82 | The Real Reason Your Marketing Isn't Working (It's Not Content)

I get the frustration. After all this effort, your marketing isn't working. You are showing up, you are creating content, you are being consistent, but people still aren't finding you. And you think the problem is your content.

Maybe you are not posting enough, maybe you need better editing, maybe you need a new tactic for your email subject lines. But what if the real problem isn't your content at all? Today I'm sharing what's actually keeping your marketing invisible. Hello, my love.

Welcome to Brand Confidence for Creatives. Are you feeling stuck in a cycle of overthinking, trying to build your brand? I'm Eugenia, but you can call me E. I'm a marketing and brand coach and I spent years stuck in the cycle of researching, hesitating, and hiding until I got clear on my voice and my message.

In this podcast, I'll guide you through the strategies you need to get clear on what you want to say, build a personal brand, and create consistent magnetic marketing. If you ever thought, I know I have something to say, I just don't know how to say it, you are in the right place. So grab your coffee and let's dive in. I want to tell you about something that changed the way I think about marketing.

I grew up during what I feel is the golden age of rom-coms. You know the ones, the typical story: boy meets girl, they fall in love, there's a misunderstanding, and they break up, then there's a grand gesture, and then happy ending. And here's the crazy thing. They all follow the same pattern, but one after the other we kept watching obsessively.

Like we knew what was gonna happen, and we still watched for years. And it wasn't because the stories were uniquely clever, even though that's debatable, because how to lose a guy in 10 days is a masterpiece of cinema. But okay, that's an exception. It was the reason we kept going back was because every element around the telling, like the story, the characters, the setting, the chemistry between the actors, the execution, the music, everything made each movie feel completely unique.

The movies, those rom-coms worked not because they were unique in the story, but because they were unique in the execution. And when I realized this, I had an aha moment about just marketing as a whole. Because maybe that's you, maybe you are creating content, you're showing up, you're consistent, but maybe after all of those efforts, nothing is working because you're not being found, and the people who do find you don't reach out to you, and the people who reach out to you are not really asking to work with you or asking about what you do.

Maybe you think that the problem is that your voice needs to be more unique, like you need more like clever captions, you need your content to be more distinctive. And then if we go to like the typical coaching advice, maybe you are in the place of like, oh, I just need to try harder, I need to increase my frequency, I need to be more vulnerable. Like, let me overshare about my horrible high school breakup so I can sound more relatable, talking about like personal finances. But it is not about having like becoming more unique or let me create more.

It's like more, more, more, and more. The issue is the same as the rom-coms, it is all about the execution. But execution in marketing, like if we translate that to our context, means something very specific, and that is your positioning. And when your positioning is safe, even a unique voice gets lost in the noise.

Now, I'm not talking about your presence, like that's your personal voice, how you rag, your personality, your physical appearance. Those are all important. Those are the things that make you you. I'm talking about something way more foundational than that.

I am talking about your positioning. Your positioning is the answer to how you think, your criteria, which is basically like what matters to you, how you see the world, your ideas, your experience. Which your experience is not only what you've done, but also what you've learned. How you curate information and select tactics, I think that's very important for educators and for course creators, um, program creators, how you curate the information that's out there.

How do you select the tactics and the order? How you structure your solutions, right? How, what's your philosophy on how change happens? When your positioning is safe, you sound like everyone else.

And again, I'm not talking about the words you use, the voice. I'm talking about the content of what's being said. And that's not because you lack personality or you just have to be more authentic. It's happening because you're not communicating how you think, you're communicating what you do.

And what you do is boring when it's the only thing you say about you and everyone else is saying the same thing. Mind you, you gotta be simple. You gotta explain what you do in a way that's simple and understandable. And if you are at a dinner party with a bunch of people from different industries, you want it to be very simple and boring so people catch you.

But when you're having a deeper conversation, let's say someone asks me, What do you do? Um, you know, I coach people in marketing, people who want to build personal brands. Oh, that's cool. If I notice that they're showing interest, I can go deeper.

That going deeper happens in real life, networking, it happens online through your content, through your visibility. Let's say you're doing a little bit of both, you're having networking online. So that is the going deeper. So to understand, I'm I'm a very example-driven person.

So to understand the difference between safe positioning and clear positioning, let me give you a couple of examples. Safe positioning sounds like everyone else. It's not wrong, it's just forgettable. For a coach, for example, it can sound like I help entrepreneurs create sustainable business and build confident leadership.

For a web designer, it can sound like I design beautiful functional websites that convert. For a consultant, it can sound like I help service providers streamline their operations and skill. C, they're not bad. And for sure, a version of this might work if you're just networking with people in a social setting, but they all sound the same.

They help people who hear your message put you in a box and kind of understand the general idea of what you do. But you are still not selling them on anything. You're not marketing or moving them through the way you see the world or getting them closer to them wanting to work with you because they're describing what they do, like those statements. But they're not describing how they think, they're not showing the criteria, they're not revealing their philosophy.

They are very safe. We need safe in social settings, we need safe to help others put us in a box. We want to be put in a box, right? We want people to understand in which lane we're playing.

But that's not enough to help them make a choice. That just helps them have a general idea of what we do. But that doesn't really move the needle. What moves the needle is clear positioning, because clear positioning shows how you think.

So let's look at the same persons, the same examples now from a clear positioning perspective. For a coach, for example, I help former female athletes rebuild their competitive edge in business. Because burnout isn't the price of success, structure is. For a designer, I design websites for coaches who refuse to look like every other coach website because your messaging deserves a vessel that honors it.

And for a consultant, I help service providers build businesses that run on systems instead of the hustle so they can actually take a vacation without everything falling apart. See how they are so specific in the people they help? How or what are these people struggling with? What is the problem you're dealing with?

Again, this is not necessarily the copy that's gonna go on your homepage, but you want to be able to have this vocabulary for your website, for your posts, for your pitches, for everything to say. Did you hear the difference? The second set isn't about being more unique, really, even though, of course, I would love to have the best words in the world. I think we all want to be there.

We all want to be that person that says things in such a clever and witty way. Really, the clear positioning is about revealing your thinking. It's about showing here's how I see this problem, here's what I believe, here's my philosophy. That doesn't have to be said in a single sentence in a social setting, but you have to have that clear, and that needs to be communicated in all your marketing materials, one way or another.

And that's what makes you visible, what makes you relevant, what makes people lean in, listen, because now they are not just hearing what you do, they are hearing how you think. In a world of marketing, social media, podcasts, YouTube, where you can get information from one place to the next, you can have a tutorial on how to edit a reel and post it. You really find what you're looking for, the solution you want, and then you move on. The thing that keeps us going back is the vessel that delivered the information.

Either because the examples were very good or the tone was incredible, the perspectives, the ideas, the factor that says, oh, I never heard about this before. So understanding this, we need now to make a shift because you can't fix a positioning problem with just content, right? Like, oh, let me post more, and that will take care of my positioning. That works as long as you are clear on what you're saying in the first place.

You could have literally the best content calendar. You could post every single day, you could be incredibly consistent, but if your positioning is safe, you'll still sound like everyone else around you. And in this year, when AI is writing things so safely, it is not bad. It is just like very safe, it all blends together.

So our brains are almost like ignoring things that were written by AI because safe positioning really in the marketing world is almost like a death sentence right now. It is not competitive anymore. So the only way you compete is by positioning that's so clear about how you think that it cannot be replicated by AI. And I'm not against AI.

I love AI. But we need to know how to use AI, when to use AI, what to prompt AI with for AI to really be a helpful thinker. If we give it something generic, because we haven't done the work of going deep and getting something very clear, AI is going to give us something safe back. Even Claude, which is very great at pushing back and telling you when things have holes, Cloud cannot replicate your thinking.

It cannot replicate your stories, it cannot replicate your perspectives in your industry in the world. Because your positioning is your unique way of thinking. Your content really is just the reflection of that thinking. So you can have a thousand pieces of content, but if they're all reflecting safe, generic thinking, that's not gonna move anyone.

Imagine walking through the mall, and I'm not sure if you still do that, but I love the mall sometimes, especially in Miami. We have some open concept malls, and that's relaxing to me. Every store sometimes it looks exactly the same. But when you walk in front of something that looks different, either the clothing is different, the window, something, you have to pause and look at it.

Safe is going to get you blended in with everything around you. So your marketing starts working with people who understand what you do, obviously, that's important. How you think, your criteria, your philosophy, your selection process. I think your selection process is so underdiscussed.

Like, how do you choose the curriculum, the tactics, the approaches, methods? Like, how do you select things? When people understand all of that, you're not competing on content volume or personality anymore. You are competing on thought leadership.

And that's where visibility happens and it's amplified. So, what do you do about this? You stop trying to create more content and you start clarifying your positioning. You get clear on how you think about your industry, what you believe, how you approach the solutions for what you do, what you've learned from your experience, how you curate information, how do you select tactics?

Because once all of that is clear, your content is going to become a natural reflection of it. You are not going to just try to sound unique. You are not going to be performing a character that you think is gonna work on social or on YouTube. You are not going to be creating personas that are nothing like you.

You are going to be communicating how you think. And that's incredibly powerful for when we are in this service space where you know we're not necessarily inventing a noble winning like medical solution, right? There's some competition. And that relates to the rom-coms, right?

They all have the same basic story, but because of all of these ingredients, the movie becomes iconic. Sure, one could say what happened was cool, but the how it was told is so much better. It's what we remember, it's the perspective, the execution, the clarity of vision. Your marketing is exactly the same.

Your story, of course, is unique, but you don't have to bust your head trying to find like a moment of trauma or a horrible breakdown or an incredible breakthrough where you start your business and three months later you were making a million dollars. Like you don't have to find these extreme stories. You have to find your perspectives. And when you have that, people find you, people trust you, people remember you because you are not safe anymore.

You are clear. So, this is what I want you to do this week. Look at your current positioning. Look at your bio, your about page, your messaging.

Like, this is gonna take you looking at how you're communicating. And ask yourself, like, be very honest. Does this reveal how I think? Or does this describe what I do?

There's a place for plain and simple, right? But if your whole brand is starting to feel safe and simple and plain, you're probably starting to blend in. Be honest, there's nothing wrong with it. We grow and we advance, and if it's just what you do, it's safe.

Safe is invisible. Now, I created a free guide, it's called the Obvious Choice BioBuilder. It's exactly about that. It's about understanding what makes you unique, being able to translate it into your online presence.

And this guide gives you the specific questions to ask yourself about how you think so you can move past the what I do. This step matters so much more than your content strategy. I promise it pays dividends. So grab the guide in the show notes.

You can go to clearbiobuilder.com, download it for free, and go through it. Look at your positioning, look at it with fresh eyes. And if you want, send me a DM on Instagram.

Tell me what's one thing that you believe about your industry that goes against the grain. That's the start of clear positioning. I read every reply and I can't wait to hear from you. See you next week.

Un beso. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you loved it, don't keep it to yourself. Send it to a friend who's also trying to grow their brand without losing themselves in the process.

And if you wanna make my day, drop a quick review on Apple Podcasts. Seriously, it means the world to me, and I know that this show is helping you show up with confidence and clarity. See you back here soon for the next episode. Un beso.