In this episode, Michelle unpacks what she actually means when she says "double down on your marketing."
Working harder isn't the answer and working smarter isn't either. Working more precisely is.
In this episode, Michelle unpacks what she actually means when she says "double down on your marketing," because spoiler: it has nothing to do with producing more content or logging more hours. It comes down to three inputs - your audiences, your message, and your trust transfers. And making each of them just a little bit better over time.
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Hi, I'm Michelle Warner, and I'm a business designer and strategist. And in the 15 plus years that I've done this work, I've 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.
So on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions, rather than blindly following someone else's strategy. Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy.
Why "Double Down" Gets Misunderstood
And this week, I want to talk about a great question I got after sending out an email to my list last week.
And side note, if you're not on my email list, and you want to receive those emails from me, head over to themichellewarner.com and get signed up. But the email that I sent out, it was about attention spans in 2026. And I used, because why wouldn't I, I used a dog training analogy to explain why reaching out to your audience has gotten harder.
Basically, I talked about the fact that like, when you're training your dog inside of the house, it's one kind of game. And then you go into the backyard and you add some distractions. And then like, you're in the dog park, and now it's just distractions galore, right?
And the same thing kind of applies to marketing. Several years ago, when internet marketing was young, you know, we're in the house, not a lot of distractions. And now we've accelerated all the way to where there are so many distractions when we're out there marketing.
And my answer to that problem, in order to continue to be successful, the answer that I suggested in the email was to double down on your marketing precision, rather than producing more content. I said, like, got to double down, right? When things get noisier, when there are more distractions, you have to double down.
And someone wrote back and asked the question that I probably should have answered in the email itself. And she said, I'd be interested in hearing about how doubling down doesn't have to take double the time. And this is such a good question, because I think when people hear double down, the mental image is immediately more.
That's normal. That would be a normal reaction, right? More content, more outreach, more hours, more hustle, more all the things.
But that is not what I meant at all. In fact, I meant the exact opposite. So today, I want to clear that up, because if you're walking around thinking that you need to work twice as hard, you know, you need to put in double the hours, you need to put in double the time in order to market.
We got to save you from that and get you thinking in the right direction.
Traffic Marketing vs. Relationship Marketing
So here's the thing about double the time as a concept. That's traffic marketing.
That is a traffic marketing mindset. If you hear you need to double down on your marketing, and again, like your very logical response without any other context is, oh my gosh, I have to have double the output, double the time, you're actually thinking in terms of traffic marketing. And again, I'm letting you off the hook here, right?
Because that would be a normal response, because the world talks about traffic marketing. And so of course, that's what you associate with it. However, traffic marketing is a numbers game, right?
We need volume, we need bodies. And how do you get that? You get it by producing more content.
So the more content you produce, you reach more people, you're going to convert a percentage of those people, et cetera, et cetera. So if you want better results, you increase the inputs, right? More posts, more ads, more emails, like it comes down to math.
And that math requires time, not to literally do the math, although for me, it requires time to do math. But the mathing of that equation of a numbers game means that you really can't double your output without like doubling your hours or your team's hours or something, right? And in the world of AI, maybe that's a little bit different, but that does require time.
When we talk about, if I say double down on your marketing and you translate that to, I need to put out double the amount of things, that is going to be a time commitment of some kind and I get that. But again, that's a traffic marketing mindset because that's how a quantity game is played. But with relationship marketing, it's not a numbers game, right?
It's not a quantity game, it's a quality game. And so quality doesn't actually scale with time. Quality scales with precision, and you may have heard me talk about this more.
I always say like, oh, relationship marketing is all about the precision of your inputs. And what do I mean by the inputs? I mean, what are you putting into, what are the literal inputs that are going into your marketing funnel, right?
What audiences are involved, what messages involved, what is that churn cycle that you're putting your effort into? And so when I say double down in the context of relationship marketing, I don't mean to literally do more. I mean, do what you're already doing better, like more intention, more clarity, more precision of the inputs.
And specifically, I just hinted at these, but there's three areas where the precision of inputs pays off. And you're just going to be absolutely shocked because if you are familiar with my relationship marketing models and you've ever heard me talk about the awareness stage of marketing, aka where people meet you, and the different pieces of that awareness pie that we need in place in order to meet people with the impact that you need to in relationship marketing, then these are going to sound very familiar because they're the three inputs of the awareness pie. And that is better audiences, better message, better trust transfer. So when I say double down, I don't mean go do double the stuff.
I mean, do a better job at finding these three things. Right, so let's walk through this and I can talk to you what I mean.
Input #1: Better Audiences
Number one, better audiences.
So in my email, I talked about this dog park analogy that we're in a nosier, more distracted environment than we were like even 18 months ago. And that was kind of the point of the email was I often talk about how the industry changed between like 2018 and 2010. So back in like from like 2010 to 2018, you could get away with anything.
And then in 2018, you had to be a little bit more precise. And in my email, I was saying, gosh, I've actually noticed another layer of that in the last 18 months, you even need to be more precise or right. So we have like this third wave happening.
And so if you've been borrowing audiences, right, if you've been like appearing on podcasts, doing collaborations, guest teaching, all those sorts of things that I talk about when I talk about relationship marketing, even if you've been reaching out for introductions, the question isn't how do I do more of it? It's am I showing up in the right rooms? And you've also probably heard me talk about that, right?
I always talked about how easy it is to find a good enough audience to talk to where you're like, yeah, these people are pretty good. Like they fit my profile. They're not totally out of left field.
And that works when you can grab a little bit more attention, when attention spans aren't as bad. But now every time that the market changes and demands a little bit more precision because it's noisier, because more people are around, well, then the requirement for getting into the right rooms also increases. So good enough audiences are not good enough anymore, right?
We need perfect audiences. Well, I'm not going to put perfect on you, but like we need really good audiences. And so the definition here is that a bigger audience or a better audience isn't bigger, right?
It's more aligned. It means you're working with your ideal connection avatars, you're thinking about your intentional networking, you are really being precise about who are you going to connect with, who's going to connect you with your potential audience, right? Who are those audiences and how can they get better?
And oftentimes when I say how can they get better, they also get smaller. It's a little bit of an inverse relationship, right? I regularly talk to audiences of like 10 people.
And when people hear that, they scoff. And then I say, oh, well, seven or eight of them convert. And that's what we're talking about.
I don't want you thinking more is room of a thousand people. I want you thinking like, where are the perfect people and how can I find higher conversion than what I'm already getting? How can I look at my intentional networking that I do and make sure that I'm always thinking about upgrading this?
Another concept I talk about here all the time and I talk about it for a reason is that your business is going to be the average of the quality of your network, right? The same way that we're the average of the five people we spend the most time around or whatever that saying is. I found that to be true about businesses.
Your business is going to be the average of the quality of your network. And so if I'm telling you that your audiences have to have better precision of input, they need to be better audiences that you're borrowing. Well, how do you borrow an audience?
You borrow an audience by building a networking relationship, right? By networking and building relationships with folks who have access to those audiences. And so if I'm telling you that you need to get in front of better audiences, what does that actually mean?
It means you're on an ongoing quest to upgrade your network. And if you've built relationships with good enough people, amazing. What you've done is proven to yourself that you can do it.
And now your challenge is to slowly look for even better matches and continue building those relationships so your network is always getting better. So when your network gets better than the audiences you'll be put in front of get better. And when that happens, the marketing is more effective, right?
So, again, instead of saying yes to every opportunity, you get really precise and picky and you take that responsibility on yourself to look at your ideal connection avatars, to look at the relationships you have and say, you know, you probably don't need to overhaul everything if you've been doing this work, but it is that opportunity to say, how can I make my network 10, 20 percent better this year? Right.
Again, if my business is the average of the quality of my network, if every year I add some people to make the quality of that network 10 percent better, well, then your business is going to be 10 percent better. And that's how I want you to think about those better audiences. Again, it's not doing 10 podcasts instead of five.
It's doing the right podcasts, it's doing the right guest teaching and not doubling that impact. So, again, same time commitment or maybe like a little extra time commitment if you have to do some research and build a new relationship or two. But this is not doubling the effort.
So that's all about, you know, better audiences.
Input #2: Better Message
Second one is better message. And this one is both obvious and something that we're constantly iterating on.
But, you know, something that we can always work on, too. I talk about your messaging and relationship marketing, especially when you're going to meet people. You may have heard me talk about this before, whereas I talk about you want to meet people with some productive haunting or positive haunting.
I use both terms. And what does that mean? It means you want to say something to them when you meet them that they can't unsee or can't unhear.
Or the opposite of that is you don't want to be generally useful. What is generally useful? Generally useful is what we see a lot of traffic marketing being, right?
Here's 10 ways to get started. Here's your first three steps. All that kind of stuff where people kind of smile and nod and they do it or they don't do it.
And it doesn't really matter. You don't make an impact. Instead, you want to be working on your messaging that's going to have an impact.
How can you help people understand what you're saying and how can you put off a real aha in their brains? Right. This real aha that's going to make them sit and productively haunt them.
And what do I mean by productively haunting them? I just mean that when they go back to their desks and they start making the same mistake again, they're hearing your name. The very obvious example of this is in my own business.
I meet a lot of people when I introduce the idea of relationship marketing. So I go into places where I know there are a lot of service providers who are doing a bunch of traffic marketing that's not working. And what is the impact that I have?
I meet them and I explain what relationship marketing is and I explain to them the difference with traffic marketing. And because they're not having success with traffic marketing, they have little ahas going off everywhere. And they're like, yes, this makes sense.
This makes so much sense. And so then what happens? Well, maybe they get it enough in that initial moment that they're ready to take action.
But more often what happens is they need to go back to their desks and they need to post on LinkedIn 14 times the next week and watch that not work again. Right. Or they need to spend all week churning out content that nobody reads.
And every time they do that, I'm the little angel or devil on their shoulder. And they're thinking, oh boy, she was right. That's productive haunting.
I'm not shaming them. I'm not shaming anyone. I'm just pointing out there's a different way to do this.
And then when you go back and repeat the behaviors and realize it's not working, I want you to think about me because then you're going to ask me to help you. And I would be delighted to do so. Right.
And so that's what we're talking about with a better message. And there's always an opportunity to look at that message and make sure that you haven't sunk into generally useful. It's really easy to sink back into generally useful.
Another way to think about generally useful is if you are a person who tends to go up and teach. That's wonderful. Like, I love teachers.
It's not how people need to meet you. When you just teach people something again, even if it's useful, they smile and nod and they tend to forget it as soon as they leave. But if you point out a comparison about why you're teaching them that.
Right. I teach relationship marketing when I meet people. But first, I point out the comparison.
First, I positively haunt them. First, I say, hey, you're all traffic marketing and I know it's not working. What do you think about this?
And then I go on to do a little bit of teaching. Whereas if I just went in a room and just started lecturing everybody about the ins and outs of relationship marketing, they'd be like, huh, interesting. And they move on with their day.
So you kind of need to set up that comparison and think about that messaging that is going to resonate with folks so that it continues to have the impact that you need in a world of noise because everybody can go generally useful. It's really easy to do. You want to be the one who gets people's attention and really productively haunts them so that they remember you over time and they remember you while they're in the act.
Input #3: Better Trust Transfers
And then the third place is building better trust transfers. And I touched on this a little bit with better audiences, but let's remind ourselves what trust transfers are. Trust transfers are that moment in awareness.
So when you're meeting folks, they're that moment where somebody introduces you. Right. Whoever owns that audience.
So we talked about, you know, when you're borrowing audiences, whose audience are you borrowing and how good of a relationship do you have with that person or that organization so that when they introduce you to their audience, they are telling your audience how absolutely wonderful you are and how lucky they are to have this opportunity to learn from you. Or if it's a one on one introduction, what a no brainer this is and how you're going to change that person's life. We don't have to go that far.
But right. You want that introduction to have a ton of impact. We don't just want it to be, hey, Joe, meet Sally.
Sally, meet Joe. Bet this you might find something interesting about each other. That's going nowhere.
And so when we talk about the quality of the network, I'm not just talking about getting the right people into your network, but I'm also talking about doubling down on those relationships that are really right. Because, again, you know, you can spend time maintaining any kind of relationship you have. So when we go back to the original question of does this mean double the time or not?
No. What it means is invest the time that you're investing in better people or better positioned people. It means upping the quality of your network and putting in that time to invest in the right people so that when it's time for them to introduce you to someone, all of the trust that that person you're being introduced to has in whoever is doing the introducing, it's all transferred over to you.
Because when that happens, your life gets so much easier. They trust you. They're going to act like a referral, like you are going to get so much of the benefit of the doubt already.
That again, your marketing job is easier because the person is already believing in you and the trust that they're going to have in you from step one is already sky high. So when we're talking about investing in relationships, the more we invest in those relationships and the more we identify the correct ones and the more that we're always trying to, you know, increase the quality of those, then that's going to pay off for you. And by the way, when I say always trying to increase the quality of your network, I don't mean that every six months you're ditching everybody that you built a relationship with and you're starting over.
What I'm talking about is that there's always going to probably be an open spot or two in your network. Somebody is going to move on. Somebody is going to do something else.
So you're thinking about like, how do you manage that natural 10 to 20 percent turnover of your network year over year so that the people that you are bringing in are always a little bit, quote unquote, higher quality? And that's always a touchy label to put on people. I don't mean they're literally better people.
I just mean they're a better fit for what you're trying to accomplish, which is find a win-win to both, you know, to meet their audiences and to provide value to each other. And so when we're looking at what does double down mean, again, I'm going to come back and it can be a very annoying term. So, again, like you can roll your eyes at me, but it's better precision of inputs, right?
Better trust transfers. That means when people meet you, they're going to meet you with a little bit more trust in you than before. And that's going to go really far.
And if you productively haunt them a little bit better with your message, they're going to remember you that much more. Right. And if you get in front of the right audiences, if you're focused on getting on a little bit better audience all the time, that input is going to get better.
Your results will get better. And that's all that matters when the noise gets really loud in a market is better precision compounds results over time. It's not about just forcing time into the equation because doing average things for longer amounts of time, you're just going to continue to get average results, right?
Or doing things that don't work for more amount of time. You're just going to continue to get no results like that is a multiplying by zero situation. We don't want that.
We want a compounding equation that builds over time. And the way you build over time on the relationship marketing side, again, precision of the inputs. How can those inputs get 5, 10, 20 percent better year over year?
Because that's going to yield remarkable results over time. So here's the deal. Let's wrap all this up.
Right. When I say double down, I mean getting more precise and I do not mean getting more prolific. And that's because traffic marketing scales with volume and volume is a time metric usually.
Right. But relationship marketing, relationship marketing, which is what we care about here. Relationship marketing scales with precision and precision is about, you know, adding in better inputs and it's not about working more hours.
And then the three places to really apply that precision when I do talk about doubling down, it's your audience and your message and your trust transfers. And you don't have to fix all three all at once. All three don't have to get doubled in terms of effectiveness and in terms of greatness every year.
We're just looking for ongoing 5, 10, 20 percent improvements because those compound over time. Right. And so if you're sitting here thinking about how can I become more effective, pick one of those.
Be honest with yourself. Right. Are you going in and teaching instead of productively haunting with your message?
Well, maybe that's an area to focus on. Or do you know in your gut that you're kind of taking the easy audiences, right, and the good enough audiences and you're not really seeking out those really great audiences? Well, here's an opportunity.
Like, let's up the requirements a little bit. Let's up the standard a little bit and look for those right audiences. Because that is going to be what you're doubling down on.
And my friends, that's what we're talking about, and if you want more help with this, again, jump on my email list. I'm going to be hosting Build Your Relationship Funnel Boot Camp coming up in mid-May through mid-June. We're going to stretch it out over four weeks.
This time we're going to go on Thursdays. So for four consecutive Thursdays, we're going to have a boot camp that will allow you in a world of tight attention spans to really process the material and to really get the And if you jump on my website newsletter and if you go check out the boot camp page on my website, you will get information about how to sign up for that waitlist. Because again, that's going to be coming up here in May and June.
A lot of people have been reaching out to me saying, when's the boot camp coming back? Well, my friends, it's coming back soon. So I would love to have you if that's a fit for you.
And as always, thank you for being here today. If this episode helped you, I would be so grateful if you shared it with someone else that might help. Or if you feel like leaving a review, those are always really helpful as well in getting this information out there.
And with that, I will tell you, thank you for always being here and I'll see you again back here in two weeks.