When it comes to marketing, your goal should always be published.
One of the biggest problems that most business owners run into is themselves.
Many business owners have their hands all over every aspect of the business. They manage everything, top to bottom, not letting anyone take over the reins completely.
You can only take something like this so far. You only have so many hours in the week. Even if you devote your entire life to work, you’re still going to hit a wall.
Which is usually what happens.
Unfortunately, many business owners either don’t realize they’ve hit the wall or flat-out refuse to admit it.
On top of that, they’re usually perfectionists, which leads to months spent agonizing over the tiniest details of their marketing materials without ever pulling the trigger.
To add fuel to the fire, many business owners also have no marketing strategy or marketing processes in place to ensure that their marketing is being done right. It ends up being haphazard at best — basically, whenever they have time, some marketing content might make it out into the world.
Or, more likely, it sits in their inboxes, ignored, and no one else knows what they’re supposed to do because there’s no clear strategy in place or process to follow.
Of all these problems, the biggest one is getting too involved in your marketing — and really just about anything else that you can hire someone to do.
So while you’re busy actually making money and doing the things that no one else at your company can do, the things that someone else actually can do sit around waiting on you.
You’re the roadblock. You’re the bottleneck. You’re the reason your marketing isn’t happening. And there are probably other things that aren’t happening too because you’re controlling everything.
In the long run, this hurts you in so many ways.
First, especially when it comes to marketing, it breaks your pipeline and makes it harder for you to grow. It can cause so much damage that you might actually end up losing money because you run out of clients and customers.
Why Running Everything Yourself Hurts in the Long Run
If everything has to run through you for approval, and you’ve got a million things to look at and approve or make changes to, you’ll inevitably let things that “aren’t important” sit around in your inbox while you focus on revenue-generating activities.
This makes sense, except those things that “aren’t important” are often either a) other revenue-generating activities or b) things that are a step on the way to generating revenue (like marketing).
If you’re the kind of business that needs new customers all the time to survive, you can’t delay marketing.
If you’re taking 3 weeks just to approve a social media post, you’re delaying your marketing a lot.
Second, if you’re the one who literally handles everything at your business, what happens when you get sick? When a relative gets sick? When you want to have a vacation? When you burn out?
And you will burn out working like this. What happens to your business then? When nobody has had the experience running things themselves because you’ve always had to handle everything?
Finally, if you ever want to sell or transition your business — even to a family member — it’s probably going to have a really hard time running without you.
No one wants to buy a business that falls apart the second the owner leaves. That business isn’t worth much. You might think it’s worth a lot, but watch what happens when you put it on the market. Watch what kind of offers you actually get from people who can see the reality — the business is nothing without you.
That’s not something that should make you happy — that should frighten you. A business that’s nothing without you is a business that’s nothing. It’s just a job — it’s not worth anything.
All of this can be fixed by:
- Creating a marketing strategy that everyone can follow and stick to
- Creating processes for every aspect of your business that anyone with the right skillset can follow
- Taking yourself out of those processes as much as possible
- Allowing things to not be perfect
Create a Marketing Strategy You Can Stick to
Something that holds most businesses back when it comes to marketing is a lack of strategy. They know they need to do certain types of marketing — they usually even know what they want to do specifically — but they don’t have an overarching strategy to guide everything.
You might be able to get away with this if you have someone whose sole job is to do your marketing and you’re willing to let them do it without any oversight, but even in those cases, it’s better if they have a strategy guiding them.
When you have a strategy mapping out the next quarter or 6 months or year (or even more), the person doing your marketing doesn’t need your guidance or input — all you have to worry about is making sure you’re good with the strategy in the first place.
This way, you still get to guide your marketing — you make all the important decisions on the strategy itself when it’s being formed — and then you can let them take over and follow the strategy you’ve signed off on.
The big thing now is to take a step back and let them do their job.
Remove Yourself from Your Marketing — Let Processes Work for You
Whether you hired someone full-time to do your marketing or you decided to work with an outside firm, you made the decision to let someone else do the heavy lifting.
Now it’s time to take it a step further by removing yourself from the equation entirely.
When you created a marketing strategy (or worked with someone else to put it together), what you really did was create marketing processes to follow.
Any good marketing strategy is a clear guide telling whoever is implementing it what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and what to do if it works really well (or not so well).
Anybody with some marketing training should be able to do that. You don’t have to be involved anymore.
Now, you might be tempted to make everyone pass all marketing decisions and collateral through you for approval, but all that will do is ensure the strategy gets way behind schedule.
That’s why it’s so important to put together a killer strategy from the beginning. If it’s highly detailed and extremely clear, there’s no need for you to check everything — anyone competent will do a fine job.
And that’s what matters most — not that they’re perfect, but that they’re fine.
Published Is Superior to Perfect
This is probably what’s holding you back more than anything, to be honest — an obsession with having perfect marketing.
No one has perfect marketing. No one.
Perfection delays progress. It keeps you from creating content, or putting out a brochure or, setting up an event, or doing whatever it is that you need to be doing to get leads and sales.
Marketing is something that needs to be happening constantly, and when things are delayed in an attempt to achieve perfection, you end up with gaps, and your audience starts to forget you.
Worst-case scenario? They buy from someone else entirely, and the few marketing messages you worked on ironically end up helping your competitor.
Remember, people see on average about 5,000 marketing messages each day. Some people see a LOT more.
It’s a numbers game, and it’s not like they’re paying close attention. If you market your product or service only a handful of times, but your competitor is consistent, all you’ve done is ensure your prospect remembers the problem they have — not that you’re the best solution.
Consistently getting in front of your prospects matters much more than doing so in some magically perfect way.
A single perfect blog post is ultimately going to be less effective than regularly posting not-quite-perfect blog posts. Staying front and center in your audience’s minds matters more than anything.
On top of that, if you spend time developing a strong marketing strategy that puts marketing processes in place with great people behind them, your “not quite perfect” marketing is still going to be really, really good and look extremely professional.
And the more you practice this and see the results, the more you’ll realize that perfectionism is a game of diminishing returns.
The time spent getting from 97% perfect to 99% isn’t going to get you an enormous boost in new leads or sales — it would be better spent on something new to keep your audiences interested and engaged.
So, all you really need now is a marketing strategy and someone to implement it for you.
Do you have one?
Let’s Talk Strategy
If you’re ready to get serious about your marketing and get a detailed strategy that anyone can implement, we’d love to talk.