Last week, I talked about what it actually looks like to get your marketing done so you can hit the roles of consistent sales.

When I first started out, I saw all a bunch of Procrastination Potholes ™ in my workflow and thought they were some failure of my own marketing muscle or work discipline.

With the fix being some version of “Just push through!”

Now that I’ve helped hundreds of business owners I realize it’s literally all of us.

So, in this issue, a map to the avoiding the biggest road craters that I’ve seen keep my client’s - and my own marketing for Ignore No More - from getting out the door and arriving on time.

I brought this in November 2024 for that “Choosing target audiences” Microconf Remote session because it was so obviously a factor in planning out campaigns but I’d never seen it in a “how-to-do-marketing” guide.

I could give a Ted Talk on this (this is my unofficial pitch!) because I have never seen seasonality brought up in a sales discussion, but it absolutely should be in your plans.

Figure out what time of year:

And depending on when you are actually launching your marketing, start with the awareness level that corresponds to the time of year.

If you’re starting in the deadzone, then build everything and wait to publish it.

AKA, don’t sell to accountants in April.

But you can build your content library, re-do your website, and research distribution channels for all of Q1 so that when May/June comes, you can start reaching out and have all of the marketing materials live to back you up.

If you’re not sure what the buying cycle is, go ask on Reddit or in communities.

Or, if you want to be more casual,

The protection against seasonality killing your cash flow is to have multiple target audiences that don’t have the exact same sales seasonality cycle.

But it’s hard to spin up marketing for multiple target audiences at once. Especially if your team is small and you’re building your foundations from (close to) scratch.

So accept the dip year one. It might not be your (marketing’s) fault.

And prep in year two to go for multiple audiences so the dip doesn’t feel like a desert in your cashflow rain.

Look at the Foundations, now look at me, now back at the Foundations…

Now back at me.

Websites are where your marketing is probably gonna get stalled.

Because there are a lot of parts and you have to decide what’s actually going to be front of house (messaging, services, pricing, features).

And what’s sitting in the back (unused accent colors, features that are better left to a sales call, services that are only if asked about).

You can avoid that stall by blocking out a day to plan out the steps, stick to your messaging matrix you just built for copy, and hiring someone else to do the part(s) you’re shakiest on.

Otherwise you’ll probably procrastinate and never get to it (blocking you from doing all of the other marketing you need to do, like emails or content) or throw it together and have it convert poorly, despite all the time you’re putting into selling and marketing.

Those steps to a website that works should be:

No one is equally good at all of them.
I, for one, am excellent at copy. I leave the design and dev to Sergio or Kate.

We wrote about the whole shebang here → How to not hire a website designer.

Fighting myself to do the marketing execution stuff between my other strategy and operations tasks is a lost cause.

Execution feels overwhelming, and that means it gets procrastinated on.

So I tell myself “I’m only gonna do this from scratch once”.

For every content + distribution combo (which is a campaign) I create a single doc to house all of the moving parts for it with sections for “Scope, Discussion, Research, Execution”

Then i sit my booty down and build every. single. thing. to get the campaign out

For March’s “meet a freelancer” spring mixer event for Workflow that meant:

When i was done setting up this event I had a task list I could repeat this for all of the other events without quietly cursing about how much work it was gonna be to setup.

This is one of the reasons I love doing series for the newsletter, which are typically written in batch form, and recommend starting with no more than 3 distribution channels at a time.

Otherwise the overwhelm is gonna getcha.

If your staring at your company not sure how to get your marketing unstuck, we should chat.

No selling, just a convo on where things are and what you want them to be.

And together I can help you work through what it would take to get there, what resources and how much it should cost so you aren’t left in analysis paralysis on what to do next.

Here’s my link, let’s chat: https://cal.com/sophia-o-neal/lets-talk

Sophia 💜👩🏽‍💻

Powered by: Listening to Becoming on the drive back home from DC. 🚗