How Your Business Can Succeed Overnight

Confession: This title is clickbait. Had I titled it, “There are No Shortcuts in Marketing”, no one would’ve read it. And I hope you read this, because it’s an important issue I see come up frequently with prospective clients + newly signed clients.

Let me make it clear:

There are no shortcuts in marketing your business.

Everything you do is going to take time. Everything must be calculated. Marketing decisions should be based on data, but a lot of the time, you need to run experiments to have any data to build a strategy off of.

I recently had a client ask me, “How do we get more leads?” and I had to chuckle a little, because that’s the billion dollar question! If there was one little trick that was the key to unlocking millions of dollars in revenue, I’d be rich as I myself used that trick to gain a thousand customers of my own.

Unless you do it yourself, you’ve gotta spend money to earn money in the marketing world.

And even then, “doing it yourself” isn’t really any less of an investment; you’re just trading the investment of your money for the investment of your time instead.

All of this may come across a little like thinly-veiled tactics to get you to spend your money on me. Not true. You’re right that I’m challenging you to consider how you might have to spend money to grow your business, but I am by no means insisting you must do it, nor that you must do it with me.

If you’re feeling stuck about ways to grow your business, here are a few things I’d advise you on when it comes to how to actually pull it off:

1. Work with people outside of your industry

I specialize in marketing, and I work with small businesses not in marketing. Realtors, contractors, restaurants, manufacturing companies; you name it. My inexperience in those industries (particularly the B2C ones) allows me to ask questions that these business owners have forgotten pop up in their customers’ minds.

By bringing people in who don’t know what you do intimately (yet), they provide a fresh outside perspective that lets you see things in a new light. Take advantage of these moments + capitalize on them.

2. Ask customers about your business

It’s so simple but so easily overlooked. Your current client base can be a wealth of knowledge to getting into the heads of more people like them.

Draft up some questions, get on the phone with your past clients (particularly the ones whom you gave the best experience to), and ask them those questions. Don’t take longer than 20 minutes or it’ll be too much of a commitment.

At this point, ask for brutal honesty. Encourage them that they are smart and their answers will help your business immensely. Make sure they know how much they matter to you. This will elicit real responses.

3. Make friends with peers in the industry

Chances are, people who are doing what you’re trying to do (successfully) have a lot to teach you. If you can find a way to genuinely benefit those people by making their acquaintance, you may lay the foundation to work with them and glean some of their knowledge.

Other times, if they have nothing to offer you professionally, it’s still just nice to make a friend and vent about crappy clients (everyone has them!). You also never know when something’s going to turn into an opportunity in the future because you expanded your network. You only have much to gain by befriending more people in your industry.

4. Try stuff. Analyze data. Refine.

You can’t make data-informed decisions without data. This means that there is a time and a place (especially in the beginning!) where you, as a business owner, just need to try some stuff to see what works. Chances are your gut is already pulling you in a certain direction about something to try. Go for it. Track the data. See what happens.

Traditional advertising like magazine ads, bus ads, billboards: these things are sometimes difficult to know “Did that actually bring in new business I wouldn’t have otherwise gotten?” if you work in an industry like a coffee shop. But, if you’re a contractor (for example), you can ask your individual leads how they learned about you.

Even if your marketing campaign is a complete failure, you will learn a ton from trying it. Chances are you will learn more from the times you fail than the times you succeed anyways! Don’t let it get you down.

When you’ve got some feedback about your ideas after trying them out in the real world, you can refine your approach and try something else.

It’s true that there’s nothing random in the marketing world, and it’s true that everything takes time. Don’t expect to see results from anything quicker than 2 weeks. But once you start getting a response (or a lack of response), you can already start refining your approach.

In Conclusion:

There are no shortcuts to marketing your business. Sorry. I don’t doubt that there are some companies out there (marketing agencies, namely) who can operate things at a large scale to grow your business. Know what the trade off is? Money. Those people will charge you out the nose for it. They might promise a lot and talk a good game, but even the Joker knows that if you’re good at something, you don’t do it for free. And if you’re really good at something, you have the authority to charge a lot for it.

If you’re a young and scrappy business owner who wants to punch above their weight, you gotta understand it’s gonna take some brains and tactics to get you there.

It’s also going to take time and money.

If done right, marketing will stack the deck so that the odds are as in-your-favour as they can possibly be.

That being said, running a business is always a gamble.

No one can guarantee your success. But through marketing, we can increase your chances.

Approach marketing from the right perspective and you’re going to be a lot less disappointed as you work hard to grow your business.

Because, yes, it is hard work.