My Approach:
Authentic and impactful brand marketing starts and ends with deeply caring about your customers, and connecting your brand with them as you would with friends - in the right places, with the right messages at the right time.
"Authentic marketing = making friends at scale."
George Kao
When Did Marketing Get So Hard?
You're here because you're tired of the latest marketing advice, fads, and over-promises. You can see, feel and deeply know that marketing is changing fast and the old ways that used to work like a charm simply don't anymore. Marketing your vision of a meaningful and impactful brand should be more than just gaming algorithms, joining the latest platform, following someone else's template for success, making more videos or discounting your margins away.
If this is you, we might need to be business friends.
I'm going to make the case that effective, strategic brand marketing always starts and ends with your customer - their problems, their needs, and most importantly their emotions. When we put the customer at the center of everything, the rest falls into place: the market positioning, the tactics and the offers. Making friends at scale, in the right place, with emotional messages that truly connect and lead to purchases, brand loyalty and more purchases.
When marketing leads with a customer-first approach, great things happen.
Listen,
You've done an amazing job at marketing to date. Your hard work, grit and determination has gotten you here, but now you just feel completely stuck, scattered, tired and overwhelmed. It feels like you spend all your time doing marketing that is just treading water. A lot of movement under the surface but no progress towards your destination.
You got into this entrepreneur business to do the big visionary things that only YOU are uniquely qualified to do - designing, inventing, making, creating, curating. Wouldn't it be amazing to actually be spending time in your Zone of Genius every day, instead of worrying about marketing?
The truth is there's no handbook for scaling a business—nobody teaches you this.
You have big plans and dreams for this next stage, but it feels out of reach with the team and marketing activities you have happening now. You can't seem to replicate anyone else's success, even though you follow the experts, hire the freelancers, take the courses, do the latest "it" thing in marketing.
Sure, you see some progress and wins, but it doesn't feel sustainable or quite right.
I've worked with business owners who hit that wall. They are doing all the things, hiring the experts and still feel like something is missing, and they are right. It's not a tactical problem, it’s a strategy problem.
When you follow marketing advice that isn't rooted in strategy and customer needs it is easy to make these mistakes:
Follow advice that isn't aligned with your business model
Allocate time and money into platforms where your customer doesn't spend time
Use messaging that doesn't answer the emotional needs and desires of your customer
Gloss over fundamentals that create a sustainable, profitable business
What Does Marketing Strategy Even Mean?
Before you even get to the tactics, you need to have these 5 elements in place, these make up the strategy and plan that follows.
There is no one-size-fits-all strategy. That’s why someone else’s brand strategy won’t lead you to your success.
My process starts with asking the right questions and then building a plan around the answers to those questions.
1) Start with the end in mind
Where are we going? What business problems are we solving for? This must be more than just saying "more sales." We can't align the marketing until we know where we are headed and what success looks like.
2) Customer-Centric Strategy
Commit to truly understanding your customers beyond the demographics and psychographics - what are their core emotional drivers as they relate to your brand? How will you make friends at scale, growing your pool of potential customers to super loyal customers?
3) Authentic Messaging & Brand Promise
You need to communicate your value in a way that resonates with your ideal customers while staying true to your brand voice and values. We need to answer the questions: Why does this brand exist? What does it truly stand for, and how does it stand out in the market?
4) Read the Data: Past to Present
Going deep into the data to evaluate and answer 3 key questions: What is working? What's missing? What can we try next? The data gives us road signs to let us know if we are on track to our destination or need to make a detour and avoid a dead-end.
5) People & Systems
Sustainable marketing is a team effort. Evaluating if the right people are in place and doing the work that aligns with the end goal. Is the priority, high-impact work getting done or are we trapped in marketing busy work? None of this works unless you build marketing processes that can grow with your business without burning out your team.
This is the exact framework I follow with clients as their fractional Chief Marketing Officer.
As your fractional CMO*, I take the lead on marketing strategy and the Big Picture. Together, we uncover your end goals, create a customer-centric strategy, develop messaging that resonates, guide your team's execution, and build sustainable systems that scale with measurable results.
You can re-focus on your Zone of Genius and know that the marketing department is in safe hands with a collaborative partner you can trust.
(*fractional is just a fancy way of saying part-time, meaning your brand likely doesn’t need a full-time marketing strategist. Most clients need anywhere from a 1-hour Power Hour consult, up to a 6-month project engagement.)
If this resonates with you,
Let's talk about how we can build marketing that works, putting your customer at the heart of everything you do.
The best person to lead your marketing is someone who gets your business. That might be me.
Ready to explore working together? Book an “If I Were Your CMO” strategy call to discuss how fractional CMO services could accelerate your business vision.