Marketing Basics Training
# Why Most People Get Marketing Wrong (And How you are Probably One of Them)
I was scrolling through LinkedIn yesterday and saw yet another post about "10 Marketing Strategies That Will Transform Your Business!" The comments were full of people thanking the poster for the "valuable insights." Meanwhile, l am sitting here thinking : do any of these people actually run a business?
Because here's what nobody tells you when you are trying to work out marketing: most of the advice out there is complete rubbish.
Not because it's technically wrong, but because it assumes you have got a team of marketing graduates and a budget that makes you feel comfortable spending £500 on A/B testing email subject lines. The reality? you are probably reading this at 11 PM after a full day of actual work, trying to work out how to get more customers without going bankrupt .
## The Real Problem With Marketing Training
Most marketing courses are written by people who learned marketing from other courses. They throw around words like "improvement" and "conversion funnels" and expect you to nod along like you were not just trying to work out if your website even works properly on mobile phones.
l have been in rooms where marketing consultants charge £200 an hour to tell business owners they need to "use joint approaches to customer getting." What does that even mean? Use multiple ways to get customers. There : l just saved you £200.
The truth about marketing is not complicated, but it's not what most people want to hear either .
## What Marketing Actually Is (When You Strip Away The Nonsense)
Marketing is finding people who have a problem your business solves, then telling them about it in words they actually understand. That's it.
Everything else : the social media strategies, the email sequences, the retargeting campaigns : those are just different ways of doing those two things. But somehow the industry has convinced everyone that you need to master seventeen different platforms and understand pixel tracking before you are allowed to tell people about your business.
Here's what actually matters:
- Knowing who has the problem you solve (and where they hang out)
- Explaining your solution without sounding like a robot
- Doing this enough that people remember you exist
That's marketing. The rest is just choosing which tools to use.
## Stop Making It Harder Than It Needs To Be
you know what's funny? Some of the most successful small businesses l know do barely any "proper" marketing. They just talk to people. They show up places. They help first and sell second.
But then they get told they need a digital marketing strategy and suddenly they are paralysed because they do not know what a lookalike audience is.
Here's a thought : maybe start with the basics before you worry about advanced Facebook advertising techniques.
Like actually knowing what you are selling and why someone would want it. l know that sounds obvious, but you would be surprised how many businesses can not explain what they do without using industry jargon that makes customers' eyes glaze over .
## The One Question Most Businesses Can not Answer
"Why should l choose you instead of doing nothing at all?"
Not why should l choose you instead of your competitor. Why should l bother changing from how things are now?
Most marketing focuses on being better than the competition. But your biggest competitor is not usually another business : it's people being perfectly content with the status quo. Which makes sense when you think about it, changing things is hard work.
If you can not answer why someone should disrupt their current routine to become your customer, then all the marketing tactics in the world will not help you.
## What you Actually Need To Know
Forget marketing funnels for a minute. Here's what will make more difference to your business than any advanced strategy:
**Know your customers like actual people.** Not demographics. Not buyer personas. Real humans with real problems and real reasons for making decisions.
**Get clear on your message.** If you can not explain what you do in one sentence without using buzzwords, your customers definitely can not either.
**Pick one or two ways to reach people.** Then get good at those before adding more. l see too many businesses spreading themselves across every platform and doing none of them well.
**Track what matters.** Forget vanity metrics. How many enquiries did you get? How many turned into customers? How much did it cost to get them? Start there.
But honestly, tracking is where most people get overwhelmed again. Start simple .
## The Part About Training That Actually Makes Sense
Real marketing training should teach you to think, not just follow templates.
Because your business is different. Your customers are different. Your competition is different. Cookie cutter approaches work about as well as you would expect.
What you need is to understand the principles behind why marketing works, then adapt them to your situation. Not copy what worked for someone else's business in a completely different industry.
Good training shows you how to research your market without spending thousands on surveys. How to test messages before committing to expensive campaigns. How to measure what's working so you can do more of it and stop wasting time on what is not.
The thing about emotional intelligence training is that it actually helps with marketing too. Understanding people makes selling easier.
## Why Most People Never Get Started
They are waiting until they understand everything. Until they have read all the blogs and taken all the courses and worked out the perfect strategy.
Meanwhile, their competitors are out there talking to customers and making sales.
Marketing is not about perfection. It's about connection. And you can not connect with people if you never start the conversation.
The businesses that succeed with marketing are not usually the ones with the most sophisticated strategies. They are the ones that show up, help people solve problems, and make it easy for customers to buy from them.
Start there. Everything else is just details you can work out later.
Available in Brisbane, but honestly? These principles work anywhere people have problems that need solving.