Business Owners: Beat Your Marketing Overwhelm For Good
Marketing your own business in a way that feels strategic is tough - in fact, it’s a tougher challenge than most pro marketers will ever face. Here’s why it feels so overwhelming: and what you can do, to cut through the noise and build a strategy that actually works for you.
You see, as a small business owner, a lot of the ‘marketing strategy’ advice you’ll find out there simply isn’t designed for you. It’s written FOR pro marketers, BY pro marketers, and that’s why it isn’t truly relevant to your situation:
You’re not a full-time marketer: marketing is FAR from being your only job. With the best will in the world, you simply cannot do everything that a pro marketer would do in your position.
You don’t have a whole other department taking care of ‘sales’ for you, leaving you free to concentrate on ‘marketing’ goals like growing reach and awareness. You’re responsible for both.
You’re (probably) not a trained marketer - and nor did you ever want to be. That means you feel like you’re always on the back foot, questioning your own decisions as you work to a skill set that you never studied.
You don’t have the peace of mind of an assured salary every month, and that makes it hard for you to still your mind and think ‘strategically’
But on top of all of that, the real reason it feels SO very hard is this:
You’re just too close to it.
You believe in your business, and you that means you want it to work.
You DEPEND on your business, and that means you NEED it to work
You built your business alone, using your skills and your passion to help other people - and that means that the thing you’ve created feels almost like an extension of you. It’s very, very difficult for you to be truly objective and consistent in the way you make decisions, measure success, and manage your time.
These are all things that the pro marketers will never truly understand - and that’s why, as a business owner, the majority of the marketing strategy advice you’ll read simply does not apply to your situation.
You see, most marketing advice assumes that you can commit time to ‘doing marketing’, for marketing’s own sake. As a solopreneur or small business owner, you simply can’t do that without compromising two things that matter more:
Your customers’ experience: the value that you deliver to the people you serve
Your own motivation and enjoyment: the zone-of-genius work that you truly love to deliver.
That’s why as a business owner marketing your own business, less is always more.
You have no duty - and no reason - to be present on every social media platform; to create complexity in your marketing. You don’t need to sacrifice your sleep, your ‘me-time’ or your sanity to feed a marketing machine of your own making.
Your time is your most precious resource.
You owe it to yourself and to your business to ensure that your marketing activity does not become a time-drain that saps energy from you and your business. So if you feel as though you are ‘always on’ in your marketing, pouring in all of the effort and reaping none of the rewards, the chances are that you’re not doing too little.
You’re doing too much.
The overwhelm and frustration that you are are feeling are your signal to hit pause, and to take stock.
You see, there is no ‘Marketing Strategy Blueprint’ that all business owners must follow.
As a business owner, your challenge - yet also, your golden opportunity - is to build a marketing system that is right for you, and the good news is that you don’t need to become an expert in marketing to do that.
To beat your marketing overwhelm, you need to become an expert in just two things:
Yourself: that includes your own strengths and ‘superpowers’, as well as your nature, your energy levels, and your own, unique vision of success. This self-knowledge will form the non-negotiable parameters of your marketing activity. As a business owner marketing your own business, it is important that you build your strategy around those activities that you can undertake with integrity, authenticity, and a sense of pride & enjoyment. Because let’s face it, you didn’t start this business to spend all your time doing things you hate.
Your perfect customer: their wants and needs; their hopes and fears; their self-image; the worries that keep them up at night and the dreams that light up their soul when times are tough. These insights will provide all the marketing content you’ll ever need.
These are the only two elements that truly matter in your marketing plan - no matter what the experts and strategists may say. There are no marketing strategy ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ for small business owners, beyond the imperative to build your business, your way, so that you can deliver your unique brand of transformation to the people you truly love to help.
Tune in to that, and give yourself permission to tune out the noise of conflicting ‘strategy’ advice around you - and you will be on track to end your marketing overwhelm, for good.