Winning with Conviction
Do you want your business to rise above the rest? Then you need to learn about conviction marketing, a concept championed by business consultant Kelly Roach, an entrepreneurial pioneer who built her own eight-figure coaching company.

As a business owner, you’re probably aware of the failure rate of starting a business. As of 2019, statistics indicate that 20 percent of businesses fail within the first year. It gradually gets worse from there, with 70 percent of businesses going under within ten years. It’s not pretty—but it is avoidable.
Kelly Roach, the founder and owner of Kelly Roach Consulting, believes she has discovered the reason why: conviction, or lack thereof.
How to Get Noticed
One of the most difficult parts of being a business owner is truly standing out. After all, to a potential client, what makes you different from anyone else who claims to do the exact same thing? To be successful, you must understand your competitive landscape—but that doesn’t mean you should mimic what’s in it. This is where Roach, and conviction marketing, steps in. “I’ve coached thousands of entrepreneurs, and the vast majority of what you see online is a regurgitation of what everyone else has. I call it ‘me-too marketing,’” she says. “Our whole purpose is to take entrepreneurs from being one in a million to a category of one.”
However, this doesn’t mean trying to be different just for the sake of being different. Rather, the purpose of conviction marketing is to give entrepreneurs an intentional methodology for how they establish their convictions. Then they can create content that clearly conveys those convictions, giving them a competitive advantage when they go to market. Ultimately, Roach says, this results in a sustainable, global brand and establishes an entrepreneur as an industry authority.
“When you decide to go into business, you believe that something’s missing in the world or that you could do something better or differently; it’s your ‘why,’” Roach explains. “You have a unique idea that will provide value above and beyond what is already available to the typical consumer. So the most important element of conviction marketing is understanding that there’s a gap in every industry and every market. When you layer tactic on top of quicksand, you get a temporary result that ultimately doesn’t last. But when you build a business based on principle and understand the fundamentals of creating a scalable business and layer amazing tactics on top of it, you then have a sustainable company.”
To get to that status, though, entrepreneurs need to understand how to ascend to the top of what Roach calls the content pyramid.

The Content Pyramid
The ground floor: how-to marketing
At the bottom of the content pyramid, where most would-be entrepreneurs dwell, is how-to marketing: educational material that gives people a quick win. These are industry-specific snippets of information that add value and allow people to act on something immediately by answering questions like “How do I maximize my ROI?” “How do I create an Instagram reel?” or “How do I close a sale over the phone?” So what’s the problem with how-to content? “It’s a great introduction to you and your brand, but it doesn’t keep people coming back,” Roach states. “Because the same thing that got them hooked with you is getting them hooked with everyone else they’re bouncing between online.”
The next level: hope marketing
Hope marketing is the next step up in Roach’s content pyramid. Here, instead of just being their how-to teacher, you’re also their supporter. As a friend or cheerleader, you can share with your audience that you went through similar growing pains, walk them through it, and encourage them to not give up. For example, if a new business owner is having difficulty with a launch, you can lend support by saying you failed at several launches before succeeding, as Roach herself does. “Hope marketing is unbelievably powerful,” she exclaims. “It creates the ‘stickiness’ factor for your brand that keeps people coming back. It makes a heart-to-heart connection with those who are consuming your content, convincing them to possibly have a long-term relationship with you, your brand, and everything you do because they feel connected on a human level.”

The ultimate success: conviction marketing
The third and most important tier is conviction marketing. This is the space that weaves how-to and hope marketing together with an overarching greater purpose—yet it’s also a space of rarefied air because, Roach claims, almost no entrepreneurs engage in it. “Conviction marketing is all about bringing in a new, distinct set of ideas to your market that are specific to you, your methodology, and your belief system,” she says. “The passion behind your ‘why’ inspires you to create a new, different, and improved outcome for your customer that elevates your industry. It’s not a comparison game between you and your competitors—because you have no competition.”
Roach often cites her own story as an example. At the time she was starting her company, she found that everything was becoming automated and impersonal. Seeing a clear gap, she decided to focus instead on personal relationships and accountability. The result? “Not only did our business explode by almost $7 million in a year, but our clients’ results exploded as well,” she notes. “People started accomplishing things in a year that would have otherwise taken ten years.” She also bucked the trend of quick get-in-and-get-out entrepreneurial coaching programs (and her team’s misgivings) by making her program, the Unstoppable Entrepreneurs, twelve months to encourage critical thinking, establish foundational principles, and foster a long-game approach for business owners.
The best part? Roach insists that anyone can take advantage of such multimillion-dollar opportunities in their industry and become a category of one, creating raving fans in the process. The key is to embrace and develop the following four qualities necessary for conviction marketing success:
- Being a true thought leader who prioritizes critical thinking over volume and solves crucial problems.
- Someone who focuses on the foundation beneath the relative fluff of how-to and hope marketing.
- Being willing to zig when everybody else in your industry is zagging.
- Having the patience and fortitude to let your vision play out in the long term.
To learn more, visit kellyroachcoaching.com
TAKE ACTION: Determine what your true conviction is for your business and what gaps you can fill in your industry to stand alone as a thought leader.