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2Quiet2Market is made for introverted solopreneurs. People who like to focus on building instead of marketing:

  • Software developers
  • Writers
  • Photographers
  • Musicians

Introverts struggle with Marketing

Creative people like these like to think of marketing as "tooting your own horn" or "advertising" or even "bragging", at least they think of it as "putting yourself out there".

I get that because I'm such a person myself (Matthias, the founder, is writing this). As a software solopreneur who creates SaaS systems, I failed at marketing with at least five products in a row.

In part, it was a mindset problem, but there was more than that:

  • Loss of context when switching between building and marketing
  • Decomposing marketing into simple components, not knowing how to break it down
  • Keeping the whole marketing stuff together, a lack of structure
  • Managing the complexity of marketing
  • Consistency, i.e. keeping at it, every other week or so

Marketing is Storytelling

To tackle marketing, we need to change our thinking. Marketing is not advertising but storytelling. We need to tell stories about how the future customer can create the best version of themselves, using our product. It's not about our product, it's a story about what our customers' lives become when they use our product.

It starts with Positioning

Customers position your product, into a category or a context, this happens inside their minds. Help them do that correctly. In your story, you need to explain the context in which your product appears as "obviously awesome", as April Dunford describes it in her book with that title.

Make the story about the transformation of your customers' way to work. Break it down into parts you can easily describe:

  • Your customer Persona
  • The Jobs to be done they will "hire" your product to do
  • The Benefits they get when they use your product
  • Your product's Features and the Qualities that cause those benefits
  • The Product itself and its category
  • The "Why" of all this

You capture all that before you proceed to messaging. This gives you a frame of reference whenever you decide that you built enough and want to return to marketing.

Learn more about positioning here.

Messaging: The next step after positioning

Messaging comprises all kinds of communication that you have with your future customers: Landing page, email, blog posts, tweets, chatbots, whatever.

Whenever you compose messages, make sure you answer the questions that your future customers have in their mind:

  • Is it for people like me?
  • What is it?
  • How does it help me?
  • Why should I care?
  • Why should I start using it right now?

When your positioning (benefits, qualities, etc.) is crystal clear, you can start to tell one story after another. To make this easy, tell stories about a moment when your customer solves a problem or gets a job done.

Learn more about messaging here.

Experimentation: Trying out your messaging on a real audience

To run a marketing experiment, you take a story that you've composed in the Messaging step and tell it to your audience. To do that, you need to determine a number of essential things:

  • the channel by which to reach your audience
  • the material you need to tell your story
  • the recipe about how you process and combine those materials
  • the tools you need to execute the recipe

If you have that, you take a story, make a hypothesis about what will happen when you tell it to your audience ("I will get 50 signups"), and then run the experiment using the things above.

Afterwards, look at what really happened, compare it to your hypothesis, and learn from that.

Learn more about experimentation here.

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