Stop Doing More Marketing. Start Understanding Your Buyer.

Most of the marketing happening in small businesses right now isn't marketing. It's motion.

Posting because you're supposed to post. 

Running an ad because a friend said it worked for them. 

Saying yes to another podcast slot because it feels productive. 

All of it costs time and money, and most of it never turns into a client.

This is the first part of a series Jen Hamilton is doing with Michael Haynes, a go-to-market specialist who works with growing B2B service and tech companies to build the exact opposite of what I just described: marketing and business development that actually connects to revenue. 

Michael's frameworks are the kind that professional services businesses use to build seven figure practices and beyond.  The first lesson he gave Jen is one every business owner needs, whether you have a marketing team or you are the marketing team.

You Don't Have a Marketing Problem. You Have a Buyer Problem

Here's where Michael starts, and where most business owners skip ahead of. Before you write a single post or plan a single campaign, you have to actually know who is deciding to hire you, and what they're trying to solve when they do.

We have to deliver the right kinds of advice, insights, and recommendations that they're looking for. - Michael Haynes

That sounds obvious until you sit with it. Most of us market from our own head: what we think is impressive about our work, what we'd want to hear if we were the client. Michael's framework flips that. It starts with the buyer's actual priorities, not yours.

So ask yourself: if your best client described exactly what convinced them to hire you, would you know the answer? If you're not sure, that's not a character flaw. It's just a sign no one ever taught you to ask.

Your Buyer Is Doing Homework Long Before You Ever Meet Them

Here's the part that changes how you think about content entirely.

Our decision makers do a lot of self-education and research on their priorities and challenges, often long before they start to reach out and want a short list. - Michael Haynes

By the time a prospective client fills out your contact form, they've already been reading, watching, and comparing for weeks, sometimes months. The businesses that win aren't the ones who show up loudest when the buyer is finally ready to talk. 

They're the ones who showed up early, in the places that buyer was already looking.

Strategy First. Tactics Second.

Posting more, running more ads, showing up on more podcasts: none of it is the problem. The problem is doing all of it before you've answered who you're actually trying to reach and why they'd choose you.

A lot of what gets called marketing is tactics. What's missing is the strategy, and then the tactics. - Jen Hamilton

This is exactly where Revenue Development, one of the six pillars our Certified Fractional COOs use to evaluate a business's health, tends to break down. 

Marketing gets treated as a to-do list instead of a strategy with its own metrics and accountability. Tactics without a strategy underneath them are just expensive guessing.

Two Moves That Actually Build Visibility

Once you know your buyer, Michael's framework points to two moves that do the heavy lifting: content and what he calls micro events.

It's not just about creating the content. It's about distributing it and making it available where your people are already going for information. - Michael Haynes

That second part is the piece most business owners miss. You can write the best article of your career, but if it only lives on your own website, the buyer who's already researching somewhere else will never find it. 

The other move, micro events, are smaller, focused gatherings: a roundtable, a live Q&A, a short workshop, built around the exact issues your buyers are already wrestling with.

Neither move requires a big budget. Both require knowing your buyer well enough to know where they're actually looking.

Let's Make This Personal

If your marketing feels like a lot of effort for very little return, that's not proof you're bad at this. It's proof you've been building tactics without a strategy underneath them, which is exactly the gap Michael and Jen dig into throughout this series.

You don't need to do more. You need to do the right things, in the right order, for the right person.

Next Steps

This week, write down who your last three clients actually were, and what they told you made them decide to hire you. Look for the pattern. That pattern is the starting point for every piece of content and every event you build from here.

If you're stuck turning your marketing from busywork into an actual growth strategy, book a Quick-Solve Session with Hamilton COOs and let's find the fix together.