Forget Writing, You Need To Become a Marketer First
Marketing illiteracy is the fastest road to failure in writing.
This is the 18th edition of The Essence.
Most aspiring writers fail to make a living because they refuse to become marketers.
That’s not my statement. I haven’t been doing this long enough to make such a bold claim. But I can’t disagree. This claim belongs to Ayodeji Awosika.
Ayo has been writing online for several years. He has well over 85,000 followers on Medium and a couple of books published. He even coaches aspiring writers. So the guy knows what he’s, well, writing about.
In a post he published about the secrets to consistently make $10,000 per month writing, Ayo wrote:
“If you don’t study marketing, persuasion, and sales, you’ll never become a successful writer.”
Any material success I had with writing can be attributed to my marketing skills.
My early experience of desperately trying to convince strangers to buy a product they don’t need as a telemarketer taught me many valuable lessons about marketing and selling.
I’ve also studied psychology and persuasion—and copywriting, of course—before I started freelancing. All that helped me not only market to sell my services, but also write more valuable and attractive articles and blog posts.
If you haven’t yet started seriously learning marketing, sales, and persuasion, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
Here’s why marketing is crucial for your writing business and how you can start learning it.
Successful writers are good marketers
The more successful they are, the better marketers they’ll usually be.
Seth Godin, a 20-time bestselling author, is without a doubt a successful writer. Godin’s blog is the most popular solo blog in the world.
Guess what skills other than writing he has?
Seth is considered to be a pioneer, expert, and guru in the marketing sphere. In 2013, he was one of only three professionals inducted into the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame. And on May of 2018, Seth Godin was inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame as well.
Seth Godin is not just a writer: He is a marketer first. If you want to be a successful writer, learn how to become a good marketer first.
Marketing teaches you how to identify your targeted readers wants & needs
When you write, you should have your targeted readers’ wants and needs in mind. Marketing helps you identify those wants, desires, and needs.
The American Marketing Association wrote this about marketing:
“Marketing is a business practice that involves identifying, predicting, and meeting customer needs.”
When you approach writing the same way, you’ll be able to predict what your targeted readers need and want to read.
Let’s say your targeted readers are entrepreneurs who have blogs and email lists. When you’re a marketer first, you’ll think in terms of their wants and needs. Not how to make your writing appealing to them.
Note down some of their wants and needs:
They want to bring many readers to their blogs
They want to convert many of those leads into customers
They need to know how to bring those readers to their blog posts
They need to know how to convert those readers into customers
Start with the first want and need. You can write a how-to guide on how to use Pinterest to drive traffic to their blogs. This post will be quite attractive to them because it speaks to their desire to get many readers to their blogs. And it shows them how to do it.
After that, you can bring back your writing mindset and use it alongside your marketing one. You can now think of how to write a killer introduction for the guide, the style you’ll use, and so on.
But first, you need to figure out what problems the guide solves. And the targeted audience’s wants or needs it meets.
Marketing teaches you that your writing pieces are products
Ayodeji touched on this point in his article. So many writers get too attached to their writing pieces. It’s good to love your brainchildren, just don’t get too romantic about it. If you want to, you can do that with your poetry, short stories, and novels.
But when it comes to writing for a living, Ayodeji wrote that you should look at them for what they are: Products.
See them as products made to fulfill the desires and needs of your targeted readers.
For example, my targeted readers for this article are writers looking to make a living out of their words. I’m writing with their desire to make it and their need to know how to make a living in mind.
This article is a product tailored to help them solve a problem they’re facing, which is not being able to make a living writing. The claps and responses I’ll get for this article will be like the product reviews.
When you approach writing this way, you’ll be able to write incredibly helpful and relevant pieces for your targeted readers. That’s how you can write articles so good they can’t resist reading.
“Marketing is the art of telling stories so enthralling that people lose track of their wallets.” — Charles Duhigg, The New York Times
If you have freelanced for companies before, you’ll get it. Because when you write for a client, it’s direct selling. You’re getting paid directly for your pieces. The same thing goes for a publication that pays you for your work.
Your job is to produce the highest quality products to your audience, your client’s audience, or a publication’s audience. Focus on that, and you’ll see doors open to you right, left, and center.
Marketing teaches you that you’re writing for an audience, not yourself
Ayodeji also touched on this point. He emphasized the importance of writing for a specific audience. Writers who are illiterate when it comes to marketing often think they can write whatever they want. And still, make a lot of money doing so.
When you write about yourself and people don’t even know you, don’t expect them to stay around to read. Unless you’re indirectly solving a problem they’re facing. And don’t write about a boring topic if no one likes to read it except you.
Writers who write for themselves should not expect an audience other than themselves.
Forget what you want and put yourself in your targeted audience’s shoes. If you do anyway, make it at least interesting for a specific audience, those who can relate.
If you check Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich website, you’ll find the word “You” written a lot. The website is designed for a targeted audience—those who want to be rich. The copy is directly speaking to you, the visitor.
Heck, even the site’s name speaks directly to his targeted audience, and it has you in it.
It’s no surprise that Ramit is also a marketing expert.
This is a no-brainer for successful writers, and they know these things because they understand marketing well. If you want to be among them, forget writing, and learn how to become a marketer first.
Final thoughts
It’s time to start upgrading your marketing knowledge and skills.
If you want to learn a lot about marketing, sales, and writing simultaneously, learn copywriting.
Copywriting is like the lost child of marketing and writing. It teaches you the cunning and the persuasiveness of the marketer to sell any product or service — and to sell your own writing pieces.
Study and read copywriting books such as Joe Sugarman’s The Advertising Secrets of the Written Word. Gary Halbert’s Boron Letters is where I started. I studied successful ads and headlines for a long time before I made any progress. I also took marketing courses, such as those provided by HubSpot Academy.
Marketing skills and knowledge can excel your writing career or business. So start working on them now.
I wrote this piece for Better Marketing in June 2021. You can find the original here.
Thanks for reading and until next time,
Mohammed