Everything is overwhelming. Writing the copy for your new website. Your social media marketing. Your latent guilt over not yet joining TikTok, and your growing worry that everyone else is moving faster than you are.
A lot of business owners are putting off working on their marketing strategy. They’re waiting for things to settle down, for the market to become more stable, or to simply have more certainty about the way things are going to go. But the problem is that they’re likely to be waiting forever.
Most of the small business owners and consultants we work with have, at some point, worked with other marketers before. And they’ll often come with some preconceived ideas about what they feel they should be doing.
If there’s one lesson life insists on reminding me of, it’s this: You can get what you want, but it will never be how you wanted it.
There are only two dependable ways to create a profitable business: By being meaningfully different from your competition in a way that provides greater value to a specific set of customers. Or by being so streamlined, efficient, and operationally effective that you can be the cheapest option.
When business owners seek out a new marketing plan, it’s rarely because the last plan didn’t work. It’s because, for one reason or another, the last plan wasn’t worked.
When I work with the leaders of marketing teams, I’ll often hear that their job has slowly mutated into mere oversight.
According to Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan in The Gap and the Gain, the British Olympic rowing team had a simple secret to their success at the 2000 Sydney games. “They developed a one-question filtering response to every single decision they made."
I’ve written before about my love of bad horror movies. In so many cases, it’s clear that the director didn’t want to make a movie. They wanted to have made a movie. And there’s a huge difference between those two desires.
Have you ever been stuck in the “arrival fallacy”? That’s the idea that happiness and satisfaction are one big accomplishment away.
Your marketing needs a “do not pass go” strategy. You need an order of operations to know what to check, and in what order, to make sure you’re doing the right things.
“Tell the truth and make it interesting.” — David Ogilvy Describing his own writing style as “a silk glove with a brick inside it,” Ogvily believed that the best way to make an impression was with facts and information, well stated.
