o last week I talked about how experience teaches you that there's never just one way to do anything. Especially not in marketing.

So if you want to find good ways of marketing that work for you, where do you start? There are so many options out there.

I think one of the best ways to do it is to start with “who do you want to be?”

I don't mean in some grand philosophical sense. Just the practical sense of how you want your audience to see you. What you feel comfortable with.

I found out about this when getting coaching on magic years ago from Roberto Giobbi as part of my obsession with magic at the time.

Roberto asked me bluntly what I wanted my audience to experience and feel when I was performing.

Was I trying to fool them? Amuse them? Astound them? Make them laugh? Give them a once in a lifetime experience of sheer wonder?

And who was I trying to be? A suave entertainer, a clown, a skilful cardsharp?

Answering that question told me what kind of tricks and performing style would work best for me.

The same goes for marketing.

Once you answer the question of who you want to be – what you want your marketing audience to experience and feel when they hear from you – the right tactics to use become easy to choose.

Personally, I want my audience to see me as a nice guy with a lot of useful and practical experience to share. I want them (you) to see me as a giver – someone who genuinely wants to help rather than just make money. Because that's who I think I am and want to be.

For me, that means any marketing I do has to give value to potential clients and not be aggressive or intrusive.

That means I don't do cold calling. I don't do purely promotional outreach or adverts. I don't do “joint ventures” (that seem to me to be largely about using access to your audience as a bargaining chip to get access to someone else's audience, not because you think they'll benefit).

Now frankly, those are probably just my own unjustified biases. I'm sure other people see joint ventures or cold outreach differently.

But the important point is, it doesn't matter.

Since marketing tactics that have been around the block a while all work reasonably well, the important thing isn't to try to find some kind of mythical “best” tactic. 

It's to find a few I can make work for me.

That means they have to be tactics I feel comfortable with and that are aligned with who I want to be.

From there it's a matter of focusing on a small number of them and getting good at them.

It's much more important to choose something and get good at it than it is to go round in circles searching for the “best” and never build any competence.