E58: You Were Never Supposed to Be the Marketer
Overview
If the word "marketing" makes you cringe, this episode is for you. I make the case that you were never supposed to be the marketer, and that you don't have to become one to grow your business. I get into why being great at your craft and being great at marketing it are two completely different skill sets, why you still can't afford to be in the dark about what good marketing looks like, and the simplest way to understand what marketing actually is. If you'd rather hand it off, here's how we help local business owners.
Key Moments
1:30 How getting burned by an agency sent me down the marketing path
3:09 The friend who tripled my income with a weekend certification
4:30 You were never supposed to be the marketer
5:28 Your three options: delegate, partner, or hire
6:30 Why you can't afford to be in the dark
7:40 The mechanic analogy
8:30 Marketing isn't the enemy, bad marketing is
9:00 Marketing in plain English: message plus distribution
11:00 The three takeaways
Full Transcript
(0:00) If you're a small business owner and you hear the word marketing and it just makes you cringe, or stresses you out, or honestly just makes you feel a little nauseous, I want you to hear me say this. You don't have to love marketing in order to have a successful business, but you do need to understand what your business needs. So what we're going to do today is show you exactly why you were never meant to be the marketer, and the one thing you actually need to do to get your business to grow. Welcome to Marketing Domination.
(0:43) My name is Sean Garner, and the Marketing Domination show is all about helping local business owners who are great at what they do and would rather do just about anything other than marketing. Each week we break marketing down into simple terms so you know what you need to know as a small business owner to actually grow your business, without having to become a marketer yourself.
(1:30) So I didn't start out loving marketing either. How I started going down the marketing rabbit hole is I got burned by an agency. My wife and I owned multiple gyms at one time, and we were hiring marketing agencies to help us. We tried a bunch of different ones, and I never really could get clear answers on what they were doing. It was very vague on what I was paying for, and any time I questioned them, I got a vague response. As I started to see red flags, I dove into learning marketing myself, and the more I learned, the more I realized what they were missing and the opportunities I was missing out on. They would use a lot of terminology I didn't understand. They might say they were doing SEO, but what actually moves a business forward with SEO was not what they were doing. They were losing me in the terminology.
(2:30) As I learned this stuff myself, we started doing more and more of it and figured out there was a better way. We ended up selling those businesses and I got into the online fitness space, doing online training. And I was struggling to make anything significant. I was frustrated because I was good at what I did. I'd been in the industry over a decade, gotten real results with people, had all these certifications. But with the online fitness stuff, nothing seemed to work.
(3:09) Then I talked to a friend whose girlfriend had gone to a weekend certification, and within a month she launched an online program and was making over $15,000 a month. I was a personal trainer struggling to make three to five thousand a month. Here's someone with no experience who in one month more than tripled what I was making, just doing it online. And I was so mad. As I started to learn what she was doing, it wasn't that she'd learned the craft better than me. She'd figured out how to be better at marketing. That lit the fire under me. I decided to go all in and figure marketing out for myself, and I ended up loving it so much it became my career.
(4:10) But you don't need to fall in love with marketing. I'm the exception. You just need to know what we're going to talk about today. So here are three things to help you feel better about hating marketing.
(4:30) Number one, you were never supposed to be the marketer. You didn't become an entrepreneur because you love writing website copy or figuring out Google or building websites. You opened the business because you were great at the thing you do. You were passionate about helping a group of people. But being great at your craft and being great at marketing your craft are two completely different skill sets, and one doesn't come with the other. A lot of business owners get burned out or close up shop early because they think they have to do all of these things, and they don't know what they don't know. So if you've been beating yourself up because the marketing part doesn't come naturally, it's not a character flaw, it's normal.
(5:28) And I honestly don't think you have to be the marketer. You can do a few things. One, you can delegate it. Maybe someone on your team is passionate about it, or you're big enough to have an in-house team. Two, you can partner with it. There are courses and tutorials where you learn alongside someone who oversees it. Or three, you can hire it. That's what we do at Sean Garner Consulting. We're a full-service digital marketing agency for local service business owners, and you can hire a team like us to do your messaging, website, and SEO so you don't have to.
(6:30) But here's the thing. Just because you're not supposed to be the marketer doesn't mean you get to be in the dark about it. No matter which option you choose, you cannot afford to be in the dark about what good marketing looks like. Here's the trap. Most business owners are so busy running their business that they can't actually check the marketing work being done for them. And even if they had the time, they don't know what good is supposed to look like, so they can't tell if they're getting what they paid for. That's how you end up paying retainer fees month after month for things that aren't moving the needle, and you don't even know it. A lot of owners think marketing is just having someone post on social media. That's not what marketing is.
(7:40) And if you don't know what you really need to be doing, you can easily get taken advantage of. Think about it. If you don't know cars and you take yours to a mechanic, that's where you get sold the $2,000 repair you didn't need. You're at the mercy of the expert. That's where a lot of business owners get taken advantage of. The goal here is that you don't need to know how to build websites or do SEO or run ads yourself. You don't need to know how to do all of it. But I do want you to know what needs to be done and what good marketing looks like.
(8:30) Because here's what I believe. If you hate marketing right now, most likely once you see what good marketing looks like, something surprising happens. You start liking it. Because marketing is not the enemy, bad marketing is the enemy. A lot of you think you hate marketing, but you don't. You hate what you've experienced, which is probably marketing done badly: confusing agencies, technical jargon, nothing that grows the business.
(9:00) So let me make it simple. Strip away all the jargon and the lingo, and marketing comes down to two things. Your message, and the distribution of that message to the right people. That's it. What you say, and who you get it to. And when you see that clearly, and you see it work, it stops being scary. If you truly want your business to grow, you have to learn to love it. You don't have to do it like I do, but you do need to see the value in it, because your message and the distribution of that message is what makes the phone ring.
(9:56) I believe entrepreneurship is a calling. And if you're called to something, we're called to dominate. To me, dominate doesn't mean crush the competition. It means doing things with excellence, taking dominion, being the best we can at what we do. So if you're hating marketing, you're not understanding what it truly is. It's getting the thing you're passionate about in front of the people you're called to serve. If we're not willing to put our message out there, the people we're called to serve keep dealing with a problem only we can solve.
(11:00) So let's bring it home. Number one, you were never supposed to be the marketer, and that's okay. You got into business to do the craft, the thing you do. Number two, you do need to know what good marketing looks like, or you'll keep paying for things that don't work. Number three, you don't hate marketing, you hate bad marketing. You hate getting taken advantage of, paying for things that don't work, and feeling like you have to be sleazy. Done right, marketing is just your message getting to the right people.
(12:00) So if this is resonating with you, know that you're not alone. Almost every business owner I work with has felt exactly like this. You don't have to become the marketing expert. But starting today, make the decision that you're at least going to know what good marketing looks like and what it takes to grow. That one decision changes everything. That's what this show is about. I want to make marketing simple and give it to you one piece at a time. Next episode, we're talking about the big thing most business owners blame first and understand the least: what your website actually needs in order to turn visitors into customers. If you want your website to become the best salesman on your team, you'll want to catch the next one. Have an awesome day.
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