Make Marketing Suck Less

Michelle Mazur [00:00:00]: Marketing is the worst. It's something we don't talk enough about in business. Because as a solo business owner, or maybe you're someone with just one or two people on your team, you're juggling a lot in your business client delivery, sales, and marketing. And let's face it, marketing is one of those things that takes a ton of time and effort, and sometimes you see very little reward and payoff. So why does marketing suck so bad? Today on the Pod, we're going to deep dive into five reasons marketing bites and what to do about it.

[00:00:41] Get ready for the Rebel Uprising podcast, the only podcast dedicated to business owners who feel overlooked for their expertise, skills, and experience. Let's claim your expertise and turn your complex ideas into unmistakable messaging that grows your business. I am your host, Dr. Michelle Mazur, the author of The Three Word Rebellion and your Rebel Truth Telling guide to building a business that gets noticed.

In business there's a ton of toxic positivity around marketing, perky people telling you how to make marketing simple or easy. Just follow my proven process, and you, too, can be flooded with clients.

Does that sound familiar to you?

The problem is, most of what's being taught doesn't seem to work for you. No matter how hard you try, you're not getting the results that the perky marketer promised. And there's a reason for that. Well, there are five reasons for that, but here's the first one.

Reason number one marketing sucks. There's so many ways to market. Which one is the right way? And hey, there's always a shiny new way to market. You've been hearing about the explosive audience growth people are experiencing on TikTok. Maybe you should do that. Maybe you should try LinkedIn. Maybe you should start a podcast.

And at the end of the day, this is essentially the paradox of choice, right? The more options you have, the harder it is to make a decision about how to market. And that leads to indecision, because I firmly believe every marketing strategy can work for you if you have reason number two in place, which I'll get to in just a second.

But you have to decide and decide to go all in. And one of the things I do in the Expert Up Club is I teach a do less but better marketing strategy because most expert business owners are trying to do way too much and half-assing it.

And here's a great example.

There are so many people who are like, well, I post on Instagram, and I can automatically post to my Facebook page. What is that doing for you? Nothing. What you post on your Facebook page doesn't even look like a Facebook post. It looks like an Instagram post with all your hashtags. Stop doing that. If Facebook isn't bringing you business, you can let it go.

So I'll talk more next week about the do less but better marketing strategy. That's going to help you make some choices about how you want to market so you can reach your goals.

But let's talk about the second reason that marketing sucks.

This goes back to the idea that any marketing strategy can work, but you have to have your message in place.

So reason number two, marketing sucks is your message isn't strategic.

Pause for just a moment and think about the last piece of marketing you put out. Do you know exactly how what you said in that piece leads to a client working with you? Do you have that journey mapped out?

Pause me if you need to and think about it.

Do you know how your last post on social media or the last email you sent, or the last blog post you wrote? Do you know how that piece of content leads to someone becoming a client? And for most people, you don't.

If you said no. No, I don't. Like, I have these content pillars, but I don't know how they actually lead to clients wanting to work with me. It's time to get more strategic with your message. Every piece of marketing that you put out there should have a purpose and should be one brick in the road to actively lead someone to working with you.

It's the journey you're taking your audience on from unaware, don't know you at all to most aware like, I am very interested in what you have to offer, to hiring you and having that sense of purpose in your message. It allows marketing to become so much easier because you know the strategic intent of everything you're doing and how it's going to add to your bottom line, to clients finding you and having more opportunities to share your expertise.

Now, we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, I'm going to talk about the third reason that marketing sucks. That's because it elicits a certain emotion.

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And we're back.

So that emotional reason why marketing sucks so much is reason number three. It's boring. It's boring as fuck. For all the talk out there about your magical message and magnetizing your audience to you, there's literally nothing mysterious about marketing.

You create your marketing message, you choose your strategy, you execute, put in the reps and measure what works and what doesn't work. The reps part, the showing up every day part. Or maybe it's just three days a week. That's the hardest part of it.

Because when the dopamine hits stop coming in, the forms of likes, follows, comments we tend to give up. We tend to think, oh, this isn't working. But we really don't know it is.

And the good news in this is that marketing is supposed to be kind of boring. You should know what actions to take that lead to your goals.

And the good news is, once you have your message and you start putting in the reps, you can figure out what actually works to turn those strangers into clients. And then you can start repurposing, which is going to save you so much time and energy in the long run. And that is, to me, the super fun part of getting to the other side of that, like, time to make the donuts, time to go out and market my business.

It is a necessity and it's boring. And because it's so boring, as this brings me to reason number four, we don't stick with it.

Once again, the reps.

And I want to talk about this concept called the Flywheel Effect. Jim Collins, in his book “From Good to Great”, talks about the flywheel, and he says this effect occurs when small wins accumulate over time, creating momentum that keeps your business growing.

So lately, I've been spending a lot of time in the creator space looking at how creators market their business and what can we as experts learn from them.

And two people that I have been following one is Jeremy Enns, who is a friend of the pod. He runs the Podcast Marketing Academy.

And the other is Jay Clouse.

And what I love about both Jeremy and Jay is they're very transparent with their metrics. They can show you the bar graph of, like, when they first started building their email list. It was like a flat line. A couple of subscribers here and there, a slow, steady drip over time, and each of those new email newsletter subscribers, they're a win for both Jeremy and Jay.

Then you reach this inflection point where all of a sudden your work takes off. It becomes easier to grow that audience. Like this year, Jeremy has shared in the Podcast Marketing Academy that he's grown to 10,000 subscribers. It took him like seven years to get there, but well done. That's the flywheel. And now I see every week his email newsletter list is growing by leaps and bounds.

And Jay Clouse is at 30,000 subscribers after working six years, really, really hard on it.

So we have to stick with it. Otherwise, we don't experience the Flywheel effect. We don't gain the momentum of small wins over time. And once you get that momentum going, that's when marketing becomes a little more fun because you're seeing the results.

All right, the final reason why marketing sucks is we don't measure, so we don't know what's working.

I will ask my clients all the time, “how do you know if something is working in your marketing?” They look at me and say, “I have no idea”.

And I ask that same question to you how do you know what's working when it comes to marketing? And if you are not measuring the metrics, the KPIs that matter, it's hard to know when you should keep going and continue and build that flywheel. Or maybe the strategy you've chosen just isn't working. Maybe your clients aren't on TikTok, so that strategy would never work for you. If you don't measure it, you can't make a decision about whether you should stop or continue or add something new to double down on that tactic.

So those I challenge you to figure out what works in your marketing and I'd love to leave you with one action today.

So here's your challenge.

Drop something that doesn't work that you've been hanging on to for a long time. Maybe it's been Facebook or posting on Instagram when you hate it. But choose something that hasn't gotten you a client for months on end because maybe it's time to let that go.

Because marketing that doesn't work is sucking you dry. It is a waste of your time, energy and money. And I promise if you drop something like it's hot, it's going to make marketing suck a lot less.

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The Rebel uprising podcast is a production of Communication Rebel. Our production coordinator is Jessica Gulley-Ward of Juggling Logistics. Our sound engineer is Stephen Mills. Rebel Uprising podcast is recorded on the unseated traditional land of the coast Salish Peoples, specifically the first people of Seattle, the Duamish people, original stewards of the land past and present.