Make Marketing Suck Less for Expertise-Driven Solo Businesses

The Three Things You Control In Your Business

·14 min·1 clip

Dr. Michelle Mazur reveals the three specific areas overlooked experts actually control to create demand.

Host Dr. Michelle Mazur opens by confessing she is a control freak, a trait she believes many business owners share due to socialization. She acknowledges that much in business is uncontrollable, like client decisions or algorithm visibility. Mazur introduces uncertainty reduction theory by Berger and Calprese from 1975, explaining it as the "no shit Sherlock" theory where people seek predictability. She connects this to business risk, where financial well-being depends on predicting buyer behavior. The core thesis is that experts control three specific areas before making offers: their message, how they market and sell, and the experiments they run. On messaging, Mazur states experts often assume others automatically see their value, but communicating benefits is mission-critical and fully within their control. After a break promoting her Expert Up Club community, she discusses marketing control, urging listeners to stop tactics they hate and that don't align with their values. The final control area is experimentation; Mazur notes experts often lack data on what generates leads. She shares a personal example: a six-month LinkedIn experiment posting three times weekly with 30 minutes daily interaction yielded no email list growth, leading her to abandon it. This experiment provided data to understand what wasn't working. The episode concludes that while external factors like algorithms remain uncontrollable, focusing on message, marketing approach, and experiments gives experts actionable control to make marketing suck less.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Make Marketing Suck Less for Expertise-Driven Solo Businesses