North Valley Marketing

Howdy Friends,

I’ve been thinking about transparency lately because North Valley Marketing is changing.

Not in a hard pivot kind of way, but we’re growing and refining the business. I recently hired my first junior marketing assistant, which prompted me to go ahead and do something that has needed doing for a long time, rebuilding my website to reflect where we are today instead of where I was when I started North Valley Marketing. 

That has made me look at my own marketing with a little more honesty. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about who we serve best and where I want the business to go from here. It’s made me realize how general and generic the original website was. There really wasn’t any reason for a contractor to choose me over another marketing agency in their hometown.

That is kind of embarrassing to admit when I spend a lot of my time telling other businesses to be more specific, show their work, and give people a clearer reason to trust them. But it is true. It is easier to see the gaps in someone else’s marketing than it is to see them in your own.

I think a lot of business owners understand that feeling. You can know what should be done and still have a hard time doing it for yourself. 

Anyway, working through this has gotten me thinking about my own marketing and transparency.

In marketing, transparency matters because people trust what they can understand. When something feels like a black box, people get skeptical. They need to understand enough to feel like they are not being fooled, ignored, or talked over.

That is especially true in the marketing industry. A lot of business owners have been burned or confused by marketing agencies that sounded impressive but never really made sense. They were told the campaign was optimizing, the strategy was working, or the numbers were improving, but they couldn’t trace it to a change in their business.

I do not want North Valley Marketing to feel like that.

I have been paying attention to a guy named Adam Robinson. He builds software companies and shares a lot of the process publicly. He talks about what he is building, what is working, what is not working, and how he is thinking through decisions. I appreciate how open he is about the process. It’s built my trust in him to the point where, if I needed a product in his space, I’d choose his because of his openness and authenticity.

That does not mean everything belongs in public, but I want to show more of how I think through marketing problems. There are things like client secrets, private numbers, customer information, or strategy that need to stay behind closed doors in order to maintain client trust.

But there is a big difference between protecting your clients and hiding so much of your work that future customers cannot understand how you think.

That is the part I want to get better at, talking more about results, lessons, tests, mistakes, improvements, and the decisions that shape the work we do. I’m not sure exactly how to do that yet, but I have a few ideas. Possibly a dashboard on the website showing ad campaign results. Something like we produced this many leads this week at this cost per lead. I’ve actually been doing a little of this in my social posts. If you hop over to my LinkedIn or Facebook, you can get an idea of what I’m thinking.

I probably will create more videos or social posts showing more of the thought process behind a website rebuild or a campaign adjustment. I do not have everything figured out yet, but it’s the direction I want to move in.

I think the same principle applies to a lot of businesses, not just mine.

But this kind of transparency can feel uncomfortable because it feels like you might get taken advantage of when, in reality, it builds people’s trust in you while attracting the right customers for you and repelling the wrong ones.

I am still figuring out exactly what this looks like for North Valley Marketing. Most of it is still in the idea stage, but we will be showing more of our work, sharing more of my thinking, and being clearer about who we help best.

If you want to watch that process, you can follow along with me on LinkedIn or Facebook.

Later, Chad Beachy