Are you *actually* bad at marketing?

Hey there,

I’ve heard you loud and clear! You want to hear from other voices beyond mine.

OKAY, FINE! I get it.

Kidding.

But after the love you showed in my conversation with Courtney Fanning, I’ve decided to make space for more brand and marketing brains inside the Brand Burnout universe—soon to be seen on the big screen, just like the MCU (again, a joke).

This week, I’m sharing a conversation with Madeline Willett of Aligned Marketing. Madeline is an external marketing director for growing businesses who actually want to carry out their marketing strategies without doing it all themselves.

Madeline and I connected via The Co-Promotion Club (Because, of course! Where else do folks meet these days?!), and I asked her to share her marketing expertise for those looking to actualize their brand and marketing strategies. Plus, we talk marketing money pits, CRMs, Wide Open Spaces, and more.

Enjoy!

First things first—if you’re brand were an animal, what would it be?

Fun! Okay, I have to say a wolf. I think a wolf is nomadic yet grounded, constantly scanning the terrain and navigating change with intention. I am personally always on the move as a nomad, but I am really centered in foundations and principles - most of my clients want the big, flashy, trendy marketing without realizing that they have to build a solid foundation first. So, I help them create a foundation on which we can get really creative!

I won’t pretend I really know anything more about wolves, but I also hear that they love to exist both in packs and solitarily, which is the ideal mix for me. I love to learn and collaborate with others, then go into my little introversion hidey hole and get the work done to bring visions to life! I think marketing needs both - understanding of consumer behavior and consistent technical effort.

I have a feeling a lot of folks think they’re bad at marketing because they’re going after the big and flashy tactics, rather than the effortless ones you promote.

What advice would you give to someone who says, “I’m bad at marketing?”

The end result of any good plan should feel “effortless,” but that doesn’t mean it’s easy at first. For anyone. That’s literally why I have a job.

However, like anything, it’s a skill that can be honed. I think when people say they’re “bad at marketing,” it’s like when people claim that they’re “not creative” just because they don’t paint well. We may think of creativity as a brilliant painting, but the reality is that people can be creative in a myriad of ways (yes, you can “creatively” put together a spreadsheet!).

In my mind, it’s the same principle for marketing. I ask these clients: What do you really mean when you say “marketing is hard,” or that you’re “bad at marketing yourself/your brand?”

Marketing is just the process and systems with which you tell the world what you do and why they should buy from you. It’s the pathway for messaging. It’s easy to follow a path once you’ve decided it’s the right one! What those pathways look like should be different and customized for each business. You don’t “have” to do social media or “have” to do email marketing if it doesn’t work for you!

At the end of the day, I say it should feel effortless because it’s aligned with how you want to represent yourself - all you have to do is walk the path.

And if you’re not buying any of my mixed metaphors, it should feel effortless because you’ve hired me to do it for you. 😃 

That idea of finding the right path hits with me. It makes me think about how often people confuse any path with the right strategy.

When we first met, I think we both separately used air quotes to talk about how others are talking about “strategy.” Tell me how you would describe marketing strategy and why it is (or isn’t!) important.

The word “strategy” is a real pet peeve for me! It has gone the way of “consultant” and “synergy,” in my opinion. They’re empty “business” words that hold little value to the actual people running those businesses.

Don’t get me wrong, I think having a real strategy is incredibly important. But I also think it’s important to define “strategy” and what actions are tied to that strategy. I often start working with a business that claims they have a “strategy” from another consultant, which has been getting dusty on a digital shelf deep in their Google Drive.

What’s the point of that?

For me, the “strategy” is a playbook that includes the marketing goals, what experiments we’re going to run to get there, and how we’ll determine if those experiments are successful or not. Then, I build a plan that is action-focused on how we’re getting there. Together, that’s a true “strategy.”

Ooh, I love that you’re talking experiments, because so many folks think “I’ve got my plan, I must be done now,” and you and I both know that marketing (and brand-building) is ongoing.

You’re great at taking the theoretical strategies and making sure they get implemented. Tell me about your process and how you go from theory to action.

Being a natural introvert sets me up well for this portion of my business. because this is really about listening first. Usually, a business owner who has been doing it all themselves comes to me a little lost in the weeds.

Yes! Lost in the weeds is a great way to describe them.

I hear a lot of “I know we would do well if we could get our business in front of the audience of this particular podcast.” Or, “I saw this on TikTok and I thought we should do the same, but nobody is following our TikTok.”

Okay, so you’re not going to be on the Tim Ferriss Show. And no, what you saw on TikTok is not going to work for you because you’re a law firm and you can’t dance.

Instead, I find the challenge is moving folks away from the “how” and more into the results they want. Especially if they’ve been doing it all alone, I find it’s easy for business owners to get stuck in trying to haphazardly follow trends, rather than really taking the time to understand what they’re working toward.

YES! You are describing so many people I work with!

No shade - that’s totally normal!

But, I like to start with the results we want to see and work backwards.

What is your marketing for?

What would your business look like if your marketing were working?

Then, we identify the limitations, the gaps, and the opportunities and plug in a few marketing experiments that will let us determine what really works. Maybe we can’t get on that huge podcast, but we can get on 3 smaller ones to start.

My rule for planning for clients is that no goal on a marketing strategy should be without aligned actions. And no aligned action gets added without identifying who, how, and when it’s getting implemented.

Wow—with this level of intention, your clients have to be seeing great results. Tell me about some recent wins!

One client who recently saw results is an operations consulting business. The founder had been expanding her consulting practice for a while, but didn’t really have a brand or a digital marketing presence that reflected the depth or clarity of her work. She had no consistent messaging and was relying almost entirely on word-of-mouth.

We partnered for one of my 12-week Marketing Sprints, where we refined her brand positioning and clarified her ideal client, developed her brand voice and messaging, and created a marketing strategy she could sustain on her own. The cherry on top was launching her new clean, professional website that reflects her evolved business.

The sustainability of managing her own brand and marketing efforts was key. She now feels confident sending people to her website, is having stronger discovery calls, and is booking aligned clients at a higher level. With systems in place and messaging that feels authentic, she’s no longer stuck in the day-to-day scramble and knows what to do to keep following her marketing plan.

I recently met her in person while visiting her hometown, and she paid for a lovely meal for us—in her words, because she “robbed me” based on how much value the sprint provided for her business confidence. I’m not sure about all that, but I very much appreciated the gesture!

Any excuse to break bread with a client is cool with me!

But seriously—that impact is huge! I find that the systems are where business owners fall short. They have big plans and dreams, but actualizing those is really hard, especially as a one-person show. I’m guessing you implemented some sort of CRM to manage some of this.

What’s your go-to CRM? And what should folks think about when they’re considering adding a CRM to their tech stack?

Marketing is as much about relationships as it is about the creative work and the metrics. I firmly believe that the right system can help you build confidence in creating and maintaining relationships, and therefore increase the value of all your marketing efforts.

I’m a huge fan of HubSpot. Except in cases where a specialized niche and software is involved (for example, I work with some summer camps that rely on camper-specific CRM’s). I nearly always recommend it. In my experience, this is the best software positioned to help you grow and does the best job of serving as a “one-stop shop” for marketing, ops, sales, customer success, and account management (helping you reduce that cost creep of duplicate software later on!).

If you’re considering adding a CRM to your business, you need to ask yourself:

• Is this a standalone system or does it need to interact with other platforms? Whether it plays nicely with any other software you use can be a big motivator to go with a specific CRM.

• Where am I going? What parts of my business are going to grow in the next year? 2 years? Will the CRM have the capability to grow with me? For example, is the CRM publishing new AI tools or new integrations frequently, or are they quickly falling behind?)

• How am I really going to use it? You’d be shocked by the number of people I work with who got a CRM because they felt they “should,” but then they don’t actually use it. They don’t update the data. They don’t learn about new features. They don’t bother with the free training. Be sure you're ready to actually use it!

Finally, a word to the wise if you’re running a business and you think you’d prefer to create a custom solution, rather than use a ready-made CRM. Consider upkeep, maintenance, developer fees, flexibility, and whether it’s truly impossible for you to get what you want from an existing CRM. You are already running your business - you don’t want to be running a custom CRM business, also.

A custom CRM?! That sounds like a money pit in the making if you’re not careful!

Speaking of…what’s the biggest waste of money when it comes to marketing?

Wow, bombshell of a question.

There’s no specific marketing waste for all brands—it’s individual. But whenever I hear the words, “It’s just how it’s done in our industry,” or “It’s how we’ve always done it,” my ears prick up. There is likely money being wasted!

The reality is that marketing is a series of experiments. I can’t tell you exactly what will work (and beware any marketer who says they can). What I can tell you is:

• What experiments are worth running?

• How much should we spend on that experiment (time, money, energy)?

• When will we decide whether it was successful or not?

We spend, we learn, and we pivot.

I find most people end up spending money without thinking of it as an experiment. If you’ve been spending money on billboards for the last 10 years and you’ve never tried investing a portion of that money elsewhere, you’re not conducting enough experiments.

If you spend 20 hours per week on social media and have five followers, you’re not experimenting enough. Spend on the experiments. Then, spend more on what is working well (while continuing to experiment and iterate with at least a portion of your budget!).

And speaking of experiments, you’ve had a zig-zag sort of journey to your current role. I was thrilled to learn that you also started your marketing career in tourism.

Tourism is such a unique industry—how has it impacted your work today?

Ah, the tourism industry. In my experience, there are three ingredients in being a successful tourism professional:

1. Understanding people and managing them with compassion and patience. I can’t tell you how many times I was leading an over-the-road tour where grown-up people passed the bathroom eight times on their way to ask me (their tour director) where the bathroom was.

2. Juggling a bit of everything while wearing a smile. Leading impromptu karaoke because you have a broken-down charter bus full of 53 octogenarians in the middle of Yukon, while simultaneously troubleshooting with the driver and trying to find a cell signal to call HQ? Been there.

3. Selling the unexpected. Oh, you want to go to Costa Rica? Nope, we don’t have a trip there, but we’ll make one!

All of these ingredients also take place in running a business, especially in marketing.

Understanding people is exactly how you determine which marketing experiments to run and how to build a strategy that your team will actually follow. Juggling is how you learn fast, fail fast, and pivot fast.

And selling the unexpected is a part of the game—you may have the vision of where we’re going, I may have a plan of what the path should look like, but sometimes we find ourselves shoveling extra dirt as we cross the forest together (is that even how paths are made? I need to work on my metaphors).

Ha! Oddly, I know a bit about how paths are made and highly recommend this article from 99 Percent Invisible.

And speaking of travel, you’re a digital nomad! How has that impacted your business?

Real talk—I only recently started admitting to my clients and prospective clients that I am a digital nomad (I work from a new country each month). I originally thought that it would worry my clients, or that they’d think I was on vacation.

But the reality is so incredibly different. After some prodding from a business coach, I finally realized that the right clients would get it and that the work speaks for itself. The truth is that being a digital nomad makes me more productive (yes, really!), inspired, and multi-skilled.

I’m often navigating challenging or strange situations in my free time, which has made me so much more resilient and shown me how to build relationships with people with wildly different perspectives.

And, I’m not alone. I tend to travel with 2-25 other nomads at a time. Which means I have “coworkers” who take their work incredibly seriously (it provides the life they love), are passionate about their unique industries, and rock at what they do (they wouldn’t get to a point where this was feasible if they didn’t give it their all!).

A client recently asked me a question about a design choice on their site, and I was able to go into the living room and ask two UX designers and one graphic designer what they thought. Can you imagine the well-rounded and interesting feedback the client received?!

In a typical office scenario, you would usually spend your time with the other 10 people who do exactly what you do and live within the same business framework you do. But imagine if you had 25 coworkers from entirely different countries, backgrounds, industries, skill levels, and business experiences—you learn so much more!

Okay, if you’re traveling with other people, I’m sure you get into all sorts of fun, like karaoke!

So, if your business had a karaoke song, what would it be?

Oh heck yeah! It would be Wide Open Spaces by the Chicks. Ha!

I think that song is really about honoring your past, but also taking a chance on a new possibility while being willing to learn from the bumps along the way. That’s how I think my clients feel when they originally set out to build their businesses, and I want my marketing approach to take them back to that original feeling of exploration and excitement.

I love this! And I’m adding that song to my karaoke playlist—I already know all the words (because, hello—Millennial!)

Thanks so much for hanging out with me today! If folks want to connect with you or just soak in some of your knowledge, where can they connect?

I offer free high-level marketing audits on my website and a transparent menu of my services.

I can also be found on LinkedIn, where I regularly share random musings and questions about marketing I think no one else is asking (but should)!

Thanks, Madeline!

And thank you for reading along!