What fresh hell is this?

O ye Not My Job subscribers,

Happy (belated) new year!

Despite general world chaos, we made it another tour round the sun, and girl am I grateful!

Because (among other things) there is much marketing to be done!

I’m going to take a wild guess and say that you too have not written your marketing plan for 2026.

You were supposed to do it by Dec…then during those 2 weeks off where you definitely were going to have time for it, and now we’re checks watch two weeks into the new year and your marketing is still, well, stuck.

Oh, joy.

Fear not!

Aelia and I are going to help you brave this new quarter-century (WILD) by helping you answer the marketing questions that are keeping you stuck:

• How do I know which target audience I should actually be focusing on?

• How do I create unique positioning in the market (esp when it’s hella crowded)?

• How do I create content that addresses specific user problems?

• How do I find a marketing channel that works for me?

• How do i get out of analysis paralysis and do the ding dang thing?

And as we do, we’re going to build your marketing plan from scratch, using the template we use for clients.

So you can start off 2026 knowing exactly what to do and how to do it!

Each week we’ll cover a question, and answer it as we walk through a section of the marketing plan template.

Plus, we’ll make sure there’s nothing missing from your marketing foundations that would kill your marketing before you get started (because that would be SAD, and i’m not talking about seasonal depression).

Let’s jump right in, shall we?

Nagging Q #1: HOW do you know who you should be marketing to?

AKA - who should your target audience be?

And if you have that nailed down (whoop whoop!) who should your core customers within that target audience (ICP if you’re an acronyms peep)?

This is holy trinity of the perfect audience characteristics to focus on:

• They are sick and tired of being sick and tired

• They are already paying for something (in time or money) to solve the problem

• They can clearly define their pain point (of which they are sick and tired)

If you don’t know who that is clearly (most people don’t, so you’re in good company if that’s the case!), here’s how to figure it out in 5 steps

1. Talk to your current customers to narrow down your ICP guesswork (if you don’t have custy’s yet, then that’s fine, we have a workaround!)

2. Test channels to see where your ICP hangs out in greatest numbers

3. Ask people to chat about their work/lives

4. Interview them (or do a mix of interviews and surveys)

5. Analyze your interviews

TLDR: you’re gonna have to talk to people. No, it’s not gonna be scary, i promise!

Take my fin, let’s go.

1. Talk to your current customers to narrow down your peeps

Start reaching out to current customers, then go to people who could be customers.

You don’t need to talk to everyone.
Around 3-7 people is a great start to help you get a foundational understanding of:

• who they are

• why they’re using your product

• what problems are they trying to solve

• why they chose you over other alternatives

• (and if applicable) what were they doing before?

2. Test channels to see where your peeps hang out in greatest numbers

Once you have your baseline from talking to your customers, start out by testing different channels.

Ask: where do these people hang out? Reddit? LinkedIn? Other communities or forums?

Go wherever you think your audience spends time. See if they’re actually there.

Tip: Hive Index is an excellent tool to find communities online based on interests and industries.

3. Ask said peeps to chat

Once you have a feel for the community and you know the kinds of people that you want to talk to, ask them to jump on a 20-minute call to talk about their problems, work, lives.

This is less prone to rejection than it sounds - most people love talking about themselves (come on, you know you love it too!).

And a word to the wise: do not mix sales and research.
If you use research calls to pitch, people will shut down or tell you what you want to hear. Nobody wins and they do not like you.

Brené Brown would be sad.

4. Interview them (or do a mix of interviews and surveys)

There’s the step-by-step guide for you in the B2B Marketing Plan.

Coooool cool cool cool cool cool - uh what am I supposed to ask in that interview?

nine-nine! (if you know, you know)

Stumped about how to frame your questions or what to ask?

Here are some tips (and we’ll drop lists of actual Qs when we jump onto the example co walkthrough).

For surveys:

• say exactly how long it will take to fill out the form—specific numbers work better!

• 10 question max

• multiple pages

• use logic so that you can pre-fill questions

• use clever or fun button names to keep people going through the form

Template incoming if ya keep reading!

For interviews:

• ask about their work (origins, industry, location, etc.)

• discuss pain points

• identify what an ideal situation would look like for them

• ask misc Qs for relationship building

Great, but how does this work in the real world?

So glad you asked.

The team at Workflow had previously done their customer research back in the summer, and had come away with very granular data on who was buying from them.

But not who they actually wanted to target.

The data has number, but it didn’t have stories, and it definitely wasn’t granular enough to make decisions off of. Based on that first wave of research. they could have gone in 9 different directions for a core customer because there were so many different kinds of creatives who used the product.

So I jumped in to help them get unstuck.

First off, talking to people!
I reached out to their current customers via email(s) with

• an option to book a 15min call with me

• or fill out a survey

I also manually handled all of their cancelation requests for 2 months so that I could ask each one why they were canceling.

Those emails looked like:

• Email to current engaged users asking to chat for 20 min with a Cal link

• Followed up a week later with a reminder email that included a survey option.

• And a third final email with survey + call link

Here’s my list of Qs for calls:

And the survey that I built.

Here’s a templatized version of that survey in Tally.

Then I organized the responses like this in Notion

5. Analyze your interviews

Aight, you’ve talked to people.

Now what?

Here’s the TLDR: Take what your core customers told you in interviews, find throughlines, and draft your positioning to who they are and what they’re looking for.

Pay special attention to:

• Why do they love your product

• What do they want out of life/work (end goal)

• Underlying problems

• Product/feature descriptions

• Unique words & phrases

We’ll walk through this analyzation more in depth next week as we cover nailing your positioning (even in a crowded market).

That’s all for this issue, we’re so happy to be back in your inboxes!
We’ll see you next week.

Cheers!

Sophia 💜👩🏽‍💻 & Aelia ⚡️🧕 

Powered by: it’s giving purgatory this year, but we shall persist. 🔥 

If you’re thinking “Man, i’ve heard the name Workflow before!”, that’s probably because I now run it! It’s long been a dream to run a SaaS company and it was a joyous Christmas present to be named CEO (I’ve been quietly leading the team since September).

You can read the full post announcement here.

Don’t worry, Ignore No More ⚡️ isn’t going anywhere!