In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner reveals why prioritizing relationship marketing over traffic-based tactics is key for businesses offering high-end, service-based services.
What if trying to market your business the same way you serve your clients is actually hurting your success? In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner reveals why prioritizing relationship marketing over traffic-based tactics is key for businesses offering high-end, service-based services. She explores how focusing on meaningful connections with a select group of clients—not overwhelming yourself with mass marketing—can lead to better results. Warner also shares strategies for addressing the potential disconnect between how you market your own business and the services you provide to clients, helping you navigate these challenges with confidence.
Check out the full episode at TheMichelleWarner.com
Hi, I'm Michelle Warner, a business designer and strategist, and in the 15 years I've done this work, I have noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into the trap of centering strategies first, when they need to be centering sequence, because the reality is the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them is more important than how well you implement any single strategy.
On this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions rather than blindly follow someone else's strategy.
Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy. Today, I'm going to address one of the elephants in the room that I hear way too often from service providers and specifically service providers who work with businesses that may use traffic marketing, and that is how can I use relationship marketing, or more specifically, how can I not be participating in traffic marketing when I provide services that I should be demonstrating in my own business?
Or even worse, I hear, I provide traffic marketing services or services that are related to a business that uses traffic marketing, but I feel like a fraud because I'm using them for my business and they're not working. So how do I know that I know what I'm talking about? How do I even know that I'm doing a good job with my business if they're not working for my own business?
And this is a mindset that's pervasive across a lot of different service providers, and I'm talking to all of you, but I'm specifically thinking about a few statements and different types of businesses that I hear way too often. I'm a copywriter who writes sales pages for a living. How can I not have a full-blown sales page on my website? Or I'm a web designer. How can my website not be the biggest and best thing that there is with all the different features I may provide to my clients? Or I'm a content specialist. How can I not be churning out emails and newsletters and social content of my own to show what I can do to potential clients? And the list goes on and on of different service providers who are running a service-based business that happens to provide services that are related to traffic marketing. And this mindset, it's both pervasive and it's a huge issue for those of you who are doing it because it's holding you back.
And it's not holding you back just a little bit, it's holding you back a significant amount from allowing your own business to reach its full potential. So stick around because I'm going to bust that mindset and I'm going to show you why it's not how you should be thinking. But more importantly, what you can be doing so that you feel safe interacting with your potential clients and showing off your expertise. But you also feel safe in doing that in a way that's going to allow your business to grow to its full potential. So let's get into it.
And to get into it, I'm going to break this argument down by getting back to sequence over strategy. Because if you were thinking you need your material to market your skills, you are actually thinking strategy first. And I need you to think sequence first because your current mode of thinking, well, it's devaluing yourself. Because think about it.
When you want to get hired, you want to get hired for not only your ability to create something and to provide that service, but you also want to get hired for your ability to think through things and to think strategically and to offer additional value. Because if you don't have that ability to think strategically, you're just being hired as a commodity provider who's just going to do whatever you're told to do. And that's not going to garner a large contract.
If you want to think like you're not a commodity, you want to present yourself as a strategic asset. How do you present yourself as a strategic asset? You present yourself that by demonstrating your ability to think through problems and think through strategy and not falling into the trap of doing something because you need to feel like you need to show it off. Let's talk through some examples here. I'm going to start with my marketers. Right?
So for my marketers, a lot of times I hear, well, if I am providing marketing services to a business that uses traffic marketing, so by definition, I am providing traffic marketing services to a business. I better be traffic marketing myself because if I'm not, how do they possibly know whether or not I can do that job? Okay.
Do you see how that's a strategy, how you're thinking strategy first? You're thinking in terms of, I better demonstrate my ability to provide this strategy, to know how to execute a strategy, but that's not thinking sequence first because again, that makes you more of a commodity person. Because if I'm hiring a marketer and they're marketing their business incorrectly, what does that say about them as a marketer?
So instead I would want a marketer who does know how to provide the service that I'm looking for, but also understands that that service they provide may not be the best way to market themselves. Let's say you're a social media marketer and you can churn out brilliant Instagram reels all day long. That is fantastic and traffic-based businesses are going to need that. But if you're so brilliant and in demand that that means you only need three or four clients a year because they're going to pay you a lot of money, why in the world would you be churning out your own Instagram reels all day long? It's a huge waste of time. Unless that brings you some kind of great pleasure, there's no need to be doing it for your own business because it's not going to get you any additional business and you don't even have the capacity for that type of business.
And so there would be a different way to demonstrate your ability than kind of harnessing yourself into some model where you have to churn out this content that is completely unnecessary. And that's just holding you back because that takes a lot of time and effort to create those things. And so why would you be doing it for your business if it's not correct? There are other ways to demonstrate to your potential clients that you know what you're doing without kind of sentencing yourself to that sort of churn all day long. And this is the same thing with content creators and copywriters. I hear all the time, gosh, you know, I provide LinkedIn ghost writing or I provide sales pages or I provide this. So if I write a sales page for a traffic based company, I better have my own big, huge sales pages all over my website. No, you shouldn't. Right?
Again, this is the same thing as kind of sentencing yourself to just churning out content all day long that's not needed. If you're sentencing yourself to having to write these big, long, complicated sales pages that no one's even going to use because if you're selling via relationship marketing, you don't even get to the sales page stage most of the time, right? You're just having a conversation and you're sending a proposal. So you're thinking about strategy first, if you're putting those up and assuming that you need to create that type of content in order to sell your services.
Same thing with my web designers. A lot of times I'll hear web designers, again, who work with big traffic based companies or retailers. And so those companies need all the different bells and whistles and so much functionality to run a really well run traffic based business. And they do need that. So that's legitimate. And that's wonderful that you provide that. But all you need is a billboard website. If you are spending the time maintaining your own website with all the different bells and whistles just to demonstrate your ability to do so, that takes a long time to keep that maintained and to keep that updated and to make your own machine working all the time.
And again, it's similar to somebody who's creating Instagram reels all day long or somebody who's taking the time to write really long sales pages for themselves that no one is ever going to use. There are other ways to demonstrate that ability or there are other ways to demonstrate your strategic brain than just thinking that strategy first and like this is some sort of one-to-one connection that if I provide the service to my client, I better also be demonstrating that I'm using it in my own business. And that's what I want to point out again, is that line of thinking, if that is the line of thinking you're making, you are kind of showing off that you're not a good marketer. And I know all of you listening are great marketers and you understand this. And so why would you be showing off that you are doing something incorrectly for your own business just in the name of making yourself look good to clients or trying to make yourself look good to clients? You're actually making really poor strategic choices there.
And so if I were a savvy client, and you better believe that I would do this because I talk about this all day long. So I'm always looking for these things. If I was a savvy client, and if I had a little traffic machine running, and I went to hire a copywriter, and I saw that they were going way above and beyond with the copy that they needed, more specifically, if I was trying to hire a marketer, and they were going above and beyond for their own marketing, I would wonder how much they really understood about the sequence, right? And about all that thinking that goes in before you choose what strategy. I would wonder, I would say, why are they doing all this for their own business? They're wasting a ton of time.
And you may have clients who are thinking that way. Even if your clients don't think that deeply about it, you don't want to be in a situation where you're providing them the opportunity to figure that out, right? And you definitely don't want to be in the position, I'm just going to be very selfish for you, you don't want to be in the position where you are wasting time needlessly maintaining these traffic machines that aren't doing anything for you, right?
This comes back to that statement we talked about at the beginning, the second statement that I hear from folks, where they say, am I a fraud? I am providing these services, and I'm doing them for myself too, because I feel like I have to, but I'm noticing they're not working for me. So do I even know what I'm doing?
Well, yes and no, you know what you're doing, because you are executing the strategies correctly, but you shouldn't be using traffic marketing yourself. So it's not surprising they're not working, because you're using the wrong marketing philosophy for your business model, using the right marketing philosophy for a traffic-based business model. So to apply it to your clients' businesses, right, you do know what you're doing, but you need to not apply that to your business, because it's not going to work. And that's the biggest point here, right? We can make all these arguments about wasted time and all that is very important. But the biggest point here is, it's not going to work. And if your clients are savvy enough, they may pick up on the fact that you're doing things that aren't in alignment with your business. And they may then wonder, oh my gosh, does this person know what they're doing? Because why are they applying these things to their business when it's not necessary?
It's necessary for my business, and I want to hire someone to do it for my business, but it's not necessary for their business, so why are they doing it? And that's what I want you to think good about. Because again, so many service providers who are in alignment with relationship marketing hesitate to commit to it because they feel like they need to traffic market in order to show off to their customers and in order to show a body of work.
But again, even under that thinking, if it's not working for you, your whole philosophy that you need to show off your body of work, presumably your clients are going to want to see not only the work product, but they're going to ask you the results of it, and it's likely not working for you. And so what results are you going to quote then? You're only going to be able to show the work product. You're not going to be able to show results because most likely the results aren't as good as you would want them to be to brag to to a prospective client.
And so how do we get around this? Because I understand the impulse, right? I understand why folks are thinking this way. There is a certain logic to it. It's just not a logic that is going deep enough in the sequence over strategy for it to hold up over time. And that's what a lot of sequence over strategy is, right? The logic at the surface, it makes sense, but it just doesn't hold up over time. So instead, we want to replace this with some logic that can hold up over time and can solve the issues of saving you time where you may be wasting it now doing some marketing that you shouldn't be doing.
And more importantly, giving you a great cover story so that you understand how to market yourself correctly while feeling safe doing so because you have a way to explain to your clients what the heck you're doing. So how can we do that? You know, now that I've convinced you that you don't need to be doing exactly the services that you provide to your clients, you were probably wondering, OK, what should I do instead? That's great, Michelle. You've convinced me. I should relationship market. I should let go of this. But how do I replace it in a way that makes me safe and in a way that I know how to handle it if somebody may question this? So if somebody who might be wanting to hire me asks, why am I not doing the skill and the service that I'm proposing, providing to them, why am I not doing it for myself? How am I going to handle that? Well, there's a couple of ways to do this.
The first and most important thing we want to do is we want to separate that connection between the conversations with the prospective clients that you might be having and the marketing that you're going to do. Let's put them into order, right? Marketing comes first because that is how you meet your potential clients. So first we need to worry about making sure you are marketing in a way that is going to allow you to meet your potential clients.
And second, we worry about the message that you give to those clients because the message doesn't matter if you can't reach them. And if you are using this mindset of, I need to demonstrate my skills and that's how I'm going to market, so I'm going to market my service-based business via traffic means, you are likely not effectively meeting your clients. So we have to start with step one.
Even if you're meeting some clients, you're unlikely to be meeting as many or the best clients that you could. And so marketing comes first and then comes the messaging. And your marketing needs to be in alignment with what you are selling, not with what you're going to help them sell. And you are selling higher-end service-based services. And what does that mean? That means you need a few clients, not tens of thousands of clients, and it means that they're going to pay you something decent for those services. So what does that mean?
That means you need to be using relationship marketing, right? And this is actually great news for this particular predicament because, yeah, relationship marketing means that you're not going to be demonstrating all of your skills if those skills are traffic-based. It means that you're going to be taking a different philosophy and going and looking to meet people in different ways. But it's also good news because relationship marketing means you're going to have, well, meaningful interactions with your potential clients, right? It means that you're going to be building a relationship with them, and that means they're not going to judge you by your cover. That means there's going to be an opportunity for conversation, an opportunity to explain yourself. And so you don't have to be scared that they are going to be judging you in silence because you have the opportunity to explain yourself, whether they ask you or whether you just do it a little bit proactively, and we'll talk about options for both in a minute. But this is the good news.
So if it feels scary to you, if it feels scary to you to just say, okay, she's right, I'm going to start relationship marketing, that, again, feels scary because it feels like you're leaving yourself exposed to this open-ended question or this unasked question, if you will. Well, there are ways to get around that because you're going to have relationships with them and you're not going to be in the more anonymous relationship that you are when you're traffic marketing. So I still want you to start your marketing with messages that are important to them.
We don't want to immediately start marketing by explaining why you're marketing in the way that you do and explaining your own personal marketing strategy. That's not what I'm advocating here. So I want you to start, like we're in that awareness stage, you do want to be starting your marketing with messages that are centered on your clients. But you can also use this to show off your strategic side, that value earning side, that side that shows what you're doing. Because whether it's early or probably later in the marketing cycle, you can proactively bring up this elephant in the room and you can compare what they may need to do with what you're doing for your own business. You can literally say, and I have said this in the past, this is what I do for my clients and why.
Now, some of you may see my own content and wonder why it doesn't look that way. And that's because, and then you can go on to explain the difference in the service you provide and how you market your own business. And they will be impressed that you understand that nuance. And that will take any energy out of the room. If you're feeling that loaded energy, and that loaded energy may just be coming from your own self-consciousness about this, but if you're feeling any of that loaded energy in the room, you can just pull out that elephant in the room, depressurize the situation by acknowledging it. And you can say, this is what I do for my own clients and why.
Hey, if you happen to see my website and you didn't see it, this is why. Because there's actually different ways that you go about this. And I see that you need to go about this this way and that's the service I provide. But for my own business, I go about it in this way. And again, that's where they learn to respect you more because you understand that nuance and they see you as more of an expert. They see that you get what's going on under the surface and you are not just somebody who shows up and starts mindlessly doing. And that adds to your value. And again, I'm not saying you do this at the very moment you meet someone. That could very well sound offensive.
If you come up and say, hi, I'm Michelle, I'm a content creator. You may be surprised if you look at my website and you don't see a lot of content. We don't want to do that. But along the way in the conversation, rather than sitting there and getting scared that they're going to bring it up or getting scared that they're seeing it and just not saying anything but they're secretly judging you for it, you can bring this up. You can find very easy places to bring this up where nobody even really recognizes or it's not a focal point of the conversation. It's just something that you throw into the conversation along the way so that you diffuse any concern they may have about that. And if they have further questions, they can ask you about it. But you've acknowledged it and you've given them a reason. And that just, again, diffuses the situation so that they're not wondering about it.
And by the way, if you don't do it proactively, this is another way that you can just be prepared if the question does come up. Right. If you know how you're going to explain yourself from a not defensive standpoint or not real surface level standpoint, if they ask you, hey, this all sounds really great and we really understand this, but I looked at your website and it doesn't look like you're marketing this way.What's up with that?
You can say, oh, well, let me explain to you why. And you're going to have a great strategic answer that makes you sound so sophisticated and smart as to why you are making different decisions for their business than that you're making for yours.
And that just demonstrates that you can understand the differences. And this doesn't mean that you don't have any kind of sample work. Of course, you want to have sample work, whether that is previous work that previous client has authorized you to share publicly that you provided for them, whether that's some anonymized content, whether that's just a sample portfolio book that you have.
That is different, right? You can take the time to create samples if that's what's needed. But you don't want to burden yourself with an ongoing marketing strategy that you're committing to that is taking too much time and again, is not optimized to meet the people you want. So we want to separate those two things. If you don't have client samples that you can point to because some clients don't want you to share, some clients, you know, there are NDAs involved, there's whatever involved and that's all very legitimate. So if you're not able to just point them to another client you've worked with, you can build a sample portfolio book. And maybe that was work that you did in the name of your business just as a sample. But that is very, very different. That's a one-time project that you occasionally keep updated, right? And that is very different than showing and committing to marketing your business in the incorrect way for the long term. Because one thing, having that sample book is a one-time project, again, that you occasionally update.
So it's an important project and it needs your time and attention, but then it's done. And that is a much better situation to be in than the one where you are trying to, on an ongoing basis, demonstrate this through the marketing of your own business. Because when you commit to that, you're committing to two different things. Number one, you're just committing to a lot of time because traffic marketing just tends to be much more time intensive than relationship marketing. So you're committing to a lot of time just churning out this stuff and having to do it at a high level because you're always worried that it's just demonstrating your best skill. If you have a portfolio book, you can literally put your best work in there versus if you're trying to do this over time. You have that ongoing pressure of always being absolutely brilliant.
And then secondly, you get to market your business in the way you need to. If you are putting this burden on yourself to market your business incorrectly just as a way of demonstrating your skills, you are further hurting yourself because you're not marketing correctly. And so you're not going to meet the best clients, as many clients as you need. Your lead generation pool will be devalued. And that's the worst outcome that you could possibly have, right? That's the most important thing in your business is having a consistent quality lead generation pool.
So why in the world would you build into your model a consistent devaluing of that just at the fear that somebody might judge you or just at the fear that somebody might question this? When I've just demonstrated there are so many easier ways to get around this and so many easy ways to explain and answer this question. And that's where we get again into the sequence over strategy question. It's so easy to look at this on the surface level and just say, oh, of course I have to market in the way and then in the same way that I actually provide services. But when you start looking a little deeper, when you start looking into the magnitude of order of that thing and what that decision actually means, it actually means that you are putting your business at a deficit day after day after day because your lead pool is going to be poor. It's going to be a poor quality than it needs to be.
And that is not something that you want to do to yourself and do to your business because that's just putting you behind the eight ball constantly. And so there are easier ways to ask this question when we get it in the correct order of, okay, you know, number one is making sure my business is operating correctly.
Number two is figuring out how do I then address that with potential clients so that they understand what on the surface might look like a disconnect between the services I am pitching and providing to them and what I'm doing for my actual business.
I would much, much rather tackle that second question and I've told you how to solve it throughout this episode than I would want to mark it incorrectly just so I didn't have to try to tackle that second question. And so my invitation to you as we sum up this episode is to make sure you're asking these questions in the right order as we always do, right? Make sure you're thinking in terms of sequence over strategy. And if you have kind of screwed that up and if you've gone to, oh my gosh, I better be marketing or I better be demonstrating my services in the exact same way that I'm going to provide them to clients, ask yourself, hey, did I actually ask this in the wrong order? Did I jump to avoiding a question or making sure that somebody wasn't judging me? Did I jump to that before I determined what was right for my business?
And I would invite you to flip that script and say, you know what, first I'm going to do what's right for my business and then I'm going to figure out how to address the elephant in the room if it exists. Because the elephant in the room that's addressable, that's easy to overcome. We can do it and we did this in this episode. So please do not sentence yourself to doing the wrong thing for your business just because you're scared of that elephant in the room. All right, this was a fun episode for me. I hope it helped you.
If it did, gosh, I would love for you to leave a rating or even drop me a message and tell me how it kind of flipped your thinking because those of you who are doing this, you know, some of my favorite groups to help because we can just make life a lot better for you in a relatively short amount of time and that is always really fun for me. And in the meantime, always feel free to connect with me. I am over at themichellewarner.com.
Drop me an email. Drop me a note here. I would love to hear from you and I will be back in two weeks with another episode.
I will see you then.