7 Hard truths about marketing your business

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1. Embrace brevity. Your marketing content is almost certainly 50% to 75% too long. Fix it. Your prospective clients are being bombarded with emails, texts, social media updates, phone calls. Their time (and attention) has never been under so much pressure. This will become an increasingly bigger issue in 2020. So get to the point. And fast.
2. Be cautious of anyone offering tricks or short cuts to marketing success. Short cuts to success are seldom short cuts and they never lead to success.
3. Avoid general marketing advice. Why? Because it’s extremely risky. Your marketing problem is specific to you and your unique situation; your industry, budget, location, size of business, competition, mindset, assets, etc. And your specific situation requires a specific strategy.
4. In business, everything you do is marketing. Yes, everything. From the way you answer the phone, reply to emails and the design of your website… to your ability to meet deadlines, the customer service you offer and your opening hours. It’s all saying something about you. Either positive or negative. Nothing is neutral. It’s making you money or it’s losing you money.
5. Don’t expect professional marketing results from amateur marketing. Marketing is the life-blood of your business. So stop treating it like some DIY project or you’ll run out of money, time (or both).
6. If you need to attend networking events, to try and get people talking about your business, you have a major problem. Ask yourself “why”? Why aren’t people automatically talking about your service? Spend more time fixing the problem. Spend zero time pestering strangers at networking events for leads.
7. You will never be one Facebook Live ‘event’ or online course away from marketing success. Ever.
8. Always over deliver. Take time to focus on being of as much value as you can be. You can’t do this if you spend too much of your time, producing content for your newsletter, Linkedin, Facebook, Youtube and a podcast. Choose one or two channels. And put your time and energy into being useful or helpful in those areas.