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— Ann Gynn

🟩 ATTRACT → 🟧 CONVERT → ⬜ retain → ⬛ amplify

I do a lot of my best work for clients who don’t want their name — or the work — anywhere public. I get it. Maybe they don’t want to reveal that they hired a consultant. Or they don’t want to reveal any potential competitive advantages. Or maybe it’s just a blanket policy. But how do I build credibility and win new clients when I can’t show what I’ve actually done?

 It’s not a lost cause. You just have to get creative in how to prove your credibility. 

A few years ago, I ghostwrote a B2B book. Obviously, ghosts never reveal themselves. So, I checked with my client to see if they would be willing to give me a reference and talk about my work if I asked them down the line. They agreed, and we put it in the contract. We also noted that I would get their OK before I ever shared their contact info with a prospect.

By the way, if you didn’t negotiate this upfront, go back to your client and ask if they would be willing to amend the agreement. They may say yes — just make sure to turn that OK into an official addendum to your contract; otherwise, you could get into trouble.

When I worked in marketing at a law firm, we ran into this problem every day. How do we talk about the work the lawyers did without breaking attorney-client confidentiality? 

So we wrote general descriptions that didn’t reveal enough information to identify the client but included enough detail to show the experience.

For example, an HR consultant might say, “My firm helped a manufacturing company develop a multistate, regulatory-compliant employee handbook.” 

That reveals a lot without coming close to identifying the company. Prospects who read that sentence now know the consultant has worked in the manufacturing industry and has expertise in multistate employee regulations and laws.

If you want to go deeper than a sentence or two, craft a general case study. What do you want to highlight? What about those highlights would be likely to identify the client? How could you modify those points? Disclose at the very beginning that some details or names have been changed to protect the client’s confidentiality. Note the spots with an asterisk where you actually made those changes.

Such disclosure is not only ethically necessary, but it also helps prospects understand why some details are missing or changed. Otherwise, they make assumptions or write their own reasons why the case study may be lacking.

You can also add up all the confidential work and quantify it in your content. 

That HR consultant, for example, could say, “This firm worked with over a dozen manufacturing clients in the past two years to update their employee handbooks to ensure compliance with local, state, and federal laws.”

None of that reveals the client or the details of the assignment. However, it does reveal the firm’s industry expertise and that the work isn’t a one-time project — all of which strengthens the consultant’s credibility.

While you can always hope your clients are OK with you sharing their name and/or work, you need to be ready when they aren’t. You don’t need to keep your work invisible; you just have to get creative with a workaround to share it publicly.

Got a question you’d like me to answer in a future edition of The Hotline? Call or text Marketing By One Hotline: +1.440.661.3984.

This week: Write a single generic-but-specific sentence about a confidential project. Use it on your website and save it for your next proposal or LinkedIn post. If you think it might be too revealing, have an uninterested party read it and try to guess the client. If they guess correctly, rewrite the sentence (but don’t tell them they’re right and break confidentiality).

Claude helped me identify the native links to stats mentioned by a source for an article. The great thing about asking AI to find sources is that you can easily verify if they’re correct.

Have any AI tricks of your own? Hit reply, call, or text the Marketing By One Hotline: +1.440.661.3984.

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Set up a Google Alert for your name and your business. That way you can get notified when you’re referenced online. It won’t catch every mention, but it’s helpful for the headlines.

Even better, set it up as a repeatable task in your favorite AI tool. Use a variation of this prompt: “Search the web for [my name] and [my business name]. Tell me if anything new shows up — reviews, mentions, articles, social posts — and flag anything that looks off."

✂️ Cut it: Instagram rolled out First Draft for iOS systems first. Now, you select clips with a tap and Insta will cut the pauses and trim your clips to give you a starting point.

📝 In writing: Threads is testing a transcript feature for podcasts. It’s a good reminder that transcripts offer a wealth of opportunities for written content that searchers will especially appreciate.

😬 Cringey fails: Did you see this article about eight social media fails? I always enjoy seeing what others did wrong for two reasons: 1. I’m thankful it’s not me. 2. I can learn so it’s never me.

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Got a question you’d like me to answer in The Hotline? Email me or DM me on LinkedIn. Even better: Text or leave a message on the Marketing By One Hotline: +1.440.661.3984.