All The Marketing Basics I Forgot
I’ve been treating this recent pivot as starting a business afresh. I know it’s not entirely the same, I have my lovely email list and people like you who click links to read what I say. This isn’t a clean slate in terms of the pieces of the business, but I am trying to have one with my expectations. I am trying to nurture and grow something and not weigh it down with what came before.
As part of this I’ve been making decisions and plans as if this were a brand new business, and in so doing have discovered where I’ve been going wrong for the last few years: I completely forgot the basics.
In the very first iteration of this business I spent the majority of my time telling people the basics of marketing. That was my thing, stripping away all the jazz hands and the must-dos and the complex concepts and saying “here are the basics – just do these”. And then I stopped talking to people about marketing so much and I got all in my head about what I wanted to be and somewhere along the line I completely forgot all of those basics.
It seems obvious now, looking back over the last few years, that that was the problem. Without the basics I had no foundation; no wonder I felt like I was flailing around in outer space with no gravity to pin me to certainty. But at the time, I was too close to it to realise. So here are the key basics that I lost track of, and why they are so important…
Do what your customers want
This was the biggie. I spent years banging on about listening to your customer, knowing what they want to achieve and what is standing in their way, and then creating products that help them get over the latter and towards the former. That was the bedrock of everything I did.
And then I wanted to find new formats of products that were less time intensive for me, and without me noticing that shifted into the front seat of all my planning. When I was having ideas for products, whether or not I wanted them became the priority, not whether or not others would want them. And obviously, if you don’t want something, if it doesn’t speak to the heart of a need, then you don’t buy it.
Finish With Confidence was my big return to this. Its name actually came verbatim from an answer to a survey I sent out: I want to know how to finish with confidence. It came from multiple responses of people saying they get stuck, can’t follow through, don’t know how to keep going to finish. It feels good to have found a format that I really enjoy supporting people in, and that directly answers a need.
Show up consistently
I’ve always said that “consistently” and “frequently” are not the same thing. Consistency is not about posting every day, but it is about showing up with a regularity you can stick to rather than dumping a load of content when you’re inspired and then disappearing for months. Can you guess what I started to do?!
Tracking back I think this started around the time my relationship ended and I was getting a house sale through and figuring out where the hell I was going to live and I had absolutely no ideas whatsoever. I give myself a lot of grace around this period, but it was also the time that I broke my consistency habit, and I somehow forgot to pick it back up.
I instead got into a feast and famine cycle with content, posting when I had lots of inspiration but not planning enough to keep things back for when I wasn’t. The trouble with not being consistent is two-fold: 1) people forget you exist if they don’t see you regularly and 2) you’re hard to trust when you’re so hot and cold. Consistency is a hard habit to recreate, especially now I’m working part time, but it’s something I’m trying to re-establish.
Start with a strong Why
I actually have to laugh a little bit about how many hours I spent with clients honing their Whys, whole sections of courses I wrote about finding your Why, and then I completely forgot to even have a Why myself. I used to, and then when I decided to pivot I was concentrating so much on what I wanted to do that the concept of Why completely left my head.
I haven’t had a strong Why for nearly four years. I have been trying to find the Thing so hard, trying to make enough money so hard, that I didn’t really stop to qualify why I was doing all this. When you don’t have a Why, you’ve got nothing to tether yourself to, you’ve got no core to organise yourself from, no point to everything you decide to do. You are just throwing increasingly random things at the wall in vain hope that something will stick enough that you can make a business out of it.
It also makes it hard for other people to understand you - to know what you stand for, the way in which you can help them, if you’re someone they can like and trust. If you don’t have a Why it’s harder for people to get into your world. My Why still feels a little ephemeral to me, like I’ve got some pieces of things I’m interested in but I don’t know how they slot together. This winter I’m planning a bit of a rebrand, and this time the Why will be the focus.
Reach outside of your own audience
What really kickstarted my business the first time round was outreach – going out into the world to find more people to come into my business orbit. This meant appearing on a lot of podcasts, doing some guest posts, having a podcast I could invite people on to. This a crucial part of the marketing mix because without it you are not acquiring new customers, just trying to sell the same things to the same people.
I stopped doing outreach and turned down interview requests around the time my life was falling apart and I didn’t know what I was doing next. This was a good decision. And then, once things were a little more stable, I just never did it again. I did think about it sometimes, as something that would be useful, but I think I forgot just how useful it was. Since then I have lost a lot of Instagram followers and my email list growth has stagnated, neither of which I’m wringing my hands about, but I had forgot that a basic of marketing is that you need to be out there putting yourself in front of the people who need you but have never heard of you. This needs to be a focus for 2024 so if you want me on your podcast, email me! ;)
In some ways it feels quite good – I am seeing first hand that everything I preached about for years works. It is just a shame that I am seeing how well they worked because I’m experiencing how badly things can go when you forget them! But the thing with basics is, you can always go back to them. And that’s the plan for now.
