Marketing is a Marriage Not a Fling

If you run a business, you need marketing. I can’t really think of one business model that would not require other people to know that the business exists. Even if you rely on word of mouth – recognise that this is STILL marketing and find a way to increase your word of mouth business. Use marketing to reward customers for referring you.

Too many people seem to think that they can try marketing on for size and see if it fits. It doesn’t work that way.

Good marketing needs to be with you for Life, not just for Christmas. If you are going to build up a brand reputation, this takes years.

Think of some household names that everybody knows about, it’s likely that they’ve been around marketing themselves for at least a decade. Bosch is 130 years old. B&Q is 50 years old. Persil is 110 years old.

What about modern companies? Think these new tech big names are marketing n00bs who just flew to the top?

Snapchat was founded in 2011 – that’s 6 years ago. Go Fund Me – 2010. Uber was founded in 2009. Air Bnb? 2008. Pay pal and Google? 1998!

Tell me, had you heard of Uber 5 years ago? Did you buy things with Pay pal 15 years ago?

And not many of the companies you’re familiar with will have generated their marketing presence from one channel like Google AdWords or social media or PR. It will have taken a mixture of many different channels to get the presence that they have. If something isn’t working, they try something new or work in a different way.

Instafame isn’t instant.

Even on personal social media channels where people are dedicated to growing only one channel, these Instagram famous girls or Twitter famous comedians. Do you think they got to that stage within 3 months of creating a profile? Almost always the answer will be no. A friend of mine has managed to grow her Instagram presence to 100k engaged users. She started from a few hundred over a year ago, and for every girl like her who has blown up, there are a million Instagram users who haven’t gotten past the 1 thousand mark no matter how hard they try.

Marketing success won’t happen just because you want it to.

Even with our best marketing efforts, we can’t expect to be the best just because we’re trying hard and investing money – MOST businesses are trying hard and investing money.

Be patient.

To be a success at marketing, it doesn’t just take experience, knowledge and money, it takes patience and time. Sometimes that time is a year, sometimes it’s a decade. What will set you apart from the rest is to have more patience and more consistency than your competitors. Statistically, a good proportion of your competitor’s businesses will fail between now and 2022. New businesses will be cropping up who don’t have your budget or time invested. Keep at it and you’ll become the top of your game, remember when trying to build a brand reputation, there is no quick fix or get rich quick scheme. Although if I lied to you and told you that I can make you an overnight success, I’d be a lot more popular!

Little things add up.

I highly recommend the book The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy, the little things we do add up. Not many people have long-term attention spans and are able to work with delayed gratification. Every day ask yourself, have I don’t better than yesterday? Has my marketing reached more people today? These little drips add up to a big pool.