This email is a day late - and this is fine

For the first time since the start of MarketINK!, an email is a day late. And this is fine.

The previous week has been quite challenging for me: I’ve been organising and running events for my day job, assisting in the final week of the Freelance Business Month and thinking about my career trajectory. As a result, I was forced to prioritize tasks, and one of my decisions was to push this edition of my newsletter a day further.

You know I value consistency and it was not an easy decision, yet when time is tight, you need to think about which tasks will carry the most value.

This is the concept of “pushing the needle“, which states that you need to do tasks which push your business, career, and life forward. It can be calling someone to set-up an event, booking an interview or putting an offer online - those tasks allow you to be further along tomorrow than you are today.

As much as I love my newsletter’s consistency, sometimes we need to focus on what is the most urgent - and the stepback is okay, as long as you don’t give up!

✔️ Do the job your customers want done!

There is this famous saying in product marketing that customers don’t buy a quarter-inch drill, they buy a quarter-inch hole in the wall: a classic way to think about the benefit of your product, not just its features.

The Jobs-to-be-done concept takes this idea a step further. It makes you consider what job your customers want completed, and how you can help them accomplish it.

For example - they don’t need a quarter-inch hole in the wall - they need to hang up their favourite painting.

The concept can help you narrow down how your product/service improves the lives of your customers - and help you marketing yourself better.

Learn more here.

Shelf Shocks

1. Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things by Adam Grant

Organizational psychologist and popular speaker Adam Grant released his new book, which looks at how we can all reveal our hidden potential. The book breaks the myth that the super-successful people rely on talent, and instead teaches us that we can improve at adopting new skills and creating amazing things.

Using his traditional storytelling approach, Grant shares the surprising journeys of entrepreneurs, athletes, musicians, and other trailblazers, that will inspire you and make you believe in your own hidden skills and potential.

2. Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results by Christina R Wodtke

At the core of business and marketing is setting goals (best if they are SMART). If you’d like to dive deeper into the topic, Christina R Wodtke has collected exciting stories about how employing Objectives and Key Results can transform your business and put you on the road to success.

If you’re tired of hearting the same ideas about goal-setting, this book will talk about the topic in a new light, with a lively, narrative approach.

3. The Shadow Work Journal: A Guide to Integrate and Transcend your Shadows by Keila Shaheen

If we ignore our subconscious, it will find ways to come to the foreground, sometimes in dreams, sometimes in surprising behaviour. Instead of this, we should acknowledge it and deal with it in a healthy way.

This is what this unusual journal attempts: to help us bring our shadow self under the spotlight and understand the hidden parts of ourselves through journaling prompts and other exercises. The book also comes with helpful explanations of the shadow self and Jungian psychology, which are worth the read if you are interested in psychology.

Fun Links

1. 10 Clever copywriting examples

“Really Good Sheet“ is a really good tagline for a company that creates something boring - in this case, bed sheets. Find out 9 other great copywriting examples in this article.

Another great example from Harry’s: “Our founders, Jeff and Andy, created Harry's because they were tired of overpaying for overdesigned razors, and of standing around waiting for the person in the drugstore to unlock the cases so they could actually buy them.“

You've reached the end of my newsletter. Hooray! If you have any comments or would like to share what you enjoyed the most, feel free to get in touch! See you in two weeks!