Summary
Isaac from Pharaoh shares a strategic shift in their marketing approach, moving away from a sole focus on advertising and building awareness toward helping clients internalize marketing fundamentals to position themselves effectively in the market. This transition stems from the realization that simply generating traffic or awareness does not guarantee success, especially when the business lacks solid foundational marketing elements.
Key Insights
- Previous Approach: The agency, like many others, initially concentrated heavily on generating awareness and driving traffic to clients (primarily dental practices).
- Challenges Faced: This strategy often led to disappointing results and dissatisfaction, particularly when clients lacked the internal marketing foundation to convert attention into meaningful engagement or business growth.
- Core Problem Identified: Awareness and attention alone do not suffice if the business is not strategically positioned or remarkable in its market. Many businesses have not intentionally built these foundational elements.
- Marketing Foundations: Before investing in advertising or awareness campaigns, businesses should:
- Clearly understand what change or value they want to create in the market.
- Identify a target audience whose belief systems align with the intended change.
- Position themselves by aligning every element of the practice or business to be remarkable and meaningful to that audience.
- Information is Not the Barrier: In today’s digital environment, information and awareness are widely accessible; thus, lack of attention is rarely the primary issue.
- Strategic Recommendation: Take a step back from chasing attention and focus on building a strong marketing foundation first.
- Advertising as a Shortcut: Once the foundation is solid, advertising and other tactical marketing efforts can accelerate growth and awareness but cannot replace foundational work.
- Educational Resources: Isaac promotes a free course designed to help businesses build these marketing foundations by clarifying market positioning, audience alignment, and creating remarkable practices.
Core Concepts
| Concept | Description |
|---|---|
| Marketing Foundations | The essential alignment of business purpose, audience, and practice design to create remarkability. |
| Awareness vs. Foundation | Awareness alone is insufficient without a strong, intentional foundation to support business growth. |
| Positioning | Strategically defining and aligning the business to resonate deeply with a specific target group. |
| Advertising | Tactical tool that accelerates visibility but only effective after foundational work is done. |
| Remarkability | The quality that makes a business stand out and encourages organic word-of-mouth referrals. |
Recommendations for Businesses
- Avoid focusing primarily on advertising or awareness if foundational marketing elements are not established.
- Develop a clear understanding of the change or value your business intends to provide.
- Identify and deeply understand your target audience’s belief systems and needs.
- Align every business touchpoint and internal process intentionally to serve and resonate with this audience.
- Use advertising strategically only after foundational marketing and positioning work is complete.
- Consider educational resources to build marketing foundations before investing heavily in tactical marketing.
Conclusion
Isaac emphasizes that the largest leverage in marketing lies in how a business is designed and positioned, rather than in the volume of advertising or awareness campaigns. By focusing on foundational marketing—clarifying purpose, audience, and positioning—businesses can become remarkable and naturally attract attention. Tactical tools like advertising then become effective accelerators rather than primary drivers. This approach aims to reduce disappointment and create more sustainable, meaningful growth for clients.
00:00:00
Hey, this is Isaac with Pharaoh and I want to talk a little bit about why we shifted away from advertising so much and helping our clients with building awareness and why we shifted more towards uh helping clients internalize marketing to position themselves in the market to show up as a need rather than as a commodity before doing all the awareness generating and stuff. And the the main reason we made this transition was because we were like all the other agencies and we always focused on building awareness. A client
00:00:36
would come to us, they had their dental practice and we would just say okay um let’s build some traffic to it and let the chips fall where they may. And turns out a lot of that approach or that approach a lot of the times didn’t work out so well for the clients and it caused a lot of bad feelings that I didn’t really um enjoy of course like uh engaging with that way in with clients uh especially those that didn’t get good results. And so um I wanted to create education so that practice owners
00:01:09
wouldn’t have to ever like experience that again. So, what I’m trying to say is that if your foundations aren’t there, no matter how much awareness and attention you build, um it’s possible that it won’t help you out if you haven’t built the foundations. Whereas for other practices, um you might have done the work of building a strong foundation already. And so, if you do build the attention and awareness, it will benefit you. Um but most of the times what I see is that many practices
00:01:34
haven’t done this properly. They haven’t done it intentionally. And for those people who it works out for, they have just an in innate understanding of how marketing works. So first step would be to take a step back away from building attention, building awareness. And I am suggesting that um it’s possible that you aren’t ready for awareness and attention because if you consider it um awareness, attention, information, we aren’t lacking that. Like if you did have the foundation already, it’s
00:02:09
relatively easy for people to find you. If you are remarkable and people start recommending you online, on groups, on forums, to their friends and family or wherever, like information today isn’t the barrier to entry. So if you go out there believing that attention and information, if people knew about you, if that’s the only thing holding you back, um I’m sorry to tell you, but that probably isn’t it. And if we engage as an agency with you um with you believing that it’s just about attention and
00:02:40
awareness, then unfortunately it’s going to lead you to a lot of disappointment. So um that’s why we don’t focus so much on um advertising and all this stuff we do like but that comes after you’ve done the work of creating the foundations. So, if you’re interested in check like understanding how to create those foundations, check out our course in the description. Uh it’s completely free and I think you’ll find it very valuable. There you’ll learn what it is that
00:03:09
you’re trying to create in the market, the change that you want to create. Um you’re going to identify the people, the group of people who have a belief system that is more inclined to align them uh with the change that you want to create for them. And finally, it’s going to be about how to position yourself for those people. how to align every element of your practice in such a way that it becomes remarkable and they can’t help but spread the word about you. And once that’s built, now we can bring uh
00:03:37
attention and awareness. We can shortcut that process. That can take a bit of time. Um if it was done purely organically, we can shortcut that with advertising and all these other tactical stuff. But um what I’m trying to say is don’t focus so much on the tactical stuff. for the most part um it isn’t the largest leverage. The largest leverage is going to lie in how you design your practice. Is it built for those people? Is it intentionally built for them? Um have you aligned every touch point to be
00:04:08
very meaningful for those people? And once you’ve done that work, the attention and awareness will come. Um but of course you can shortcut that but that has to be done first. So hopefully that changes how you uh understand or approach marketing and I hope you find it very valuable.