Market Every Day

Apr 8

TL;DR

For small business owners / solo-preneurs — you gotta be marketing everyday. Ideally, the first 30 minutes of everyday.

I recently found myself in a place where my sales were declining (as of the writing of this article, they’re still there). Initially I started to panic, but I’ve been in business long enough to realize that being reactive to that panicked feeling will only make matters worse.

Once I spoke with some trusted friends and business mentors, I quickly realized my mistake (and I’d suspect a lot of other people have fallen into this trap as well):

I stopped marketing.

Marketing is this terrible business-oriented term that we use to make people think we’re smart business people and know what we’re talking about. The reality, however, is that marketing just means letting people know that you exist, or in the case of your business, that your business exists.

If you ask any business owner, “Should you be marketing?” The answer is simple: yes. But, as business owners with a hundred things to do each day, the real question is, “where should marketing fall in my daily priority list?” or “How much time should I spend each day marketing?” In this article I’ll share the answers to these questions from my experience.

A Business Makes Sales

Unfortunately, despite our secret wishes, most of us are not in the position of having endless clients waiting in line for our services, allowing us to focus solely on our craft. There’s more to business that just our craft. So, let’s take a quick step backwards and look at what it means to have a business — let me warn you, for some, this might hurt.

To be in business, you must be making sales. Just because you have a website, it doesn’t mean you have a business. Just because you have business cards, it doesn’t mean you have a business. Just because you registered for an LLC, doesn’t mean you have a business.

Will these things help you and support your business? Sure, they might. But none of this will define whether or not you have a real business.

A business is defined by one thing- whether or not you are making sales (ideally, to run a good business, you must be making consistent sales).

If you’re trying to figure out whether something is critical to your business or not, ask yourself this question: "Have businesses ever existed without this?"

For example, take your business website. Yes, businesses have existed before websites.

Yes, businesses have existed without business cards. Yes, businesses have existed without a single email sales funnels. Yes, businesses have even existed before the invention of the LLC. But a business has never existed without making sales. If you’re not making sales, you don’t have a business.

You might say, "Well, sales don’t define my business because I don’t prioritize getting rich, I prioritize helping people."

First, that’s wonderful, keep that mindset — helping people is the only way a business can grow and be successful. Valuing people over profits is moral and right, but businesses still have to make sales. But, keep in mind that even non-profits have to "make a profit" to stay alive. They typically call their cash inflow “donations” instead of “sales”, and they may choose to use their incoming cash differently than a for-profit. Even so, a successful non-profit must bring in at least as much money as it spends.

Regardless of your personal values and beliefs around money, the cold hard truth is that a successful business (and non-profit) must bring in more than it spends. This in-coming money comes from sales.

For the sake of the rest of this article, humor me and let’s agree that getting sales in your business is the building block that’s required for all the rest of your business activity. So, the question now becomes, how do we get sales?

Marketing Comes Before Sales

Many of us in the digital space think there is this holy grail of getting sales. We call it: “The Marketing Funnel”.

The idea goes something like this: I post an article or ad on social media, someone will click on that link and be taken to my ‘interest‘ page, they’ll then sign up with their email address for a video or download or some other tempting “freebie”. Now we have their email address. Next, I do a 4-email drip campaign giving them bits of my super valuable knowledge, then I drive them to my mile-long long-form sales page. They ultimately sign up for my offering and I make a million dollars on the internet without lifting a finger! I’m making money in my sleep!

This isn’t how marketing actually works 99% of the time, especially for small businesses. Here’s the reality of the situation: building out that entire marketing funnel and maintaining it can cost a bunch of money and even more time and energy. Personally, I’m not a big fan of the typical digital sales funnels. They feel gimmicky and I’m not so sure that the financial and time investment required to actually make them work well is not better used somewhere else, particularly if you have limited time and money (which is most of us).

Furthermore, the customer’s journey is rarely this linear. It’s typically much windier—and more random.

So, if freebies —> webinars —> email campaigns —> sales pages aren’t the answer (they’re not for me anyways, although you do you!), how should you be trying to make sales?

A sale only happens after someone trusts you and knows what you have to offer. Then, they will decide if what you offer is a fit for what they need or want.

Now, let’s break that down into the two component parts that you, the business owner, can influence:

A person trusts you
The same person learns what you have to offer

Marketing is an effort to help support these two steps, by encouraging trust in your business and making sure that people know what you offer and how it could benefit them. This process is a lot less linear. I prefer to think of the customer’s journey less of moving from one step to the next, and more as kind of swirling around in a twisty marketing-phase cloud until the customer decides to make a purchase.

For me, the work of marketing looks like writing a blog and publishing it on my site, posting a tutorial on YouTube, or answering someone’s question in the Squarespace Forums. That’s how I let people get to know me, trust me, understand what I offer, and keep myself in front of them. Hopefully, if it’s a good fit for what they need, then we’ve made a match that will result in a sale.

For you, marketing will look different. But here is the trick, and also the challenge for many of us- you need to market every day.

Market Every Day

There are thousands of statistics out there about how many interactions you need to make with a person before they become a customer, and tons of information about moving people from “cold” to “hot” leads. I’m not going to presume I know the specifics of your business, but I do want to offer some advice from my experience for anyone willing to hear it:

You need to market every day.

Marketing is the beast that spawns sales and it must be fed often. It is the most important thing you can be doing in your business, but it’s often not at the top of our daily to-do lists.

There is lag-time between marketing (building trust) and a sale, which means that you won’t see the effects of your marketing effort, or lack there-of, for weeks or months. But since most of us judge the success of our business on how our sales are going in the moment, it’s easy to miss this connection between our marketing efforts and our sales. Sometimes we have short memories, and sales start feel random when we forget that it’s our past marketing efforts that are driving today’s sales

In the meantime you might think things are going great, not realizing that your lapse in marketing is about to result in a lapse in sales (speaking from experience here)! Or conversely, you might think things are going horribly, not realizing you’re on the cusp of a big increase in sales. So many business owners with limited time spend all their time marketing, and then when they get a lot of business from it, they spend all their time on production - delivering the thing they’d been marketing. Then, because they’re too busy producing to market, they stop making sales (yikes!). They go on a marketing frenzy, resulting in more sales, that they then stop marketing to fulfill. You see the problem here. This vicious cycle can only be solved with discipline and intention, and the most basic answer to breaking it and seeing your sales gain stability is to spend some time every day marketing.

A few final notes:

First, stop measuring. Don’t focus on the metrics of marketing too much. Instead of stressing about how many clicks or likes or subscribes you’re getting, focus on what you have ultimate control over — how you spend your time every day. Spend the first 30 minutes to an hour of your day doing some marketing-related activity. There is a time and place for rigorous metrics and data analysis, but it just shouldn’t be as high on the priority list as we want it to be.

Second, do marketing you love. There is a myth that every business owner has to market on every single available channel- social media, blogs, webinars, etc. Let me free you from that idea by telling you that finding a few good ways to market will get you where you want to go faster than trying to market in all the ways at once. If social media gives you anxiety attacks or the idea of writing a blog makes you sweat, then you shouldn’t do those things every day. The best way to ensure that you market every day is to make your marketing activity something you enjoy, not something you dread.

Most importantly, build the discipline of marketing every day, and watch what happens in your business.

Keep Building,
Will