Why New Marketing Tactics Won't Get You More Clients
The real reason your offer isn't converting, and the one thing you can change that makes almost any marketing tactic work better
Hi there,
If you’ve been following me for a bit, you may know that I’ve been a marketer my entire professional career. So I understand how frustrating it can be when your marketing efforts seem like they aren’t working.
If that’s what you’re dealing with now, it’s tempting to try another guru’s program or offer that promises to bring you more clients.
But based on what I’ve seen working with health and wellness professionals since 2018, there’s a good chance the marketing tactic isn’t the problem. Tactics are just what’s happening on the surface.
The problem is most likely that your offer is too similar to other offers out there. That’s a positioning problem. And you can’t fix a positioning problem with better tactics. That would be like filling your car with premium gas and expecting it to drive better when the real issue is a flat tire.
Now before we dive into how to fix this problem, just a quick note… Today’s article is based on my most recent video, filmed on Rue du Haut Castelet in the old Safranier quarter of Antibes, on the Côte d’Azur. If you prefer to watch the video version, you can see it here.
Okay, so how do you fix a positioning problem?
By adding in a little “Pixie Dust.”
I know that sounds whimsical. But this concept has helped many of the health and wellness professionals I’ve worked with charge premium prices and become the go-to expert in very crowded niches.
In fact, Pixie Dust makes practically any marketing tactic work better.
What Exactly Is Pixie Dust?
When I help health and wellness professionals add Pixie Dust to their positioning, I look at two areas. You need them both. Miss either one and you’re back to blending in.
The first is your offer.
Your offer needs to solve a problem in a way people can’t find anywhere else. That means it needs to fill a gap nobody else is filling.
The second is your messaging. This is where the real power is. Your messaging is how you help people see their problem in a completely new way.
When your messaging has Pixie Dust, it does five things at once:
It helps people understand the real reason they have their problem
It releases them from guilt about having the problem
It explains why everything else they’ve tried hasn’t worked
It gives them genuine hope that your solution will finally help them
It positions you as the person uniquely equipped to give them the help they need
That’s not marketing hype. It’s a perspective shift. And it changes how people see you and respond to you.
When your marketing lacks Pixie Dust, even a “perfect” funnel with great ad copy and a perfectly structured webinar can leave you with an empty calendar.
But add a little Pixie Dust, and you stop having to convince people. They get a little excited and lean in to hear more because you shift their perspective. You move from being “just another option” to being the BEST option.
Here’s the part about Pixie Dust that surprises most people — it’s almost certainly something you already know.
Most health and wellness professionals understand health problems at a level their clients will never reach on their own. You know the underlying causes. You’ve seen the patterns and know why certain approaches don’t work. You’ve also had moments where you discovered something that completely changed how you think about the problem.
But that knowledge stays locked in your head. Maybe you’ve felt that yourself. You use it when you’re working with clients, but it almost never makes it into your marketing.
That’s a massive missed opportunity. Buried in what you already know is usually something that would surprise your ideal client if they heard it. An insight, a connection, or a new variable that changes how they understand their situation. Something that makes them think, “I’ve never heard anyone explain it that way before.”
That’s the heart of your Pixie Dust.
What It Looks Like in Practice
I once worked with a coach named Jackie who helped people with anxiety. She already understood the gut-brain connection deeply. And she knew certain foods could trigger anxiety and others could calm it. That’s why she incorporated nutrition into her work.
But when we looked at her marketing, she was positioning herself as an anxiety coach, which made her sound like a lot of other coaches.
Meanwhile, her audience was truly suffering. In Facebook groups and comment sections, people were saying things like “I’ve been in therapy for years and I’m still dealing with this” and “I’ve tried everything — nothing helps.”
Everything they’d tried gave them short-term coping mechanisms. But nothing created a lasting change.
Jackie already knew why. She knew that anxiety isn’t always just a mental health issue. There’s often a gut component that most people, and even many practitioners, completely overlook.
When the gut microbiome is out of balance, it produces chemicals that directly affect mood and anxiety levels. That’s why therapy and medication alone often don’t create lasting results. They’re treating the symptom, not the root cause.
But Jackie wasn’t saying any of that in her marketing. So we made that insight the centerpiece of her messaging.
Instead of positioning herself as another anxiety coach, she introduced a completely new way of understanding the problem — one that hit all five things great messaging does at once. It explained the real reason they had anxiety. It released them from guilt, because it wasn’t “all in their head” and it wasn’t a personal failure. It explained why the other things they’d tried hadn’t worked. And it gave them genuine hope that Jackie could finally help them.
She took something millions of people struggle with and gave them a new lens for understanding it. She went from being one of many anxiety coaches to being the coach who resolves anxiety by addressing the root cause in the gut.
And because she had something nobody else was offering, she could charge $3,000 to $4,000 or more, while coaches without this kind of positioning were stuck competing at $100 an hour.
Here’s what makes this even better. I worked with Jackie back in 2019. And just yesterday I received an email about new research published in SciTechDaily on the gut-brain connection and how it affects anxiety. So Jackie wasn’t ahead of the science — that link was already being studied. But she was years ahead of the mainstream conversation. And it will take many more years before it becomes common knowledge.
How to Uncover Your Own Pixie Dust
Jackie didn’t invent the gut-brain connection. She didn’t go out and learn something new. She took knowledge she already had and finally put it where it belonged — in her marketing.
That’s the case for most of the health and wellness professionals I work with.
Your Pixie Dust is usually already there. The trick is identifying which piece of what you know is the one that will make the biggest impact. The one that makes your ideal client stop and think, “Wait… I’ve never heard anyone explain it that way.”
Here are a few questions to help you find your own Pixie Dust:
What do you know about your clients’ problem that they don’t know?
What have you discovered or learned that changed how you think about it?
Why do the approaches people typically try not work, and what does work instead?
The answers to those questions are where your Pixie Dust lives.
When you find it, you have something genuinely different to say. People start reaching out to you instead of the other way around. And you stop feeling like you’re competing with everyone else, because you’re not saying what everyone else is saying.
Finding your Pixie Dust Positioning is one of the three steps in The Trust-Based Marketing Method™. The other two are validating your offer before you build it, and choosing the right marketing path for your situation. This is the framework I developed specifically for health and wellness professionals after watching what actually works, and what doesn’t, across more than a thousand businesses.
I wrote a mini-book that walks you through all three steps. Find out more about it here.
Before you go, I’d love to hear from you. Have you ever had this feeling? You know there’s something special about what you do, but you can’t quite put it into words. Tell me in the comments.
That’s all for this week! I’ll see you next time.
