Ep7 What To Do When It Feels Like Your Marketing Isn't Working And You Want To Give Up

We all have moments, days, weeks and months where it feels like things aren't working. The bookings aren't coming in, content has low engagement and it doesn't feel like the needle is moving.

The good news is that you don't need to burn your business to the ground.

Instead, you can listen to this actionable episode to know exactly what you do

Join the FREE Uncommon Folk community for support.

Book in for a Marketing MOT to identify what might be holding you back from increasing your bookings.

Buy Mirrored Marketing for effective market research templates that are designed for conversion. 

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Transcript

Imposter syndrome, desire to just burn it all to the ground. Now I've had my own business for four years and I also know my cycle very well. So I can recognize this theme and I know that it is just something that I deal with each month and next month, next week, sorry.  Hopefully it doesn't last for a whole month. 

Next week, I just won't feel like this. And this is something I actually experienced with a client as well.  She would go through this cycle of being like, I hate everything I'm working on, it's not good enough, I don't want to do it anymore. And then the next week she'd be like, Oh my god, I love it so much, this is amazing, this is the best thing.

And we identified that it was also her cycle. And what we spoke about was actually what to do. When that week strikes because I'm quite lucky that I set a lot of my own schedule So quite often I will just block out the week before I'm due because I know what I'm like And I know that I don't have too much energy to give.

I feel very inward and doubt feels really strong  Obviously, we can't always do that this week. I definitely can't do that I have lots of calls lots of things booked in like in an ideal world we would but I  It's not always possible. And that's okay. What we need to learn to do is navigate that time. And maybe for you, this isn't a cyclic thing.

Maybe this is just a period that you're in at the moment or have been in for a while. Maybe it's something you feel every time you come to launch something new, post on social media, you know, go into the next expansion in your business, whatever that looks like for you.  And what I'm really speaking about is just that  doubt, that feeling that things aren't working, that questioning of whether you should give up.

Because I don't think it makes you  any less of an incredible business owner and service provider to admit that sometimes you feel like that. I certainly do. I even feel that way about my marketing, despite the fact that I don't. Being a marketing consultant who's been in the industry in 10 years. So let's just start with a huge dose of validation.

Everyone who I speak to in business feels like this. It's a very normal part of the process. And sometimes we can't just hide under our blanket and pretend that our business exists. Sometimes we have to just  Get on with things and still be moving forward.  So what I really want to speak on today, specifically in the sense of when you feel like your marketing isn't working, is what you can do about that.

Because I have so many service providers who come to me who have an entire folder of the most incredible reviews of people telling them How good they are at what they do, the transformations that they have created, how much they just love the service, and yet so often they feel like  it's not good enough, they can't book it out,  maybe they should just give up on it.

Because there's this gap between the marketing of it and the brilliance of it.  What I won't be able to speak about is how to close that gap. When it, you know you have a good service, but it just feels like you can't really convey that, and people aren't booking it in a way that you know it is worthy of. 

So the first thing I always recommend, and I'm going to say these two words, and you're probably going to resist it, and you're probably going to think it's boring, because most people do, is market research.  Now, this is single handedly the most important piece of marketing, But you'd be so surprised, or maybe you're not surprised at all, how many people skip it. 

This to me is wild because you would never work on a campaign, I don't want to say like in the real world, but like I do think there is this kind of like funny thing of like real world business versus online business.  And I love the way that we are changing things and doing things so differently online.

But also, I think some of the old ways of doing business are still very relevant and almost being bypassed. And for me, market research is one of those. Because you would never see a campaign, an agency, anything within the marketing realm.  be worked on without market research.  And when I say those words, people feel the resistance because they think like stuffy interviews or client avatars or these tables to fill out about where people are versus where they want to be.

And sure, that's an element of it. I mean, I personally never create a client avatar, but I see the value and things like that.  But I like to create a reframe around market research to be a conversation.  So be understanding who the people that you serve,  what they're experiencing,  what they're feeling,  how they feel about taking action,  what styles they resonate with.

Knowing them so, so well, that you know not just how to speak to them within your marketing, but how to truly, genuinely serve them.  Now when I say it like that, you are probably already doing market research. If you have created a service that was based on maybe another offering of yours, maybe you worked one to one and then you created a course from that,  you are naturally doing market research because you are understanding what serves people, what creates transformation,  and then you are creating in accordance to that. 

That is what market research is.  It's so funny because when I was at uni, this was my favourite, favourite part of studying. Like it was called Consumer Insights and I was like, I want to be a Consumer Insights Research Analyst.  And actually I realised I didn't because it's very much  Like, data heavy and it is very much just being a researcher and I like the actual creation side of things.

But I was just fascinated by understanding people on the deepest level and then how to create  so that you connect with them, they feel really seen and they want to take action. And ultimately that's what I help you do.  So if you are listening to that and going, Okay, that sounds great, how on earth do I do it?

Well, I have actually created an entire section in Mirrored Marketing that teaches you how to do this. It has questions and prompts that you can duplicate, fill out, and then find your own consumer insights.  But essentially what we are doing there is, like I said, we're understanding people. We're understanding where they're at, not just in this like, surface level way of being like, Ooh, they want to improve their marketing. 

We go so much deeper than that. So for me, something I know to be true about a lot of the people I work with is what I just said. They are at that point where they are so frustrated because they know they're really good at what they do. They know that they should be booked out. They know that they should be  recognized more for what they do.

Being invited on podcasts and opportunities and all of these different things. And they're feeling that frustration at that.  Because the only thing stopping them from doing that is not their skill set, They know that they've got that.  It's their ability to convey that to the outside world. So do you see how different that is versus someone like, Ooh, I just want to work on my marketing.

It's a very different way of understanding people. And then it really fuels my creative mind of emails to write, content to create, messaging to put on my website, because I truly am in the mind of the person. And this is where you can create from the space of like, Oh my God, I feel like you're talking to me.

I feel like that's like the holy grail of compliments within marketing. I love it when people message me that because I'm like, Oh, I'm doing my job right. That's how it should be.  So I would always start there. Like, is your marketing actually doing that? Are you truly speaking to people in a language that they understand in a way that really activates them?

And then are you conveying what they really care about in regards to your service in a way that makes them want to take action? Because it's not just about saying, this is my service and this is what it does. It's about wording that in a way where people go, that's exactly what I need. I can imagine how my life will be once I've had that.

That's something I want to do right now. That's something I'm ready to receive. And you'll hear me speak about this a lot, but your marketing should take people on this journey of being ready for your service. You cannot create that journey without truly understanding your clientele.  Again, like I said, we don't need to do boring interviews to be able to find this information.

In fact, if you are somebody that has  a library of those reviews,  so much of the answers to these questions that I'm posing  will already be there in front of you.  Same if you are somebody who does discovery calls.  You have a bank of marketing messaging material right in front of you in these spaces. And if you don't have any of that, friends, families, communities, the uncommon folk community that I'm in is free until the new year.

I'll pop the link below.  You can go into the go work sessions and you can ask people questions. And what you're really finding out here is like, How clearly does this speak to you? How seen do you feel within this messaging? What do you think of the service? How are you feeling about it? What's your desire to take action on it like?

What resistances might you have? What would be holding you back from hitting book? The more you can ask these questions, be curious and understand, the more effective your marketing is going to be. So if you are currently feeling like it's not working, And you haven't been asking these questions, you haven't been doing this kind of research or having these conversations.

That is your first place to start.  Then, we move on to testing that. Now I would love to just say, as soon as you've done that and you put the marketing out into the world, it will work. And to be honest, that's what a lot of marketing professionals do tell you. But,  I can't make you that promise. It may do. 

But what I want people to get really, really comfortable with is trial and error within marketing. I did a post this week that said like, the actual key to success within business is being willing to trial and error. It's being willing to put something out there and for it to not work and for you not to make it mean something or take it super personally, which I appreciate is so hard as someone who's really sensitive of perfectionism. 

doesn't like criticism. It's really bloody hard not to make it mean something.  But it's really about saying, okay, well, this is just a strategy that I'm testing and it's not landing.  What can I do now?  How can I shake it up? What changes can I make? And this is what I have been doing this week. So I've gone back to that place of research.

I've asked questions, had conversations.  Then I'm coming back to a place of, okay, what can we test here?  So I have been going into my messaging and seeing like, okay, let me look at this with fresh eyes. It's been a while since I looked at it. Do I think that captures someone as soon as they land? Is it really like, wow, I feel like you're speaking to me, you're in my brain.

Is it really clear what the service is, what it does, and how people will be after it? You know, going into all these key elements of marketing, then going into the email funnels, clicking and seeing where people have stopped opening, where maybe they've unsubscribed. Again, I'm speaking to a fellow creator this week about how painful that is, but It's part of the process.

What part of the funnel that I'm losing them at. And then I go in and I make adjustments.  Then I've been testing on Pinterest. Now this is my biggest, biggest tip recommendation for marketing on your business. Pinterest is my playground. That is how I describe it. I am constantly uploading to Pinterest and testing.

Now, if you have a Pinterest for business account, which you can set up for free, you can create any pins. And it's not like Instagram where you're going to be bombarding your followers, or it's going to just stay there on your newsfeed for everyone to see at all times.  Pinterest is designed to be used like this.

Uploading multiple pins that are found over and over and over again. Some of my most popular pins were created five years ago. And I mean my most popular pins now. What's getting the most saves and clicks right now is from five years ago. A little bit annoying because it's absolutely not relevant to anything I do anymore. 

But the point is, is that they're always discoverable and they don't come up in order. You know, they'll just come up on people's feeds randomly,  So you can really just test and trial. So I will test maybe one way of saying something in like five different ways.  I'll test different graphics. Then I'll also just test loads of different statements about the work that I do and see what activates and engages.

And then from there, I might change my messaging. I might create an ad.  Using the best performing so that I know if I'm going to put ad spend behind this, it's going to perform well. Again, this is something else I see loads of creators just hitting promote.  Don't waste your money.  Pinterest lets you test for free.

By the way, the ad agencies are all testing. The agency who I just worked with, they tested 50 to 100 creatives per campaign.  And that was within, I think they did it within three rounds. So they tested like 50 to a hundred different images, different taglines, different headlines, headlines, everything like that, and then condense it down to the top 10 and then they narrow it down to the top three.

And it's very, very small spend that they're testing, maybe like a pound a day or like 50 P a day per creative.  And then they're putting the big ad spend behind the ones that perform well.  So if we want to be really good at marketing our own business, we need to be doing things like this. And I'm not saying go and spend a load of money testing 100 creatives.

But like I said, daily I am testing on Pinterest for free.  And then I'm putting ad spend behind the things that are working well. Or then I'm replicating that content over on Instagram. Because I'm someone that wants to be at my screen less. I want things to be effective and simple.  And I'm using this testing to be able to do that. 

Then comes on to the final piece, which is probably the hardest. And that is just keeping the faith.  Sometimes when it feels like things aren't working,  they actually are, you just can't see the progress. I think we're absorbing so much messaging online of how quick and easy things should be.  And when they're not. 

we feel like we're doing it wrong or we're not good enough or our service isn't good enough. When the reality is, quite often, marketing takes three to six months to be effective. People need to see marketing messages over and over and over again before they hit buy.  And so when you're at that point of going, no, it's not working, I'm just going to give up. 

The next post you did might have been when someone was going to hit buy. The next video you created could have been the one that went viral.  And so it is about finding that balance between going, okay, things aren't working here. Like, I need to have a look. I need to be strategic here. I need to do some research, test some things, you know, be curious, play around. 

And also just going, I just need to trust in the process. I need to keep showing up, keep being consistent. And by that I mean not pushing through when you really, really, really don't want to. Like for me, sometimes these weeks before I'm due, I do not want to be seen. I do not want to show up.  And that's okay.

I just need to take a step back, really hold these parts of me and go, yeah, do you know what? It feels really hard this week. That doubt is strong. I hear you. Thank you for trying to protect me.  And just give it space.  Others I need to go, you know what? I'm sick of this narrative. Like, I hear you. Thank you for keeping me safe, but  I'm gonna keep going because I trust that it's all working. 

And as always, that's a really hard balance to find. So if you are feeling a little bit unsure, you're like,  I feel like I'm not too sure why my marketing isn't working, whether I just need to keep the faith, whether it is something more strategic. My marketing MOT is now open and I'm so excited to be sharing this.

But we will essentially, as you would in an MOT, go in, take a look at what might not be working, what might need a little bit of an adjustment, so that your marketing is clear and it is designed to convert clients. Very limited spaces of these. All the information about it is below. Thank you.