Reverse Engineering
As a marketer, there is one client that is the most difficult to work for. Who is it, you ask?
It’s marketing yourself.
Why?
If you think about, when other clients come to you with their problems, you clearly see what is wrong because you are being objective. There are no ‘feelings’ that are hurt because they are coming to you to seek advice and for you to fix their problem. You’re able to step away from the source of the problem.
Well, when you are marketing yourself, whether it may be your brand or your company, you are too close and feel that it’s too personal. So you freeze up. With all the best practices that we have tested and learned in our day jobs as marketers, you’d think it’s be easy to just transfer it over. To just make yourself the client.
However, you soon realize it is not that easy. The way we approach the problem (or the client) needs to be reframed in another way. In this case, breaking down to the core principles. Back to basics, if you will, for marketing.
- Know how to communicate to your audience — your customers, not your colleagues.
- Reverse engineer personalization and depersonalize by writing to the masses and use your voice.
- Stop trying to seek people’s opinions, but rather look at a piece of your work and see if it meets your objective and aligns to your KPIs.
- Learn, fail, move on, learn, fail, continue to move on and so forth.
- There is no wrong answer. It is YOUR company, YOUR brand, YOU get to call the shots. You determine what works and what doesn’t. Put yourself back into the driver seat.
