“If your product or service is good enough, it will sell itself”. That’s the greatest lie I’ve heard about business and marketing. And that lie is responsible for the “sudden death” of thousands of companies.

Let me be straightforward: without marketing, you risk your entire business. Then why do so many avoid it? And when they do it, they do it profoundly wrong? It’s like a child at a party nobody wants to play with, but when they do, it’s awkward (I can relate to that as an introvert).

Richie Norton put it right: “Marketing is safe. Sales are risky unless marketing has done its job. Then sales are safe, too.” There is no sales without marketing, plain and simple.

One-person businesses are no exception to that. You can only facilitate your lead and revenue generation with effective marketing as a solopreneur.

The thing is that 2 out of 3 solopreneurs (actual statistics from my experience with clients) approach marketing with fear and not curiosity. They are afraid of failure and success with it at the same time. They also feel like a fraud and that marketing will expose their inefficiency.

It doesn’t have to be and feel this way. Marketing is not (should not be) about manipulation but persuasion. If you master persuasion, you will master the art and science of marketing itself.

It doesn’t have to be intrusive to work. Prominent entrepreneur and keynote speaker Tom Fishburne put it nicely, “The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing”. It’s about value, care for your audience, stories and emotions, all integrated into a seamless experience.

Marketing sounds wonderful. Then why do solopreneurs struggle with it?

4 reasons why

If you don’t know something, you become afraid of it. Ignorance is the worst growth killer. Many solopreneurs come from other disciplines and may have never been taught the marketing fundamentals. Even if they have, they may not know how to implement them effectively.

The isolation many solopreneurs struggle with is also why they avoid marketing or any activity that promotes their work. It’s true. They live in a “bubble” and focus solely on their product or service (trust me, I’ve been there myself at the beginning, although I studied marketing back at university).

Even if they are pro-marketing, they fail to prioritise it or outsource it to an expert if it is not their core strength. Some are even afraid of outsourcing it because they feel it will look and sound alien to their true selves.

The Money Myth is another common (if not the most common) reason. Marketing should not be approached as a cost centre. While it may involve spending, that’s not a predetermined condition. In many cases, you can even do it without spending a dime or a cent because “marketing is not about ads.” I will elaborate on that later.

For now, let me elaborate on the 3 Marketing Fundamentals you need to have in place before even starting your one-person business.

The 3 Marketing Fundamentals

There are countless viewpoints, and the more books or videos you read or watch, the more puzzled you become.

Let me be clear on this: marketing is and should be straightforward. Simplicity wins over complexity, especially for already struggling solopreneurs.

Over the years, I’ve distilled the foundations of marketing for any solo business to this trio:

• Your Why, How, What Statement

• Your target audience (or niche)

• Your UDP (Unique Differentiation Point)

When you have those three elements in place, you are good to go. Marketing will become more effortless and smoother - without significant hiccups or mistakes.

The Why, How, What statement

Inspired by Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle framework, this statement serves as the essence of your brand and business (essentially, you, since you are a solopreneur).

Starting from the inside, your Why is your purpose and audience.

The How is the way you will realise this purpose and your values.

The What is the specific product or service you offer.

It can take the following form.

I empower [YOUR AUDIENCE, e.g. consultants, female entrepreneurs, introverts struggling with their careers] to [WHAT YOU HELP THEM ACHIEVE] by [WHAT YOU PROVIDE AND HOW, YOUR VALUES] with my [PRODUCT OR SERVICE].

Feel free to change the wording to suit your case better. But keep the format as is. The structure is crucial.

Target audience (or niche)

Without a clearly defined target audience, your marketing will fall short. You need to know exactly who you talk to so that you can optimise your message and marketing for them. 

The best way to do it is this:

• Identify a group of people’s present state and desired future state and the gap between them. Your offering should be about how you can bridge that gap. 

• Create 1-3 personas (the number is up to you, but for starters, one is sufficient) and describe them as well as you can (needs and pain points, solutions they need, personalities or behaviours if you can, preferences). 

Unique Differentiation Point (UDP)

Now, that’s crucial. Your marketing is about to suffer if you are not differentiated enough. Differentiation and uniqueness set you apart from others, offering the same thing to the same audience, more or less.

It answers the question, “Why do potential clients choose me over the others?”. Let me clarify this: it’s not about competitors and how you can outperform them. It’s about the diverse and unique skills, expertise or viewpoints you bring to the table.

Be cautious, though: the UDP is NOT about the features of your offering or its benefits. Things like “save time or money” can’t differentiate you enough simply because they are self-evident (nobody will buy from you to spend more time and money on a solution).

To help you with crafting your UDP, search in these 3 areas:

• Your personality and values

• Your background, experience and expertise

• Your unique method of delivering your offering (how you connect the dots for your audience)

Now that you have the 3 Marketing Fundamentals in place, you are good to go with marketing for your solo business.

Just make sure you keep shy from making these 7 common mistakes most solopreneurs make at one stage or another.

The 7 most common mistakes (and how to avoid them)

I hope I made it crystal clear so far that marketing is essential (as well as sales) for your one-person business. A good enough product or service do not suffice to help your business survive and thrive.

The following situations are very common among solopreneurs and, based on my year long experience working with one-person business owners, they can limit your marketing effectiveness and overall business growth significantly. 

#1 Relying on outbound marketing because it’s easier to do it

For those not familiar with the term, outbound marketing is about actively reaching out to potential customers to promote your service or product. That is, ads, cold calling, and emailing.

Those tactics are straightforward. You create the ads in the platform of your choice, pick an audience (in the way the platform allows you to) and push the button. It’s the same with cold outreach. You get access to your potential customers’ email addresses or phone numbers (beware of doing it in a legal and ethical way) and start reaching out.

The fact that outbound marketing is easier does not mean it’s the only way to promote your service or product. In our time, outbound content (essentially ads and cold outreach) is proven to work less and less. We live in a world full of distractions. People don’t want more distractions and don’t like being aggressively sold to.

Inbound marketing (content in all its forms) can work wonders. It is more resource-demanding (time, energy, focus), but it can lead to great results in the long run. Plus, the results are more sustainable because content helps you build your brand and audience.

Conclusion: Include inbound marketing in your marketing mix and avoid relying on ads to grow your solo business.

#2 Excluding outbound marketing from your mix

This is the opposite of the previous mistake. Inbound marketing is undoubtedly more effective and efficient than cold outreach and ads. However, many solopreneurs exclude the latter from their mix altogether. 

They go to the other side of the marketing spectrum, relying solely on inbound marketing (i.e. content). Some consider ads salesy, pushy, distractive, disruptive, and unethical. This aphorism can’t serve you well. You miss many opportunities to scale by excluding ads from your mix.

Ads can help amplify the reach of your message and get it in front of the eyes of a broad audience (still clearly defined). It can also reach that audience faster than you could do with email marketing alone. Again, it’s not about speed. To grow a solo business sustainably, you need to use persuasion and not manipulation (= manipulative ads and aggressive cold outreach). However, ads can, under certain conditions, 

I’ve worked on both ends of the marketing spectrum. My take on this dual challenge (inbound vs. outbound) is to use inbound marketing as your business's primary strategy. Once you find what works (for example, an offer or a lead magnet to grow your newsletter mailing list), you can use ads to scale the results.

Conclusion: Don’t cross outbound marketing off your marketing list, but include it in your mix when you want to scale something you have found that works.

#3 Overthinking and wasting precious time and energy

For some reason unknown to me, solopreneurs are more prone to a lack of confidence in their actions. On the other hand, entrepreneurs may be overconfident, but they are committed to swift action. Solopreneurs may waste precious time and energy overthinking their marketing.

I’ve met and worked with talented solopreneurs who tortured themselves with constant doubt about their marketing efforts. They felt uncomfortable with outbound marketing (and mostly unwilling to do it), but they were also sceptical about their inbound marketing. They don’t want to rely on ads (but exclude them altogether from the mix), and at the same time, they are not confident with content marketing. They overthink their messaging, strategy, pillar topics, audience, and almost everything in their marketing mix, insisting on working on them until they feel 100% right or ready.

Guess what? Your marketing will never look 100% right, and you will never feel 100% ready to go for it unless you start. Perfectionism and procrastination are verified growth-killers.

Opt for action instead of wasting precious resources (overthinking, postponing, working on insignificant details). Once you set your strategy and plan, start executing and fine-tuning on the go. The sooner you fail with an element of your marketing mix, the better, as you can swiftly adapt and try a new twist.

Conclusion: Opt for 50% to 70% good enough marketing and go for it, learning from mistakes or failures and capitalising on what you actually find that works.

#4 No strategy and planning but randomness

I can’t stress enough the paramount importance of structure and order in marketing (as in anything else in life and business). Randomness is your worst enemy. Many solopreneurs take the advice for swift action to the extremes, starting off with no structure, strategy or plan.

Even worse, they don’t think their marketing strategically, thus resorting to promising marketing tactics that look easy to do (for example, ads). Even if they start with content, they have no strategy in place regarding the topics and subtopics they want to talk about, the formats of content they will focus on, or the media their target audience hangs out at (so they select the most effective distribution channel), to name a few weak points.

Without a clearly defined strategy, a solid marketing plan and a concrete and actionable execution plan, your marketing will fall short of effectiveness and efficiency. The results will be poor or random at best. You need to be strategic and tactical with intention in order to make the most of your marketing and let it grow your solo business.

Approach marketing as a 3+1 stage process. The first step is strategy (beginning with the marketing fundamentals I mentioned earlier and crafting the same for your inbound and outbound marketing). The second stage is planning, where you decide what marketing activities to do, when, where and how (formats, distribution channels), and put everything into a specific marketing plan (use a spreadsheet to write everything down; don’t use sophisticated tools initially). The third stage is solid execution based on your plan (do it ruthlessly but also adapt if you need to). The extra stage is tracking performance to ensure you are on the right track.

Conclusion: Avoid randomness in your marketing and opt for a structured approach with strategy, planning, an execution plan, and tracking mechanisms.

#5 Struggling to keep up with the pace of marketing (or a lack of consistency)

Most solopreneurs (at least those who opt for action and don’t overthink) go all in with marketing when they start off after they have set their marketing fundamentals, strategy and plan. This is not sustainable.

Going all in means overspending resources on marketing for a specific amount of time and neglecting other vital functions of your one-person business (like sales, business development, long-term growth, and delivery). As a solopreneur, you wear many hats. You can’t afford to put essential business activities aside, as doing so will soon backfire simply because there’s no one else to do it for you (outsourcing core functions of your business is not recommended).

Moreover, overfocusing on marketing (often focusing on minute and insignificant details) unconsciously creates excessive expectations. You condition your mind to believe that this is how marketing is done (should be done). So, when you can’t keep up with the fast pace anymore (because you are overwhelmed or burnt out), you become disappointed and risk quitting marketing altogether.

You need a healthy and sustainable pace where you prioritise those marketing activities that matter the most at each specific point in time and focus on delivering them effectively and efficiently. You don’t need to burn out with marketing quickly and give up. Unfortunately, there’s no fast rule about what the ideal pace is. I can’t give you one because each case is different. This is something you need to figure out yourself on the go. Just remember to structure it in a way that allows you to be consistent with marketing and make the most out of your efforts.

Conclusion: Avoid burning out with marketing when you start, and find a healthy pace that allows for consistency in the long run.

#6 Poor marketing execution = poor results 

Even the best marketing strategy and plan fail if poorly executed. This is very common in business overall. Most tend to focus on the more strategic parts of marketing (often overspending their resources), allowing for little energy and focus on execution.

Many solopreneurs craft a solid marketing strategy and plan but fail to plan for resources for execution. This struggle is often paired with the previous one about a healthy pace they can keep up with. It’s easier to look at your strategy and plan and take pride in it than to challenge yourself with ruthlessly executing what needs to be done in the daily grind. Most don’t execute properly (so marketing becomes less effective), or they skip whole parts because they may not have the time, energy or required focus.

Let me put it plain and straightforward: poor execution kills your marketing. On top of that, you condition yourself for negative mental and psychological consequences. You get disappointed and/or frustrated with the results, often doubting your worth or quitting marketing altogether. Trust me, I’ve seen that happen more often than not.

Execution is about management. Management is about prioritising and spending your limited resources accordingly. You need to build that habit, but you can’t do that overnight. As with all habits, you need to unfreeze your current situation (i.e. bad habit, e.g. not publishing the content you had planned for a week), change your mindset and shift to a new, healthier habit (= executing your marketing plan consistently and realistically by making the proper provisions). Habit building is a vast topic, and I will return to it at some point with a dedicated letter.

Conclusion: Plan the execution of your marketing plan thoroughly but realistically based on the resources you can allocate and execute consistently without aiming for perfection.

#7 No marketing funnel in place

Funnels are a rather taboo topic nowadays because of the bad reputation they got when marketing gurus and experts flooded the ecosystem with automated funnels and false promises that they are the remedy for all things growth.

Through trial and error, I’ve adopted a more sustainable approach to funnels. I am not into tools and hacks for using funnels to grow your business exponentially on autopilot. At least not before you set up your core marketing and sales funnel.

Without a funnel, your marketing navigates muddy waters and foggy landscapes. You don’t know what to say to whom at the right time to lead them further down your funnel and eventually convert them to paying clients. Doing so means you spend your resources randomly, and the results can’t be anything other than random. The more you stay at this random stage without a strategic funnel, the less effective your marketing becomes and the poorer the results.

To reverse that, set up a simple yet effective funnel that can serve as the roadmap for your lead generation. That funnel has 3 stages: The Top of the funnel is how you attract people into your funnel (reach and awareness), the Middle of the funnel is about how you nurture them (awareness of your value and solution), and the Bottom of the funnel is how you convert them to clients (decision, easing the friction). Each stage needs a different marketing mix (content, forms, channels, topics). Do your homework.

Conclusion: Create a simple but effective strategic funnel to guide your marketing efforts and provide structure, effectiveness and tracking.

Wrapping up

Marketing is an essential part of your business mix as a solopreneur. What you need is to integrate it mindfully and sustainably into your work. Mindfully means having a solid understanding and acknowledgement of its value and necessity (vs mindlessly because you have to do it). Sustainably means doing it in a way that does not compromise future outcomes (based on persuasion and not manipulation) and can be sustained in the long run (vs burning out quickly and risking skipping it altogether).

Also, keep in mind that you should start small and grow on the go and that simplicity wins over complexity. Keep it simple (especially at the beginning until you form the proper healthy marketing habits).

What’s next?

You can and deserve to enjoy the solopreneurship journey and create a lifestyle that supports working and living with meaning, purpose, and enjoyment. Marketing is essential, and you are not to skip it. But it also doesn’t have to be a chore or an intimidating task on your list.

If you need support navigating the solopreneurship journey, let me help. DM me on LinkedIn, and let’s explore how Mindset Coaching can help you move forward and claim what you desire and deserve with your one-person business.