112 - Secret to Boosting Your Business? Start Thinking Like a Marketer

Thinking like a marketer isn’t about flashy tactics—it’s about basics, mindset, and using simple strategies that connect your ideal audience to your business. You’ll hear why “marketing” means the activities that bring customers to you, how the 4 Ps fit in, and how to apply it with a clear, customer-first lens. 

I’m delighted to share this session from my good friend, colleague, and marketing coach Brenda Meller. Although, the original Think Like a Marketer* presentation was done on video I know you'll pick up tons of tips and techniques from this audio version. 

Takeaways

🔹 Good marketing speaks to a clear ideal audience, is memorable, and unique—don’t just notice it, ask why it works. 

🔹 Marketing = activities that connect customers to you (with the classic 4 Ps: product, price, place, promotion). 

🔹 Aim for intentional marketing (a plan and roadmap) vs. unintentional (the 404-page problem). 

🔹 Shift into a customer-first mindset: write to one person; use “you/your” language so messages land. 

🔹 Always create a bridge to the future: tell people exactly what to do next (simple, specific CTAs). 

🔹 Surprise and delight: own mistakes, invite feedback—and reward people who help you improve. 

🔹 Engage your community and spell out the action you want (likes, comments, replies). 

🔹 Be an idea generator for others; small, thoughtful suggestions create memorable brand moments. 

🔹 Marketing is learnable—treat it like practice (think yoga): steady reps build skill and confidence. 

* Think Like a Marketer was part of the LIVE 4-hour Mini Marketing Marathon on September 11, 2025

🔷 Thank you for listening. If you found this episode relevant don't forget to hit that Follow Button to keep learning and growing with us.

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Transcript

So very excited to kick off the event today.

I am super proud of Annette for pulling this event together.

Just an amazing thing that she's been able to do.

And she was actually on my Live-a-Thon event about a month ago, and she's a part

of my Marketing with Meller program.

And she was actually a person who reached out to me early on in her membership

and said, Hey, can you teach us how to do what you do?

How do you think like a marketer?

So I actually led a master class inside my Marketing with Mellar

program, and I'm now bringing this abridged version to all of you here today.

All right, so to get started, I want to let you know in this

presentation today, you will learn how to think like

a marketer to help to supercharge your business and your personal growth.

I'm just doing a quick little look.

Okay, it looks like the slides are loading here.

This is the hard part about being a virtual presenter.

You can't just look over your shoulder slides.

You have to actually make sure that they're working up on the screen here.

So As we get started, I'm going to walk you through a flow here today.

It's to help you to follow along with me as we're going through.

We're going to start with some marketing basics.

I'm going to touch on some of the things that Annette already talked about in terms

of marketing basics and what is marketing.

Then we're going to get you into a marketing mindset,

and I'm going to teach you some of the keys to having that marketing mindset.

Then I'll be walking you through some high-level marketing strategies,

things that you can start doing this week, even today, to get into

thinking like a marketer.

And I'm going to leave you with my recommendation for your next steps.

Now, I would recommend, hopefully you've got a notepad nearby.

If you don't already have one, grab one right now,

because in addition to my presentation, there's going to be so many wonderful

ideas that you're going to learn during today's mini marketing marathon.

And I want to make sure that you do take action.

So I'm going to jump ahead, and that's one of the things we're

talking about in your next steps.

So let's start with marketing basics.

Now, Marketing is essentially all of the activities that connects

your customers to you.

That's really what marketing is.

I hire interns for my business, and I did this during corporate as well.

And one of the questions I would always ask my interns, and these are marketing

interns, is what is marketing?

There's so many different descriptions out there, and there's an academic thing,

and there's the real-world description.

But it's essentially marketing is all of the activities that bring your

customers to you or that you are doing to help to to bring those customers

to you and to connect you.

Now, from an academic mindset, you may have heard of the four

P's of marketing strategy.

This is very common.

If you've taken a class in marketing, this has probably been one of the multiple

choice questions on the sounds, right?

The 4Ps of marketing.

And the 4Ps are essentially product or service, what it is that we are selling

or offering to our customers or consumers.

The price, how much are you charging for these products and services?

Might be free, might be a paid service, might be premium.

The place, where can we purchase this?

Whether it's at a brick and mortar retail store, whether it's online, etc,

or a hybrid version of that, and promotion, all of the different

methods for which we are using to connect our customers to us.

At It does include advertising, as Annette mentioned earlier.

And nowadays, it includes social media as well.

And the reality of the situation, my friend, is that you are doing marketing

for your business, whether you know it or not.

Whether you like it or not, you are doing marketing for your business.

Did you know that?

And if you're not aware, your marketing probably falls into two categories.

It's either intentional marketing, you've got this playbook,

this game plan that you're using, and maybe you actually have a formal

marketing plan that you renew every year, and it's a roadmap that you follow

throughout the year, or it's unintentional marketing.

And unintentional marketing, to me, is like when you launch a website and you

don't go through a checklist and do usability testing and all that great

stuff, and then somebody tries to visit a secondary web page and they

get this 404 page not found.

It might get a little frustrating, might feel a little bit disjointed in some

of your efforts, but the website was launched, right?

So we're doing all these things.

So regardless, if you know it or not, you are doing marketing for your business,

whether it is intentional or unintentional.

Now, the other thing is everyone thinks that they know marketing.

I remember when I used to work in corporate marketing,

and I worked in corporate marketing for 20 plus years, and we would have

people from the sales team.

I would be working on presentations for them.

And people from the sales team would say, I know what you're doing.

Move over.

They felt like they knew marketing because everyone feels like, you probably

feel like you know marketing as well. Why is that?

Because we are all consumers.

We are the target of all of this marketing that we see in our everyday life.

And the other thing is we all know when something feels off about the marketing

strategy or the messaging.

And I like jigsaw puzzles.

I'm going to use this analogy as, if you've ever done a jigsaw puzzle,

then some of the pieces are pretty close to fitting, but something

just doesn't quite fit, right?

And you're like, no, that's not the right piece that goes along with it.

And I think that's the same thing with marketing.

We know when something feels a little bit off.

Think about this.

I'm not going to give specific examples, but your favorite brand brings

in a celebrity whose values don't align with your own, or maybe they change

a logo, or they try a new initiative that's a bit obscure, right?

And something just feels off, and you're like, that's definitely

not on brand for them, right?

And that's, I think, because we as consumers, we're

experiencing these things all the time.

Now, we all know good Good marketing when we see it, right?

You know good marketing.

Good marketing was what Annette did with all of the promotion leading up

to this mini marketing marathon event.

You know good marketing when you see it, right?

Now, starting today, to start to think like a marketer,

I want you to start thinking about asking yourself, why is it good?

Why is it good marketing?

The likelihood is that it's all of these three things.

The first is it's speaking to your ideal target audience, that company, that brand.

It's speaking to that ideal target It's hitting you in the right place.

The other thing is it's memorable.

There's something that's a little bit different about it.

I think it was Frank, if I'm not mistaken, who had a promo video for this.

And the very first slide was a picture of Elmo, but it was a half a second.

I was like, what Is thisermo in there? It was memorable.

And that's something that made it really good marketing.

And then it's unique.

It's something that other people are not doing.

Now, the good thing is that all of you, whether you consider yourself a marketer

or a non-marketer, all of us can be taught to think like a marketer.

I think about this analogy of yoga.

It's like you just need to practice it every day and open your mind

to the possibilities that you can think like a marketer and start practicing

marketing thinking today and every day.

Now on this screen on the left side is in the yoga, it's called Dancers Pose.

I've been practicing this pose for years.

I'm getting the better and better.

I don't quite have my leg all the way to hold up in there.

But I know that by practicing yoga, I'm getting better incrementally

with every session that I do.

All right, so now that we've talked about what is marketing, let's get

into a marketing mindset.

And I want to give you some keys as we're walking through here today.

Because starting today, my friend, you can start to think like a marketer

in all of your business activities.

So one key is shifting everything that you're doing for your marketing

to your ideal customer's point of view.

I've been doing one of these techniques.

Have you noticed this already?

I'm using a lot of you and your statements in my messaging.

Have you noticed that I'm speaking to you right now.

I'm speaking to one person, right?

So shift all of your marketing and think about it being received from that ideal

customer's point of view.

That's a key to thinking like a marketer.

Another key is creating a bridge to the future.

Now, I used to work in a call center back in years ago,

and at the end of the contact center agents conversation,

we would train the individuals on creating that bridge to the future.

If you have any other questions, we can be reached Monday through Friday,

9: 00 AM to 5: 00 PM at this phone number or go to the website

Every interaction you have with your customers, you should be

creating a bridge to the future.

What do you want them to do next if they want to continue on that path, or how

can they get a hold of you to reengage?

You're going to be hearing throughout the day, all of us as presenters are going

to be creating bridges to the future with you because we want to stay

engaged with you long after the event.

If you're interested in doing business with us, we want to make

it as easy as possible.

For example, Marketing with Meller, I'm promoting this today.

You can join for just $25 your first month.

That's an example of a Bridge to the Future, and that's one

of the keys to thinking like a marketer.

All right, another key is to aim to surprise and delight your audience.

And I try to do this all the time.

I have this story, a good friend will tell you when you have spinach on your teeth.

And Annette and I, we do this all the time.

Annette and I will text each other and we'll be like, Hey, you had a typo.

The other day I posted and I said, I'm so excited to meet the other presenters.

But instead of meet, I said, eat.

I'm going to eat the other presenters.

And then she sent me a text.

She's like, I'm laughing laughing so hard.

But a good friend will tell you when you have spinach in your teeth.

And I've used this technique.

The other day, I sent out an email.

I'm launching a new webinar and I asked my VIP attendees, my VIP list, rather.

I said, Register. And at the bottom I had PS.

I said, This is a new registration page I have.

If you happen to notice any typos or anything wrong, let me know.

And I had about a dozen of those people, replied back and they said,

your email said, hi, their first name.

And it literally said first name.

It didn't have their names in it.

And I had people telling me, hey, you might want to get that

And when this happens, when I have these, I don't like to call them mistakes,

learning experiences.

When I have learning experiences like this that occur, you know what I do?

Especially if it's something that's costing me business.

If it's a broken link that's not working, that was to a checkout

page, I reward them.

I will give out a free autographed copy of my book as a thank you

for pointing that out.

So I want you to think about aiming to surprise and delight your customers,

and you can do this in a variety of different ways.

Another key to thinking like a marketer.

Successful marketers, I'm going to lean in on this one.

This is important. We all know that this is not a solo sport.

This is about engaging your community and your community of peers,

all of the different people that you'll be hearing from today,

Gillian and Kendra and Ryan and everybody else you'll be hearing about today.

Annette, we are all working together to make this event more successful.

Did you notice that on LinkedIn, we were all engaging with each other's

posts because we know the power of collaboration.

And it's that expression of a rising tide lifts all boats.

Now, there's one thing you can do, even though we don't have comments enabled

on YouTube, I want you to like this video right now.

I'm looking at on my other screen, I've got it pulled up.

I see that four people have liked this video right now.

Go and like the video right now if you could.

It just went up to 11, so we're all taking action on this.

I want you to think about what I just did right now.

I engaged you as the viewer to incorporate some type of engagement with content.

Tell people what you want them to do.

Then when they do it, if you have the opportunity to to reply

back to them or engage with them as well.

So engaging your community, this is another key to that marketing mindset.

Here's another key.

I want you to start becoming an idea generator for other people.

When you think of marketing ideas for other people, I want

you to suggest it to them.

I'm going to show you a quick story here, tell you a quick story here.

And then and I are both speakers, and we were on a call once talking about

what do we do as speakers at the end of our talk, especially if it's an unpaid

speaking engagement, to make sure that we're leads from that event.

And a lot of us talked about having a hat or a box that we would pass around

the room and drop business cards in it.

And I said, I use a pie tin for mine.

And that's company, you know what it's called, right?

Black Dog Marketing Strategies.

And I said to Annette, I said, You know it would be really cool?

I give away an autographed copy of my book as my giveaway when I

get those business cards.

I said, You know what would be really cool for you?

Get a little black dog stuffed toy.

And she actually ends, she's doing this now when she's at live events.

And she one-upped me because in in addition to having the little black

dog stuffed toy that she gives away, which is a hit, by the way,

she also has one of those collapsible rubber water bowls

that you have for your dog.

That's what people drop their names and their business cards into.

So I want you to think about this.

Whenever you think of ideas for other people, reach out and say,

Hey, have you ever considered?

And give them that idea.

That's going to help you to get into that marketing mindset

of thinking like a marketer.

All right, so now that we've talked about what is marketing and having a marketing

mindset, let me give you some marketing strategies, things that you

can start do this very week.

And the first thing is do a brand and marketing audit for your business.

If you've not done this before, it's something to do.

Just look through all of your marketing materials from top to bottom.

I'm going to give a shout out right now to my friend, John Espirian.

He's got a great book that's called Content DNA.

I read it cover to cover like twice already.

And he has so many ideas about how to be consistent in everything that you do

online from your brand colors, your font, your voice, everything like that.

And I know off the top my head, my magenta pink color, which is what

you see here on screen, it's A11060.

I know that top of my head because I'm always using that brand

color inside Canva.

My font is Monserit.

That's my preferred primary.

My secondary is Ariel, right?

And my voice, I always want to be educational,

informational, engaging, and sometimes even entertaining.

A lot of times I'll put little PS, bonus tips in there for people as well.

So that's part of my brand voice.

You should establish what your brand voice is as well.

That's to be something as a part of your brand audit.

And think about, are you consistent everywhere you go?

And that's something that John talks about in his book.

Are you consistent online and offline and in-person and through

electronic communications?

And are you looking at your brand audit and doing this a process annually?

Because things change over time. You might not like pink.

Maybe you like blue next year as an example.

So think about changing that over time.

Another thing you can do, another marketing strategy you

can do is to scan your website.

This is so important because this is really where a lot of us

are doing business, right? So go to your homepage.

Do this today. Go to your website homepage.

Think about what are your primary products and services area focus for your business.

How easy is it to find it from your homepage?

You might be surprised.

I had a friend a while a while back, we were talking about public speaking.

I'm doing more conferences and events, and they were on the homepage,

and they said, I can't find you.

How do I book you as a speaker from your homepage?

And I'm like, oh, my gosh.

You look at your website so often that you forget to really look at, is it easy

for to find that key product or service.

So make sure you're doing that.

And then on your secondary web pages, I want you to think about as information

listed in priority order, meaning is the most important

service at the top of your page, because we as humans,

we're not that much different.

We read from top to bottom, and we don't read everything.

So we're going to lose your attention if we put the important stuff at the bottom.

Put the important stuff at the top of the page instead.

Let me give you a quick tip on email.

Make sure that your emails that you're sending out, you should be sending

emails, I hope that you are.

Those emails should be skimmable, right?

Easy to read from top to bottom on your phone or on the desktop.

There should be one call to action, not 12, one clear call

to action for people to take.

And I want you to think about if you were reading that email and a friend forwarded

it to you, would you want to opt into that email list, right?

Or if you're on the list already or you're reading this email,

would you want to opt out?

You know what I'm talking about, right?

You see some of these emails, you're like unsubscribed.

I don't want you to view that.

I want you to be one of those emails that are interesting to read.

When we think about real estate, gosh, I have built my business on LinkedIn.

I am a LinkedIn coach, but we are all essentially living

on rented real estate when we're using social media as a primary form

of marketing for our business.

And that's okay that we're using it, but I want you to think about,

do you have a marketing plan, a process by which people can click off

of LinkedIn to go to your website, and then you get them into your email

channel or into a Contact Us form?

So do you have a marketing plan to move your ideal target audience off of those

platforms in a path on what to do next?

Finally, to create new opportunities for your business, you can do

that through existing business processes.

It's like crimping your pie crust before you bake it.

It just makes it more interesting.

You can do that through things like adding in an email footer.

Right now, I'm promoting my upcoming webinar in my email footers.

Packaging.

Instead of just using boring envelopes, use of something that matches

your brand color.

This is what I did during the pandemic when delivering my books.

Maybe apparel and brand pops.

You might notice in the background, I've got my pink magenta

lights on when I'm in person.

I'm always wearing pink.

I did talk about that pie tin earlier.

Then research.

Ask new clients, How did you hear about me?

At the end of an engagement, what worked well?

What would you suggest for improvement?

I want to encourage you to continue to learn from other marketers.

I like podcasts.

I'm going to give a shout out to Kendra Corman, Annette Richmond,

and Amy Porterfield.

All three women have really wonderful ways of learning from those individuals.

All right, I'm going to turn the floor back over to Annette.

But before I do so, I'm going to give you your next step into thinking a marketer.

And I want to let you know, you don't have to do everything that you

hear today, but you do need to do something, right?

And that, my friend, is how you can begin to think like a marketer.

All right, Annette, do you want to come back up again?

Here we go. Yes.

So, Brenda, before we let you go, you did mention your membership.

But before you do, I have to say, when I'm at the end of a presentation

and I say I have this black dog, people are like, Bring Bring it over here.

Everybody wants it so badly, this little four dollar dog.

So tell us a little bit about your offers before I bring up Stella,

who is our next speaker.

Yeah, wonderful.

So I do have a variety of different marketing checklist and everything

from building up your LinkedIn profile, creating a company page.

You can go to mellermarketing.com/checklist for that.

My program, my membership program, which Annette mentioned earlier,

is called Marketing with Meller.

You can join monthly for 67 a month or for 670 for the year.

And I am creating an offer where you can join this month for just

$25 for your first month.

And beyond that, if you're interested in working with me

one-on-one, I do offer LinkedIn coaching as well.

Thank you so much, my friend.