The one thing everyone forgets about marketing...

I love quick wins, don't you?

When I first started baking with my children when they were toddlers, we made microwave mug cakes. All you have to do is throw all the ingredients in a mug, mix it up with a fork, microwave it for a minute or two and voila! A tasty hot dessert.

And when I'm planning marketing with my clients, we always start with the quick wins. What can you do in less than an hour that will make it easier for people to buy from you? Get those quick wins ticked off straight away.

But not everything in marketing is a quick win. A lot of marketing activities take time, especially if your business is like mine and has a long buyer journey.

So here's the one thing A LOT of people marketing a small business forget is this… 

Strategic marketing is a long game. ​

In order to get a great outcome, you need to go in with a plan. You need to be clear about your aims and objectives and each move you make should be part of an overall strategy.

But not all people go into the marketing game with a strategy. 

They launch their website, send a few messages out on LinkedIn,  join a networking group or publish a blog and expect great leads to come running. 

But this is like signing up to the gym and expecting to walk out of your first session with a six pack. As much as we all wish it really was this easy to get fit, it takes time, consistency and a lot of confidence in your overall strategy to start seeing these amazing results. 

The same is true of marketing. 

I was reminded of this recently in my own business… 

When Katie first joined my team back in March 2021, I had her doing a lot of outbound work on LinkedIn. She would spend at least an hour a day finding, connecting and striking up conversations with small business owners to find out more about their marketing needs. 

Her goal was to generate 2 highly qualified leads per week, but come October we were still yet to generate any qualified leads via this process. 

I have to admit, I was getting really frustrated because I knew this process worked, I just didn’t know why it wasn't working for us at that time. 

There were many times in those 9 months where we nearly pulled the plug on her outbound work. 

But, at the end of October we got our first sale through this channel. 

Someone we had connected with back in Katie’s second week on the job got in touch saying they’d been reading all our content and were now ready to get started on their marketing. 

Since then we’ve had a whole flurry of leads through this channel from people we connected with back at the start of 2021.

So why did it take so long for this activity to pay off? 

There are lots of reasons (including lockdowns and their effect on our audience) but it mainly comes down to how long our buyer journey is. 

Because a lot of the services we offer are high value and require a time investment from our client, there is a lot of risk involved for the person buying in. This means it takes time for potential clients to trust us enough to feel comfortable buying what we offer. 

We couldn't rush people through this process, so we needed to be consistent in the content we were sharing with them and on our social media. This meant that, when they were ready to address their marketing, they were confident in reaching out to us. 

If you’re struggling to see results from yours or your marketing team's efforts, be sure to book a free Clarity Call with me today so we can take a deeper look into why you’re still waiting on results…