The Lenny B Modern Marketing Recipe: 5 Things Every Marketing Piece Must Include
Aug 21, 2026
A lot of people start marketing too early.
They ask:
What should I post?
What does the audience want?
What kind of content will get attention?
What platform should I use?
In my approach, those are downstream questions.
Before you can create effective marketing, you need to understand who your ideal audience is. But you can’t really understand your audience until you understand what you’re offering them. And you can’t intelligently design your products and services until you first understand what is uniquely yours to offer.
That is where I start.
Don’t build the business by first asking what the market wants.
Build it around what is uniquely you.
What do you love doing? What are your unfair advantages? What can you talk about all day? What skills, experience, personality and perspective come naturally to you? And most importantly, how can those things genuinely help another person?
Once that foundation becomes clear, you can begin designing products around it. Once you understand the products, you can identify the people who are most likely to benefit from them. And once you understand those people, your marketing becomes much easier to create.
That’s the order:
You → What You Can Offer → Products → Ideal Audience → Marketing
And once you reach the marketing stage, I use a simple five-part recipe.
In my system, a piece of content is not complete modern marketing unless it includes these five things.
1. Brand Yourself
People need to know who you are, what you do, and why they should keep paying attention.
Your brand is not just your logo or business name. It is the repeated answer to a simple question:
Why are you here, and how can you help me?
I do this constantly in my own content. I remind people that I’m Lenny B, what I work on, who I help, and what kind of problems I can help solve.
Good branding also qualifies the audience. The right person thinks, This is for me. The wrong person can move on.
That’s a feature, not a failure.
2. Show Your Authentic Personality
Your expertise may not be unique.
You are.
There may be thousands of people who teach your subject, sell a similar service, or use the same tools. What cannot be duplicated is your experience, personality, point of view, humor, communication style and way of seeing the world.
Modern marketing works best when the audience gets to know the real person behind the expertise.
That relationship is part of the value.
3. Illustrate Your Skill
Don’t just tell people you’re good at something.
Show them.
Demonstrate the thing you know how to do. Solve part of a problem. Analyze something. Build something. Explain how you make decisions.
Your marketing should give someone evidence of your ability before they ever hire you.
That is one of the biggest advantages of modern content: people can experience your expertise before becoming customers.
4. Teach Something Useful
A strong marketing piece should leave the person better than you found them.
Teach them something they can understand or use.
You don’t need to give away everything you know. But you should create genuine value.
Teaching builds trust because the audience experiences the way you think. They begin to understand not only what you know, but how you solve problems.
5. Include a Call to Action
Marketing should lead somewhere.
What should the right person do next?
Read another article. Watch another video. Submit something for review. Join a list. Schedule a conversation. Explore a service. Buy a product.
The call to action should be the natural next step for the person your content was designed to help.
Without that connection, you may have created great education or entertainment—but you haven’t completed the marketing loop.
The Lenny B Five-Part Test
Before I call something a complete modern marketing piece, I want to be able to answer yes to all five:
- Does it reinforce the brand?
- Does the real person show up?
- Does it demonstrate skill or expertise?
- Does it teach or provide genuine value?
- Does it give the right person a logical next step?
If one of those pieces is missing, the content may still be useful.
But in my system, it isn’t complete marketing yet.
And there’s one more important distinction: modern marketing is not really about broadcasting to everybody.
It is about creating the right breadcrumbs for the right people.
When your business is built around what is uniquely yours, your products are designed around that value, and your audience consists of people who actually need what you offer, every marketing piece can help those people recognize you, understand your value, develop trust, and find their way toward the right next step.
