Throw Away Your 7 Tips For Marketing Your Business

Marketing — or bringing your business and its products and services to market – is an often misunderstood, poorly taught and negatively regarded part of the business world.

There are a lot of charlatans and even more people who don’t test their ideas, accept initial failure as defeat and fail to realize that marketing is simply the process of creatively talking about the things you do and the business or organization that holds all those things together.

Put this together with marketing and advertising being their own industries and all of the complexities of individual competency within organizations, we find ourselves – as business owners – in quite the predicament when it comes to understanding how to approach marketing for our business.

Where to Start

First of all, the methods and execution techniques of marketing can be the complicated part, but marketing on its own isn’t all that complicated.

The ‘what’ and the ‘why’ are usually the easiest parts to identify, but the ‘how’ is where a lot of folks get hung up.

• ‘What’ we’re marketing is our business, our products and our services.

• ‘Why’ is the next question to answer: to get more customers and clients, increase brand recognition, grow an email list, create community engagement, raise awareness of a product or service, increase appointments, etc.

• ‘How’ is the way you talk about these things. ‘How’ includes methods, techniques and strategies.

So, how do you start?

Simplify ‘How’

Marketing requires multiple passes on different aspects of your business.

You need to be letting people know that you exist in general and then also let them know about all of the wonderful specific things you have and can offer.

I call ‘letting people know that you exist’ brand recognition. This needs to be the baseline, always running, never stops marketing campaign.

Depending on who you are, your business and who you serve this campaign can be through weekly networking meetings, regularly posting on social media, running ads introducing your business in general, sending letters, and on and on.

Brand recognition campaigns can be simple and small, or complicated and huge. No matter how you choose to do it, they all start with the same core.

Before you go to Google and Facebook and start running ads, simplify the ‘how.’

Your ads won’t convert, make sense or resonate with the people you want to reach if you don’t know how to authentically and easily talk about your business and all the wonderful things you do for people.

Imagine your ultimate client or customer sitting across from you. They need what you offer and have no issues working with except for one thing: they don’t know that you offer the very thing you need.

Now assume that you find out they have an issue that you can solve with your business. How do you explain that to them?

Write that down. That’s marketing.

Talk to People, Not Crowds

If you start with ‘mass appeal’ then you’ll miss out on connecting with anyone.

Most of anything sold in our culture has its super flashy and attention grabbing outliers who claim quick fixes and immediate results.

Unequivocally, all of the quick-fix marketing strategies and appeals to grow huge brands (“overnight!”) that drive six-figure sales and transform your life do not exist.

Growing businesses take time.

Marketing takes time.

When you are persistent and keep at it, you get to watch the whole thing grow, take shape and become something more than you could have managed on your own.

This means that even when you’re speaking to the masses, you have to remember that it’s people – individuals – who are hearing, reading and interacting with everything you put out.

Speak to individuals, not crowds.

Good Marketing Starts With Good Branding

Good or bad branding isn’t a subjective value judgement about having the right motives, the most purposeful mission statement or the coolest logo.

Good branding is about congruence.

The easiest and most straight forward for me to understand congruence is through geometry.

If a triangle is going to be a triangle, its angles must all equal 180 degrees. If they don’t all equal 180 degrees, then it’s not a triangle.

Congruence is the length of each side and the way the triangle fits together that makes it the thing it is.

Branding is the same way. It’s understanding the balance of your values, your mission, how you take care of your people and your business and how you take care of the clients and customers you serve.

Congruence is the magical balance of all of these things working together.

Like a triangle, your brand either is or it isn’t.

At first, it isn’t.

As time goes on, it becomes what it is.

Nothing isn’t something, so don’t have such high expectations for your branding and your marketing if you haven’t put the work into creating a congruent brand.

You can do this.

Make Bold Moves.