t feel like self-promotion. I wasn’t explaining why we’re great. I was simply sharing why one approach is better than another. I was adding value to the audience.

Every major event I spoke at was about data and aligned to the two key messages we wanted to share.

Step Four: Develop The Services

Alongside the promotional messages, we also began developing the services.

Notice here that we were promoting the message long before we developed the services. I wanted to see what resonated and build the services around that.

In the past, data had been something we had done as part of existing projects. But, increasingly, we created data-only services that companies could use. This post attracted some initial attention.

Once we knew what worked and what didn’t, we created a specific ‘community intelligence’ services page as part of our new site.

Around this time I hired a data analyst with a PhD to help these services.

We even developed (and branded) a new system for measuring the success of communities which (in my opinion) is far better than what we had previously.

The Results

I’ve been very happy with the results. I feel we’ve repositioned our consultancy in a unique way which no other consultant has yet been able (or willing) to match. We’re able to create content which few others are able to create.

We’ve secured projects with companies like Meta, Microsoft, Sephora, and many more by offering a service we didn’t offer previously and we generated more consultancy revenue in 2022.

I’ve been invited to host sold-out data workshops at major industry events - these in turn have increased awareness of us.

But perhaps the best thing about this is it’s never felt uncomfortable. We’re doing research, sharing the discoveries we make, and seeing that resonate.

Another beneficial aspect of this is we’re growing a market for our services rather than simply trying to figure out what the market wants. By creating a disconnect from the current state to something better, we’re becoming the bridge people can rely upon to be better at how they engage.

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Thanks for reading

Richard Millington