How to Choose the Right Marketing Strategy for YOU

A client recently shared with me that, before working with me, she was in two different marketing memberships. One said you have to go all in on social media if you want to get clients. The other said social media is a waste of time, you have to blog if you want to get clients.

Naturally she was left caught in indecision. Which membership was right? They both were run by very successful business owners, and yet they were saying LITERALLY the exact opposite thing. 

She wanted to get more clients, of course. But how? Who was she supposed to trust? What marketing strategy was she supposed to do?

Thankfully, after taking our free 4-day training series, Conversion Content Breakthrough, she had her answer.

And it was NOT AT ALL what she expected, while still being EXACTLY what she needed to move forward with confidence in marketing her business through extraordinary and effective content that would bring her Right Fit client directly to her digital doorstep.

Find out exactly how she moved out of marketing confusion into content clarity and confidence below ⤵️

Look Beyond Marketing Strategies for Your Clue

But first, we have to make one thing clear: there is a difference between Marketing strategies and Marketing foundations. Strategies are what both of these memberships were presenting. One strategy was to market on social media. The other strategy was to utilize blogging and the power of SEO. And when you’re working from the strategy level without first having your relevant foundations in place, the end result is almost always confusion.

Why? Because there are foundations underneath every single strategy. And without those foundations, you can do the exact same thing that someone else does, but you won’t get the same results—no matter how completely/”to a T” you implement that strategy.

To help show you what I mean, allow me to introduce you to the WholeCo Hierarchy of Steps™.

The common approach in our online business space is to start with strategies and tactics—such as “how to go viral with Reels” or “how to get high-ticket clients on LinkedIn” or, in the case of the client I shared about above, “how to get clients on social media” or “how to get clients through blogging.“ In many ways this approach can feel like it “makes sense,” but as you see here, before you start answering any of those questions, you have to first have your foundations underneath that strategy, and those foundations need to be grounded within the context of your Sustainable Success System™. And if you try to utilize ANY of these strategies without already having built your marketing foundations within the context of your Sustainable Success System™, you’re very likely going to find a million different answers—some people will say you “have” to be on social media while some people will say “social media is useless, you need to be blogging.”

Hence, the marketing confusion that so many online service providers, coaches, consultants, strategists, healers, guides, and other practitioners face on the regular.

Using Your Sustainable Success System™ to Make Marketing Simpler

The great news is that marketing becomes pretty simple when you look beyond the strategies and into the foundations, even when you feel like you might just be “bad” at marketing. But in order to do that, we have to first understand the Sustainable Success System™, WholeCo’s proprietary framework for how you get paid (really freaking well) to do the work you MOST love doing, in the way you MOST love doing it, with the people you MOST love working with.

Within each of the 6 elements of your Sustainable Success System™ lies a WholeCo Hierarchy of Steps™. In order to build each of the elements, you want to start with Audience—and build those foundations then strategies—then Offers—and build those foundations then strategies—then Messaging—and build those foundations then strategies—and THEN you can get to building your Marketing foundations, followed by choosing your marketing strategy.

(By the way, I share what these marketing foundations are—specifically: content marketing foundations—inside of our free 4-day training series, Conversion Content Breakthrough.)

The foundations of each of these elements have to built in this specific order because each of them inform the next. Your Audience foundations inform the type/s of Offer/s you build. Your Offer foundations inform the Messaging you use to talk about your work. And, you guessed it, your Messaging foundations inform the Marketing content you create to attract Right Fit clients (Audience) into your right-for-them work (Offers). Yes, your Marketing foundations go on to inform how you generate leads, and your Lead Generation foundations inform how you Sell, too. In this way, we turn your business from a pulled-in-every-direction (and metaphorically duct taped together) thing into one cohesive ecosystem in which every element strengthens the others—but that’s a conversation for another day.

What YOU care about here is how to choose the right marketing strategy for YOU. So without further ado, let’s talk about it.

How to Choose the Right Marketing Strategy for YOU

Step 0: Build your Audience, Offer, and Messaging foundations.

Well, you need to start by building out the foundations of each of the elements of your Sustainable Success System™ prior to jumping into strategic content Marketing. Those foundations are: your Audience, Offer, and Messaging foundations. Doing so is a bit of an in-depth process, that we really only cover in full inside of our comprehensive business training program, EXPAND—though I’ll share an overview here.

For your Audience foundations—of which there are 4—you need to know who your true Right Fit client is. Most online business owners get really caught up with “Ideal Client” work, but here at WholeCo our Right Fit client identification process starts where traditional Ideal Client work stops. That’s because while knowing ideal demographics and psychographics might be helpful for defining a direction of your business, that’s about all they do. And if you try to build a business around an Ideal Client profile, well…things like building offers, crafting messaging and marketing content, choosing marketing platforms and lead generation strategies, or even identifying in a sales conversation whether or not someone will be a DREAM or a drain to work with all become…challenging, to say the least.

Then you move into your Offer foundations—of which there are also 4—which, when built, allow you to create offers that reliably facilitate results for your Right Fit clients. This is not about building an offer based around “what you think people will buy,” but rather methodically crafting an offer (and eventually a full Offer Suite) that meets your Right Fit clients in the moment they’re ready to buy with the solution they both need and are actively looking for.

Finally, your Messaging foundations that allow you to have the right words to bring Right Fit clients into your right-for-them work.

With the foundations of these three elements of your Sustainable Success System™ in place, you can now begin to craft your Marketing strategy. For ease, I’m going to talk about your content marketing strategy here—as there are ways to market beyond content marketing, that have different foundations and requirements.

Step 1: Take stock of what YOU like and dislike.

A crucial part of building a Sustainably Successful business is that you enjoy what you’re doing. Yes, things might still feel challenging, some things might not be your favorite thing to do, but altogether and for the most part, you truly do enjoy what you’re doing and how you’re doing it.

This extends into your marketing, which is why before we even try to craft a marketing strategy for you, we need to get clear on what do YOU actually want to do?

I know this can feel SO counterintuitive, especially when it feels like the question you should be asking, “What do I need to do to get the results I desire?” But that question actually more often than not ends up leading you in a direction you don’t want to go. Think back to my client that I shared about at the beginning of this post. She was asking, “How do I get clients from my marketing?” and where did she end up? Inside two different memberships telling her two completely different answers, now even more stuck because, despite having “experts” outside of her telling her what she “needs to do” to get her desired results, she still didn’t know what the “right” answer was.

But what if there is no RIGHT answer, there is only a right-for-you answer?

That’s why when I am supporting a client to craft their own marketing strategy, we start by asking: what do YOU like? What do YOU dislike? And then we build from there, figuring out how to craft a strategy that is BOTH effective AND enjoyable for them to commit to and follow through on.

Now, it’s really common for online business owners to say things like, “Well I don’t like marketing at all.” If that’s you, my invitation to you is to get really clear about WHAT you dislike about marketing—because I can almost guarantee you that it’s not that you “don’t like marketing,” it’s that you don’t like the type of marketing you feel that you “have” to do and you don’t realize there’s another option. (p.s. if this is you, I’d recommend you check out my marketing mindset course, Social Media Reset. It’s only $97!)

Here’s some ideas of what you might DISLIKE and LIKE about marketing. Of course, please note that while your answers might have some crossover with the ideas below, they will very likely will be different—and that is A-OK. Use this list as an example to get your brain going, NOT as the “right” answers.

• DISLIKE
  • Feeling like everyone is trying to sell you something, all the time
  • Feeling like people are fake in their marketing
  • Having to create graphics or videos
  • Feeling pressured to post every day
  • The ever-changing algorithm/s
• LIKE
  • Writing, especially when that writing is from the heart
  • Being creative and letting yourself express yourself and show up authentically
  • Having real conversations
  • Sharing things that inspire people to live or think differently and/or that you wish you would have known earlier
  • The opportunity to connect with people all over the world that you otherwise wouldn’t have gotten a chance to connect with

As I said before, this example list is purely here to help get your brain going. Now it’s your turn: what are at least (5) things that you DISLIKE about marketing? What are at least (5) things that you LIKE about marketing?

Let your answers here inform your next steps.

Step 2: Choose your platform.

Another client came to me once saying that she “hated being on Instagram.” Creating videos for Reels felt exhausting, she felt like she had to always be on Stories, she didn’t like creating graphics, and she wished that she could create captions longer than 2,200 characters. I asked her, “So why are you there?”

Her response is one I’ve heard a thousand times before: “Because that’s where my clients are.”

It makes so much sense why so many business owners believe they’re “stuck” on a certain marketing platform when they’ve been taught that “that’s where their clients are.” But the truth is: unless you have a SUPER specific niche, your clients are pretty much everywhere. You’re just as likely to have clients on LinkedIn—yes, even if you are not B2B—as you are on TikTok as you are on Instagram as you are on Facebook as you are on email as you are on podcasts as you are on Youtube…you get the idea. Sure, they’re likely slightly different segments of your audience on each of those platforms, but there are people who are looking for exactly what you sell on (pretty much) every single platform.

Which is why, as we discussed above, it’s LESS about finding the “right” platform and MORE about finding the right-for-YOU platform.

If you dislike creating video, skip TikTok. If you love writing long-form captions, use Facebook. If designing graphics is annoying, skip Instagram and head over to LinkedIn. There are SO MANY OPTIONS—you simply need to choose ONE to start with (and then sure, once you’re consistently attracting clients on that platform and have a solid base of revenue underneath you, experiment with expanding to a second or even third marketing platform — which now will feel FUN rather than draining, because you don’t need it to work!).

What ONE marketing platform are you choosing? And yes, I do indeed mean one marketing platform—the only exception here is that I’d recommend that you have both a “public” marketing platform (e.g. social media) and an email list. (Though yes, you can send a lot of the same content to your email list that you publish on social media—I had my first 6-figure and multi-6-figure year doing just that.)

Now, depending on where you are in business, you may wish to hold off on choosing a more “evergreen” style platform like podcasting, YouTube, or blogging and instead opt for traditional social media marketing. I know it is ~all the rage~ in the online business world of 2023 to hate on social media marketing, with many people giving reasons like, “Your posts basically die within 24 hours!”

The reality is though that social media marketing is almost always the fastest path to getting new clients. You could put a post up today, which would show up in someones’ feed today, and they could follow your CTA (call to action) and step into your work—today. Not to mention, for MANY business owners, the fact that content dies/disappears in such a “short” time period is actually a REALLY GREAT THING. Why?

Because until you’ve built and solidified each of the elements of your Sustainable Success System™, things will very likely be rapidly changing in your business on the regular. The offers you’re selling will most likely change. Your price points will most likely change. Your messaging will most likely change. Heck! You might do an entire pivot in your business and wind up doing totally different work! Which means that creating those more “evergreen” forms of content marketing—which often takes MUCH more time, energy, and money than creating a social media post does—can be a bit of a waste of time, because evergreen content is meant to be relevant for pretty much ever.

Whereas social media content? It pretty much dies within 24 hours (or 1ish week, max). Which means that if next month you’ve realized that you don’t want to sell that offer anymore, you don’t end up with people clicking a link in your podcast shownotes that is now not only entirely defunct, but not even relevant to the work you’re doing anymore, anyway. (p.s. want to transform your relationship with social media to one of angst to appreciation, so that you can actually use it as the powerful tool that it is? Join me inside my marketing mindset course, Social Media Reset.)

Step 3: Choose your offer.

Before you begin creating content, you need to know what offer you are intending to bring client/s into through your marketing. And when I say “offer” here, I mean anything free or paid. Of course, I’d HIGHLY recommend getting used to talking about your paid offers more regularly than you talk about your free ones, because how else do you expect your audience to know how to work with you?

A lot of people will try to create content based around themes—like, “It’s Valentine’s Day this month, so I’ll create content around love.”—but when you try to fit your offers into your content, there will almost certainly come a point where you’re trying to connect dots that, frankly, are much too unrelated to even try to be connected.

That’s why I always teach my clients to choose—usually at the beginning of each month—what they’ll be selling that month, and then to come up with content ideas from there. Which leads us to the next part of your content marketing strategy: what are you intending to sell in the next ~30 days?

Step 4: Ideate content topics.

Probably the most common question I’m asked about marketing is, “What should I talk about?!” And THIS is why it matters that you’ve already built the foundations of those first 3 elements of your Sustainable Success System™: your Audience, Offers, and Messaging.

A lot of people try to create content based off of what they see other people doing. Which, can sometimes work. But even if it works for a moment—with “works” being defined as: it builds a thriving community around your work and is consistently bringing Right Fit clients directly to your digital doorstep—this approach rarely continues working. Not to mention: does creating that “quick tip” or “inspirational” content feel like an accurate representation of the power and magnitude of your work? I highly doubt it.

But when you know who your Right Fit client is, you’ve chosen which offer (free or paid) you are intending to sell right now, and you know how to talk about that offer so that the Right Fit people are naturally attracted to it—well, crafting content that is as extraordinary to read/engage with as it is for you to create becomes relatively simple (and, for many of our clients, even enjoyable).

I go in-depth in Not Another List of Content Prompts (only $9!) on how to find your BEST, most effective content topics—in a way that is WAY more expansive than the traditional “content pillars” that are so frequently taught—so here’s what I’ll say for now: You want to create content that speaks directly into your Right Fit clients present day reality.

What problems are they currently facing? What questions are they currently asking? What experiences are they currently having?

Right now, I invite you to create a list of at least 10 ideas.

And again: if you want to go deeper into this and really learn how to find those topics, I recommend picking up your own copy of Not Another List of Content Prompts. It’s only $9, but don’t let that teeny tiny price point fool you. Business owner after business owner has taken this step-by-step guide and used it to come up with quite literally endless conversion content concepts—in just the couple of hours it takes to work your way through the exercises in the guide—that they can then use to create everything from blog posts (like this one!) and podcast episodes to Instagram Reels and LinkedIn posts. This will seriously make creating content so much simpler (and way more effective) for the rest of your time in business!

Step 5: Make your commitments.

I know it’s super popular to say things like, “You have to post every single day in order to be successful!” But the truth is: it’s actually more important that you make a commitment you can stick to than to “post every day” for the sake of posting every day.

My clients are visionaries. They have BIG dreams. Which means that sometimes they get frustrated with themselves because they can’t execute at the level that they’d ideally like to. AND — trying to execute beyond their capacity is a recipe for diminishing self-trust, rather than expanding it.

That’s why I encourage my clients to make a commitment to themselves that they can actually keep. For some of them, that means publishing content once per day. For others, that means 5 days per week. For still others, that means setting the bar really low at one time per week—with the knowledge that they can always do more if they feel up to it.

What commitment/s are you making to yourself in regards to your marketing? (This might be related to the number of pieces of content you’ll create each week, or it might not! You know what you need more than I ever will.)

Of course, I’ll be honest with you: every single piece of content increases the likelihood that people will see your work. AND — it’s sooo important for the long-term health of your business that you allow yourself to start where you are, with what you have, and go from there. Maybe all you really can trust yourself to follow through on right now is one piece of content per week. Ok great! Start there, get into the rhythm of it, and then in one month from now check back in. Could you try for a couple pieces of content per week? Do that for a month, and then check back in.

Allow yourself to start where you are with what you have and build from there. This is SO KEY to building real, lasting Sustainable Success in your business.

Finally: Get started!

You now have a super simple and entirely custom-to-you marketing strategy.

1. You know what you like and dislike about marketing, and you’ve let that inform every other decision made about your marketing strategy.
2. You’ve chosen your ONE (+ email) marketing platform.
3. You’ve chosen which offer you’re selling, right now.
4. You’ve ideated some content topics related to that offer.
5. You’ve made your commitments.

Now you’re ready to get started!

Of course, just like with anything in business, my invitation here is to experiment and continue iterating based off of what you’re learning. The business owners who make it far in business and who end up with much more complex marketing strategies than this one are the ones who tried a bunch of things to see what worked and didn’t work for them, their audience, and their business. By mapping out your simple marketing strategy here today, you’ve made decisions off of what you know today. I applaud you for that! AND you very well might implement your strategy over the course of this next month, get to the end, and realize: “WOW, I hated [some part of it].”

That’s totally ok! In fact, it’s to be expected. Start where you are, with what you have, and allow yourself to naturally grow and expand and refine and clarify from there.

Oh, and that client I shared about at the beginning, who was confused as to whether she should “go all in on social media” or “ditch social media and blog instead”? Based off of where she was in business at the time that we began working together, she realized that she wanted the space to be able to truly experiment in her business and figure out what work she TRULY loves doing, HOW, and with WHO, and so she decided to hold off on blogging and stick with one social media platform (in addition to her email list) for now. Not only is she actually showing up consistently and, more importantly, powerfully to build her community now, she’s also confidently talking about her work and bringing clients in.

This gets to be simple. Let it be simple. Start from where you are, with what you have right now, and build from there.

Want to go even deeper by learning the foundations of extraordinary and effective content?

Join me inside Conversion Content Breakthrough, our free 4-day training series where you’ll ditch the surface-level strategies for “content that converts” to craft extraordinary and effective content instead.