Marketing yourself is a lot like that. For some reason (false modesty, a societal proscription against bragging, whatever), it’s a lot harder to market yourself than it is to market someone else. 

Recently, I’ve had the challenge to market myself, in order to build bookings for live, musical performance. It’s interesting, because while I am typically fearless when recommending marketing ideas to clients, when you’re doing it yourself, it’s a lot harder. But why? I have a theory (what a surprise!)…

When I pitch to clients, there’s an automatic checks-and-balances thing going on, that causes me to slow down a bit, and consider my recommendations. If I don’t have a rationale with data to back up my plans, the client would be likely to shoot them down, and lose confidence in me at the same time. When you market yourself, you have no check-and-balance system in place, to force you to consider things like “is this over the top.” 

What makes this interesting from a marketing perspective, though, is that I’m essentially “eating my own dog food.” It’s one thing to know the right thing for a client to do. It’s quite another when you have to pay for it yourself. This puts a whole new perspective on things. For instance, I created some posters for myself, to promote a recent gig. I had a concept, got my wife to help shoot the pictures, then created the poster. So far so good. Since I only needed a few, it was off to FedEx Kinko’s to print ‘em up. The cost was reasonable, but I had to weigh that cost against what I earned for playing. (No sense spending money on promotion, if it’s going to cut deeply into profits, especially without a guaranteed return on the marketing investment.) Once I saw where the restaurant hung the posters, I realized they had a previously unrecognized design flaw. I’d put the picture of me with my guitar on a black background. Very dramatic. Unfortunately, because the restaturant chose to hang the posters on the tinted glass of their front doors, it was difficult to see the artwork until you were only a couple of feet away from the glass. A higher-contrast design would be a much better bet, say – a white background. Not as dramatic, visually, but it would “read” much better through the tinted glass. 

So, you live and learn. It cost little for me to learn this lesson. Next time, I’ll keep the physical limitations of where the poster will be placed (I had no control over where they put them), when I’m designing the next batch. Like a lot of marketing, this is a case of a closed-loop feedback cycle: 

• Analyze the problem
• Propose a solution
• Execute the solution
• Analyze the result
• Adjust the solution to improve the results
• Test again, with modifications

Periodically, I’ll blog some more about how the self-promotion thing is working. Think of it as my own little marketing lab, with the results published here.

What’s the takeaway for you? Well, first you should ditch any negative self-talk, and look at the possibilities. Need to promote yourself, your company, your product? Have a limited budget? That’s not a deal-breaker…it just means you need to get creative. Next, start blue-skying…think up as many ideas for promotions as you can. Don’t discard any of them – yet. Just list them and come back to them later. After you’ve brainstormed, it’s time to start prioritizing your ideas, and putting the impractical ones on the back burner. Notice, I didn’t say “throw ‘em out.” Just put them away for future reference. You never know when one might come in handy.

Now, implement and test like crazy. Did it work? Why? Why not? Can you fix it? Make it better? Testing gives you answers you can’t get from intuition and guesswork.

I’ll let you know how my quickie self-promotion effort turns out. In the meantime, when was the last time you promoted you?