My friend Adrienne Dorison talks a lot about the bottlenecks in your business.
For example, if you or your team has limited capacity to deliver your product or service, your bottleneck is in delivery. If you have a sales problem getting leads to become paying customers, you have a conversion problem. And if you have trouble getting new leads in the first place, you have an attraction problem.
Any given business will move through these problems in something of a cycle. For example, let’s say you have a delivery problem, so you hire a new team member to help you deliver. But now you have more capacity than you have customers, so you need to pay attention to converting more of your leads to paying clients. And once you exhaust your existing leads, you need to attract more…
…and so on.
It’s completely natural to cycle through these bottlenecks in your business, and if you’re pretty savvy, you’ll get good at identifying where you’re at in any given stage so that you can focus your goals on solving the right problem. If you don’t, you’ll end up wasting resources trying to solve the wrong problem.
How do you know if you have a marketing bottleneck?
Attraction is just another word for marketing, so how do you know if you have a bottleneck in marketing and attracting new leads?
Well, the most obvious answer is that you don’t have enough leads to reach your revenue targets. (Although, this can be tricky; if you aren’t sure about your conversion rate, look into that, too. It could be that you have plenty of leads if you could improve your conversion rate.)
Here’s a common scenario: A business owner wants to sell X spots in her online course every time she launches, but she keeps missing that goal. She’s got plenty of capacity to deliver the course, so she looks at conversion rate, and it turns out that her conversion rate is healthy — the problem is that she doesn’t have enough people seeing the offer to hit her goal.
That is an attraction bottleneck.
Whatever our theoretical course-creator is doing to attract new eyeballs and new leads for her course, it isn’t enough. If she can put enough people into the top of the funnel, she will meet her goals.
Why do you have a bottleneck in your marketing?
The question, then, becomes why? Why isn’t she attracting enough new leads to reach her goals?
It could be any number of reasons, but if she’s like many of my clients, the bottleneck is her.
That is, somehow she is standing in the way of producing a marketing plan that will work to attract the leads she needs to meet her goals. Is she doing this on purpose? Of course not! She’s probably completely unaware of it.
Remember Jeff Foxworthy’s comedy bit, “You might be a redneck…”? Well, let’s play “You might be the bottleneck…”
You might be the bottleneck if…
- you have dozens, even hundreds of ideas — that never get created because you don’t have the time.
- your blog is fully of draft posts that you just can’t seem to finish — or don’t publish because you’re not sure when is the best time to use them.
- you don’t have a smart plan about what kind of marketing message to share at what time… so you end sharing random thoughts at the last minute or not sharing anything at all…
- you create tons of content (live streams, videos, coaching calls, courses, speeches, etc.) but they don’t get shared and repurposed as well as they could be because there’s no system for doing so. It’s like spending HOURS of your precious time creating something, only to toss it into a river and hope somebody sees it.
- you’ve been doing this for so long that it feels like you’ve said it all, and because you can’t think of anything new to say (or any new way to say it) you just… stop posting.
- you’re been so busy serving clients and customers that marketing was never a top priority… but now you want to grow or scale.
- you religiously create content, but it never gets any traction because you don’t have any kind of plan for promoting it outside your circle of already-adoring fans.
- you have a team or team member that’s ready and willing to create whatever content you want… but you struggle to give them direction…
If any of those sound like you? You might be the bottleneck in your marketing processes in your business.
BUT! There is a solution.
How to unblock your marketing bottleneck
If you’ve identified that you are the bottleneck in your business’ marketing plan, that’s actually the first step to solving the problem — because once you can see that you are the bottleneck, you can unstopper the bottleneck to open things up.
- You can hire someone to help you create the big picture content plan.
- You can work with someone to brainstorm amazing ideas and get them out of your head and into that plan.
- You can hire a team to execute on those amazing ideas.
- You can get help creating a promotional framework that your team can implement to get your message out to the right people.
(In fact, you can hire us to help you with all of those things.)
The point is, you can get out of the position of holding up the marketing plan and instead let it flow fast and free (with as much or as little input from you as you want).
If you have a business that needs consistently and regularly attract new leads to the top of your funnel to make the rest of your business goals work, then content marketing is one of the best solutions in which you can invest — because content really shines in attracting new audiences and helping move them toward a conversion.
If this sounds like you, and you’d like some help unstoppering your bottleneck, I’d love to speak with you. Click here now to fill out our short application and schedule a time to meet and discuss how we can fix your attraction problem in your business.