The 3-Ingredient Antidote for Marketing Inconsistency

Some of us grew up watching Michael J. Fox play Marty McFly in the Back to the Future franchise, and a plot thread in Back to the Future Part II is the perfect way to set the stage for an insight I share with my high-ticket coaching clients all the time.

Like, so often that when I hear the same words come out of my mouth again, the fifteen-year-old in me rolls his eyes and says, “Yeah, whatever, Dad.”

Anyway, I digress.

In Part II “Old” Biff steals the DeLorean from Doc and Marty and travels back in time to November 12, 1955. He gives “Young” Biff Grays Sports Almanac, which is significant because it contains the results of every major sporting event from 1950 to 2000.

Young Biff uses the almanac to get rich by betting on said sporting events. His moral decrepitude becomes an issue. If you don’t know the rest, I won’t ruin the movie for you.

The Biffs got me to thinking, if I had a time-traveling DeLorean, what Grays Sports Almanac would I give myself?

If I could put on Biff’s disguise, complete with unconvincing wig and green track suit, what advantage would I hand to Young Austin, circa April 20, 2009?

“Hey, buddy, you’ll be just fine if you do this….”

My now abundant gray hair, sixteen years’ worth of freelancing, and a dash of reflection produced not a gambling advantage but two insights:

1. Unpredictable income causes lots of problems for freelancers.
2. Inconsistent marketing is to blame for unpredictable income.

In other words, Young Austin, or whoever you are, inconsistency creates unpredictability, and unpredictability creates stress.

Do you want less stress? Make marketing a habit, and don’t let yourself off the hook.

It’s also helpful to think about the inverse: What happens if consistent marketing generates a surplus of leads? If you have enough leads, you can confidently raise your prices. Higher prices leave you with enough cash to hire a VA or bring in subcontractors. More support is your ticket out of working too much.

And once you’ve delegated some of the $10 an hour tasks or the pieces of projects you don’t particularly enjoy, you free up more time to spend on high-leverage tasks, including marketing.

Behold the virtuous cycle you’ve set into motion!

But back to the original point: Inconsistency in marketing correlates to big fluctuations in the work coming in and ensures you stay on the feast-or-famine roller coaster that makes so many freelancers sick.

Allow me to be the resident business dad and point out that we can’t simultaneously complain about the effect (perpetual roller coaster) while also doing nothing about the cause (inconsistent marketing).

Well, I suppose plenty of freelancers do complain while also doing nothing to improve the situation, but I have little to say to them except this: Either change or do the people in your life a favor and stop griping about something you can change.

Acknowledging our learned helplessness and then moving toward responsibility and the agency that was there all along is one of the most difficult and rewarding aspects of adulthood and solopreneurship.

I’ll assume you’re here because you want to do that and change your situation for the better, so keep reading.

3 Things You Need to Build a Freelance Business You Love

You’re approximately 1.3 bajillion times (conservative estimate) more likely to build a freelance business you love if you have these 3 things:

1. 1-page marketing plan (or, one short enough to memorize)
2. Consistency (aka, Morning Marketing Habit)
3. 15-minute “schedulable” activities

For starters, why do I recommend a 1-page marketing plan?

The problem with most marketing plans is length. They’re time-consuming to create and read, and later, in the crush of running a business, most of us aren’t going to slow down long enough to review the plan, figure out where we are in it, pinpoint the next meaningful action, and do it.

Long, dense plans thus encourage us to start winging it (again) pretty quickly.

The antidote to this is a much shorter plan—one page. You keep subtracting and simplifying until you’ve defined exactly what you’ll do for marketing for the next 3-6 months.

Busyness, sloppiness, laziness, or forgetfulness may still cause you to deviate from the plan from time to time. Fine. You’re fallible. You recommit to your plan, and keep recommitting, until you get the results you wanted or the lesson you needed.

To reach that point, your plan will need your chosen strategies, their supporting tactics, ongoing activities, approximate timeframes, and any variables you’ll tinker with or measure. More on measurement in a moment.

Approach marketing like a scientist.

None of us can really say what works or doesn’t with any certainty until we put in a statistically significant number of activities:

• 100 outreach emails sent in 100 days, not 17 sent over 6 months
• 30 podcast interviews booked in 6 months, not 3 booked in 1 year
• 150 LinkedIn posts published in 1 year, not “I publish when I find the time”

Effective marketing requires something resembling a scientific approach:

• When I tried X activity Y number of times within Z timeframe, I saw A results.
• How might a slightly different approach yield a different result?

Your marketing experiments need a control. Most freelancers already have one: waiting for word-of mouth and referrals (that is, doing nothing that resembles marketing).

You compare results from your experiments to results from your control (that is, doing nothing) and iterate the experiments as needed to get better results.

After you start framing your marketing efforts as experiments, you’ll realize that you ought to measure your inputs and outputs to find the next iteration. You may also tweak variables in successive sub-experiments that you perform inside the bigger one:

• Do I get a higher response rate to outreach emails with subject line 1, 2, or 3?
• Which 10 of last month’s LinkedIn posts had the highest engagement?
• Do I get more podcast interviews if I follow up 5 times instead of 3?

You will eventually trial-and-error your way to satisfactory input-to-output, effort-to-outcome results, or you can gain enough data to conclude the experiment was a bust, at which point you pivot to a new strategy.

Measure so you know when you’re wrong.

Marketing experiments are less about being right from the get-go and more about becoming less and less wrong over time.

For example, let’s say you publish multiple heartfelt LinkedIn posts. You crafted them with great love and attention to stylistic detail, and yet they went over like no ice cream with my kids.

But then, on a day when you’re too discouraged by the lackluster response to throw yourself into lush prose, you take a screenshot of an email from a client gushing about your work, and you write 16 words: “If you want to be this happy about your website, leave a comment. I’ll DM you.”

Four people leave comments, and just like that, you’ve got 4 new project leads.

Really?! you think. That slapdash post was the one that finally got the desired results.

Yes, and you never would have written it if you hadn’t already plodded through a bunch of well-written but ineffective ones.

This is what “marketing” looks like in the real world, and you don’t get to the improvements without noticing and measuring what doesn’t seem to be working, despite the care you put into it, and without trying new things, many of won’t be perfectly executed.

More unsolicited commentary from business dad:

• You don’t get the improvements without the insights.
• You don’t get the insights without regular analysis.
• You have nothing to analyze if you’re inconsistent.

There’s the word inconsistency again.

What causes inconsistency isn’t our lack of good intentions but getting busy with client work and, you know, life. Picking your sick daughter up from school on a Wednesday costs you an hour, and there goes your marketing time for the day.

Because “marketing” isn’t something you can actually put in your calendar, you’ve got to turn your 1-page plan into a weekly marketing schedule.

Break marketing down into 15-minute schedulable activities.

You’re more likely to stick to the plan and achieve consistency if you atomize your strategies (e.g., LinkedIn content marketing) and their supporting tactics (e.g., publishing LinkedIn posts). That is, you must break them into smaller and smaller pieces until you’ve got nucleus of activities you can actually schedule.

You can’t schedule “LinkedIn content marketing,” but you can schedule “collect ideas for new posts.”

You can’t schedule “start conversations using DMs,” but you can schedule “send messages to the next 5 people in my Dream 100 list.”

You know you’re on your way to consistency when you’ve got atoms of marketing work that you can do in 15 minutes.

Above all, we’ve got to be realistic about how and when we’ll fit marketing in to the rest of our responsibilities. A 1-page marketing plan atomized into a weekly schedule and 15-minute activities is realistic, based on how a workday can deviate from your expectations faster than a tequila-drunk politician.

You don’t really mean that marketing solves everything, right?

Of course I don’t. Marketing can generate new project leads, but it can’t fix fundamental flaws in your business model. Only you can do that.

What consistent marketing can do is buy you time, literally:

• You get new leads and stay in business long enough to realize you’re undercharging.
• You raise your prices by only 10% because that’s what your wobbly confidence would allow.
• Surprisingly, that 10% increase doesn’t tear a hole in spacetime. You bump it up another 10%.
• You notice that some of your work has higher perceived value and decide to double down on that.
• As you reduce the number of services you offer, you find it easier to nail down your processes.
• That predictable boost in efficiency enables you to make more money in less time.

You get what I’m saying. Consistent marketing won’t make all of your problems disappear, but it is a lead domino that, once knocked over, can set off a chain reaction.

Or, maybe it’s more accurate to say that a surplus of projects creates a lot of options. Having options means you can be more strategic and less reactive.

You’re smart and resourceful, so if you use consistent marketing to not go out of business, you’ll figure out the other problems.

Land the friggin’ plane already, Austin.

Marketing becomes less intimidating, overwhelming, and erratic if you create a 1-page plan, mince it into 15-minute activities, and assign them to specific days of the week.

And if you still struggle with inconsistency?

Keep shrinking the commitment until the habit sticks. Marketing activity on 3 days, not 5. Or, on 1 day, not 3.

Do what you can, and then grow the commitment once you’ve developed the habit.

Now, for the unabashed pitch.

I invite you to buy Morning Marketing Habit for $149. Start building the habit that will flatten the ups and downs and get you off the freelance feast-or-famine rollercoaster.

Or, you can apply to join the Freelance Cake Community and get Morning Marketing Habit for free inside.

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