Why Being Authentic in Your Marketing Matters
It’s Halloween week, and while dressing up and pretending to be someone you’re not is fun for a couple of days, it’s time to take the mask off and let you and your business be who they’re meant to be. Business owners think they have to do all of the things. They have to spend thousands of dollars on highly produced Facebook ads. They have to do television commercials. They have to do highly scripted videos that are recorded in a studio by a professional team to be posted on social media. Because someone you deem “successful” is doing it (or at least the person selling them advertising will tell you that they are).
And while all of that can work, your marketing is exactly that: yours. All the production in the world, the thousands of dollars in ad spend, and the most well-written script is not going to make you a carbon copy of another business. You are who you are, and by being you you’ll be the most successful. How?
Here are 3 ways to keep it real:
LASER FOCUS ON YOUR TARGET
Think about how many customers that you need to have a wildly successful, record-breaking year. 200? 10,000? 20,000? Still just a fraction of a percent of the humans out there – whether that’s in your city, state, or country.
Honing in on your perfect client allows you to not only communicate to the people that you would like to become customers, it allows you to understand the customers with which you connect. Do you love animals and have your dog with you at the business? Then animal lovers are likely to connect with you. One of the hardest things as a business owner is to reject customers – but if one customer is going to take 80% of your time and cause you 100% of your stress, then they’re not the right ones. Release those wrong customers and understand who the right ones are.
FIGURE OUT WHO YOU ARE
Write it down. Who are you as a business? What is your mission statement? What is unique about your business as opposed to every other business in your industry and market? Why should they choose you? If every single employee cannot communicate this without hesitation, then you’ve got a problem.
Drop the act. Be unapologetically you. Embrace the flaws, the fun, and the spontaneity.
GET A MARKETING PLAN…YOUR MARKETING PLAN
Marketing plans have key components that allow them to drive results such as an analysis of where your business is right now, and where you would like to go. They include details about your target market, and should have a financial component. But simply purchasing a plan that someone else in your industry uses isn’t going to work.
Why? Your uniqueness is lost. Leaning into why your business is different will help with authenticity, and will help you connect further with your customers. This is a little harder than buying a cookie cutter, but I promise it’s more fun.
I’m going to teach all of this in my upcoming live virtual and online self-paced classes. We’ll dive into each of these topics, and so much more, so you can shift your perspective and be a stellar marketer. Be the first to know when these new classes launch by clicking here.
