You Are Not Your Own Customer

Hi, my name is Kathy and I’m a marketer.

I am not "just" a marketer -- I'm a joyful, liberated, delighted-to-do-it marketer. That may sound strange to you, especially if you are one of the many coaches who complain bitterly about marketing.

I’ve been self-employed since 1997, but I must confess that I haven’t always been a joyful, liberated, delighted to-do-it marketer. It took me about seven years to settle into a happy committed relationship with marketing.

So what was I doing between 1997 and 2004? Well, I kept myself quite busy…

• Annoying some people with too many emails, and other people with too few.
• Confusing people with either the wrong information, too little information or too much information.
• Struggling with my Gremlin of Self Worth in a very public way, by alternately raising, lowering, then raising again, and revealing, hiding, then revealing again -- my pricing.
• Changing my website copy every time I read some new fangled theory or “fact” about what to do or what NEVER to do with your website copy.
• Re-writing and re-launching my freebie over and over – with no appreciable result other than an uncanny ability to maintain a perfect balance between the number of new subscribers and the number of unsubscribers each month (i.e., a net gain of exactly zero).
• Doing countless free teleclasses, which got rave reviews from people who were into free stuff, but which made very little impression on people who were actually likely to purchase anything.

And I admit, I complained bitterly about how much I hated to be marketed to. Which left me in the weird position of needing to do to my own customers that which I hated others to do unto me (or so I thought at the time).

Just Not That Into It

All that stuff I was doing? It was all for me. I wasn’t necessarily doing any of it because it was the right thing to do. If I looked too closely at whether it was right or not, I might have had to make some uncomfortable changes. And to be honest, I wasn’t really that into doing anything that took me farther out of my comfort zone. I was already in over my head, just trying to tolerate the idea of marketing, never mind whether it was actually working for my customers.

In spite of all that, I must have been doing some marketing right, because clients managed to find me; not exactly a flood of them, but still. And when my marketing worked, it felt really good. So it wasn’t all bad…

It’s hard to pinpoint where things started to shift, but if I had to pick I’d say it was reading Martha Barletta’s book, Marketing to Women. That book validated what my gut was telling me to do (as opposed to my head, which was a very dark and stormy place where marketing was concerned). I feel I learned just as much about myself as a marketer as I did about the women (and men) I’m marketing to.

Good Marketing is Simply Good Service

More importantly, it helped me make an important mental shift, from self-centered marketing to Customer-centered marketing. We are all children of the age of advertising; we have earned the right to have our personal biases and preferences about how we like or hate to be marketed to. But from a marketing standpoint, it doesn’t matter what WE like. What matters is what works for the Customer.

Good marketing is simply good service. This should be an easy thing for coaches to get – it’s not about you, and it’s not even about all those other people like you. It’s only -- and always -- about the Customer.

How do you know what serves your Customer? First, you have to be able to distinguish between a Customer and all those other people who are NOT your Customer, and then you have to be very tuned in, very attentive. Pay attention to what works, even if it wouldn’t work for you.

You are someone else’s Customer.