Marketing

Taking it to market

Welcome to the part where it all goes out into the world.

By the time you land here, you've done the why, the what and the how. Your values, your purpose, your vision and legacy are clear. Your brand, your business model, your value proposition and your read on the competition are all on the page. Marketing is the what else — what else do we need to do so the business is firing on all engines? It's the first section of the Operating stage, and its whole job is to take the positioned, planned business you've built and amplify it into the market.

I'll be honest with you up front, the way I am on the video: I am not a master marketer, and I'd never pretend to be. This isn't my passion or my purpose. It's a key component of what it takes to scale and grow a business, and what I'm sharing is simply what I've found useful doing it for myself. If you want to go deep, go read Jack Trout, Al Ries' 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Seth Godin, Ryan Holiday — consume all of it. And if you want someone to do the marketing for you, hire a service provider. I'm assuming you're a founder, three-plus years in, with a small team — and quite possibly, you are the marketing team. So I'll meet you where you are.

Half of it is already written

Here's the bit most people miss, and it's the whole reason Marketing sits where it does in the framework.

Everything you've already produced is the input. Your values, purpose, vision and legacy tell you how to talk about your brand and get people to care. Your brand canvas, your business model, your value proposition and your competition map tell you who you're targeting, where, and what you want to say to them. Marketing doesn't ask you to invent a message from scratch — in a lot of cases half your content is already written, because you did the preceding work. Marketing that runs without a clear brand underneath it just wastes the exposure. Done in order, it amplifies something that's already true.

So the first move is analysis. How big is my market? Who holds the largest chair? Who's actually buying, what are the characteristics of the top buyers, what price ranges are they in, how many sellers are there? Then competition across three horizons — who do I want to be competing with in ten years, who am I beating in three, and who's in my sights for the next twelve months? When I started as a celebrant I'm fighting the cheapest, newest locals; in ten years I want to be the one flown around the country. That gap sets the direction and the energy of everything that follows.

Positioning, exposure and the brand myth

Jack Trout put it best: positioning is a mental device people use to file new information in a logical place — and they discard anything that doesn't find a comfortable, empty slot in their mind. That's why we did all that work on category and perception early. You're not trying to fight for space someone else already owns; you're filling an empty window so that when it's time to buy, you're seen, remembered and considered.

Then there's the uncomfortable maths of repetition. The old rule was that three exposures to an idea made someone treat it as important. In the social media era, it's now north of twenty. That's the real reason we use social in business — not vanity, but to be seen enough times that people genuinely register that you exist and that you're part of solving their problem. What people focus on, they treat as important. So you need to be seen.

And over the long arc, you're building a brand myth — your brand promise wedded to heroic, epic associations, compounded over years. Look at Red Bull. They're not selling you a can any more; they're selling an entire energetic, adventurous lifestyle. That's the mythology you're aiming at, in service of the ten-year legacy you defined at the very beginning.

Make it, then move it

When it comes to actually producing, get smart and lazy in the right places. Start with words — they become scripts, scripts become video, video gives you audio, and the transcript gives you written content. One long-form piece, recorded the way I'm recording this, breaks down into articles, into posts, into sixty-second clips. Produce once, distribute everywhere. Then run a proper distribution process: written content to your site and LinkedIn, video to YouTube, audio to your podcast, images to the visual platforms — so people who care about your problem find you where they already are, instead of you hoping they all turn up in one place.

A couple of principles I hold to. Aim for 90% value, 10% sales — content communicates culture, purpose and problem-solving, it rarely sells outright. And while you're still building an audience, post organically to each platform rather than auto-blasting through a tool; the algorithms reward you for it. Underneath all of it, your brand sits as the input — your pitch, category, promise, the words and attributes — feeding every piece you make.

Where this points

That's Marketing in overview: take the positioned, planned business, and amplify it. Simple to say. I never said easy. The founders who do the detailed work build a trend that lasts — a legacy. The ones who skim the surface build a fad. You've got this far because you can handle the detail, and this is where it pays off.

The full set — the social analysis table, the customer-research questions, the goals and tactics worksheets, the channel-by-outcome map and the advertising retargeting sequence — is reserved for the people I take through the framework properly, and it's far sharper with someone in the room. That's exactly what I do with founders inside The Success Framework. → Work with Rob.

Join the list, and I'll take you the rest of the way.