Marketing for Solos Can Be Simpler Than You Think
You don’t need a bigger audience. You need the right people to know and trust you.
Whether you’re a consultant, a fractional, or running a small agency, you wear every hat. Marketing is the hat that trips most people up. It feels like you should be posting more, growing the list, showing up on every platform at once. So you overthink it, and then you do nothing.
Marketing is just one part of your client factory, and for high-ticket work, it’s simpler than it seems. You’re not running a volume game. A handful of the right people who trust you will do more than a big audience that never buys. A big follower count alone won't win you a five-figure project. People hire you when they trust you to deliver.
So that’s the whole job: build awareness and trust with the right people.
One thing this assumes is that you’ve already got offer-market fit, or at least know who your ICP is and what core offer you’re selling them. Without that, good marketing is tough. If you’re not sure where to start, start there.
The three things it takes
Good marketing for a business like yours runs on three pieces:
Message. Say what you do for one specific buyer, in the words your buyer already uses, not jargon.
Channels. Pick one or two places where your buyers already spend time, and that fit your work and your energy. One or two, not five, so you can keep up with them.
Consistency. Show up week after week with content and small intro offers. Awareness and trust build slowly, and they fade fast when you go quiet.
Most operators blame the channel when the problem is the message. They hop from platform to platform looking for something that works, when the message itself was never clear or specific enough.
Ground troops and air cover
I’m a believer that most solos and agency owners need two kinds of marketing running at once.
Passive marketing is your air cover. You put out content and let the right people come to you over time. It works, but it’s slow, and if it’s all you’ve got, you can wait a long while before anyone shows up.
Active marketing is your ground troops. This is outreach you control. You pick who to talk to, and you start the conversation, so it tends to pay off sooner.
You want both. The air cover warms people up, so the outreach lands more easily. The outreach brings in conversations now, while the content keeps working in the background.
Evan Kubitschek, a member of the 10x Solo community, runs a solo marketing ops consultancy. He finds most of his clients through LinkedIn. Initially, he assumed strong posts would pull in leads on their own. They didn’t. What changed things was splitting his time roughly in half: half creating content, half starting conversations in comments and DMs.
Most of his prospects now come from those conversations, not from people who book straight off his profile. The posts give him reach, but the conversations are what turn that reach into clients.
Outreach without the ick
Outreach gets a bad name, and it earns it. We all delete the same cold pitches every day. But the problem is how people do it, not outreach itself.
Remember the job: awareness and trust. Outreach that opens with “I want to sell you something” fails to build trust. To fix it, you need a reason to reach out that isn’t about you, ideally something useful you can offer.
A few that work:
Someone visits your profile or comments on a post, so you open a normal conversation in the DMs.
You invite a good-fit prospect to a small, private workshop focused on a specific outcome. (Not a recycled webinar where you talk at a crowd for an hour.)
You invite someone to be a guest on your podcast.
Each one gives them a reason to say yes that has nothing to do with being sold. That’s the kind of outreach that builds trust instead of torching it.
Go deeper on the channels that fit your work and your energy: The 5 Conversation Engines.
How to know it’s working
You don’t need a dashboard for this. Ask yourself three questions each week, and they will tell you most of what you need:
Awareness. Did any new right-fit buyers come across you this week? You may not be able to measure the exact number, but if the answer is no one, you know something needs to improve.
Trust. Are you building trust with those buyers and adding value before you ask for anything in return? Look at how you did that this week.
Conversations. Are your efforts turning into conversations with the right-fit buyers? That’s a number you can track week over week.
For most solos and small agencies, one or two good conversations a week with people who fit is enough to keep a high-ticket business full. The trap is mistaking activity for progress and chasing a bigger number you don’t need.
This week, pick the weakest piece of your marketing system and tighten it. Sharpen the message, add a little ground game if you’ve only got air cover, or test a new intro offer to open a conversation with something useful. You don’t need a bigger system. You need your current one to run a little better.
Keep building,
Garrett
P.S. If your marketing isn’t turning into conversations and you can’t tell whether it’s your message, your channel, or the offer underneath it, book a call with me. We’ll find what’s blocking it and where to focus first.
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