There is more to marketing than Facebook ads. There. I said it.
As a business owner, coach, or entrepreneur – you need to create a complete and profitable marketing strategy. There’s a ton that needs to go into it, but there’s also a ton that doesn’t need to go into it. I think that, often, people make marketing this big, scary thing… and it doesn’t need to be!
At the end of the day, we all want to grow a profitable business, right?
However, there are a few things that you need to get clear on before you even begin to create a profitable marketing strategy. One of those is your marketing mindset.
Your Marketing Mindset
Your mindset affects your business. The real key to success is your thoughts, how those thoughts affect your feelings and your actions and what those actions result in. I want you to take a closer look at these three areas of your marketing mindset:
Set realistic expectations
One of the biggest marketing mindset shifts that we need to make revolves around our expectations.
Marketing has been going on for millions of years. Way before social media, the internet, television, and even the postal service. Marketing has always been a part of business.
At some point, we all became impatient with our marketing strategies. When you see the “gurus” saying you can go from zero to a million in no time, that idea has embedded itself into our collective psyche. The problem is, that’s just not accurate. Sure, it can happen, but it’s not the norm.
We’re all expecting the exception instead of the norm.
Think about an ad on TV or a postcard that came in the mail. Those are really about brand awareness. And what does brand awareness do? It helps to build that, know, like, and trust. It allows you to provide value to your audience through something like a coupon or discount code.
The same goes for your online marketing. Many of us have become complacent. It used to be easy to throw something up there and make a sale because it was new and unique.
When it comes to marketing, we need to set an expectation that it is a long-term piece of our business. The reality is if we’re not marketing our business, we’re not bringing in leads. If we’re not bringing in leads, we’re not making sales. If we’re not making sales we don’t have a business.
When you look at marketing from that perspective, it’s essential to shift your mindset as far as how long it takes to market your business.
Be open to change
I also have observed that many of us have become complacent in what we are doing. I know that in the past, webinars, micro-offers, and quizzes have worked great. Unless you give something a try, you can’t really know if your audience is going to react positively. This is why marketing is both an art and a science.
The scientific part of it is really looking at your marketing as an experiment. You test things out, observe the results, and then make tweaks to it or pivot. You can look at what you’re doing and change it in major or minor ways. Looking at marketing from a scientific perspective allows us so much more space to be both curious and flexible.
Make an investment
When it comes to marketing, I see many have a fear of investing. I know that investing in your business can be scary. It’s an investment, literally. It is crucial to invest in your business.
When it comes to investing in your business, you can invest either time, money, or both. If you don’t have one or the other, it is essential to use the one that you have.
If you don’t have the time to scale your business, and it’s successful and profitable, you can pay a marketing agency to handle that for you.
If you don’t have the money to invest, but you do have time, learning about marketing and how to best market your business is going to be your saving grace. Even so, you’ll want to be guided by a trusted marketing expert.
Whichever fits better for you, it will be worth the time or money investment, I promise you that.
Investing in your business is critical. When we avoid investing in our business, it can’t pay us back.