Why Marketing Is Really About Self-Leadership

Marketing advice is everywhere.

Strategies, content ideas, formulas for what to post.

But honestly… most business owners don’t struggle because they don’t know enough.

They struggle because marketing requires self-leadership.

Leading yourself to show up.

Leading yourself to stay visible.

Leading yourself to keep going even when the results aren’t immediate.

That’s what I talk about in this week’s podcast episode.

Because the shift most business owners need isn’t another marketing tactic — it’s building the habit of marketing.

Which is exactly why I created The Marketing Collective 

A space for business owners who are already showing up in their marketing but want it to feel clearer, more consistent, and actually start attracting the right clients.

If you want to stop overthinking your marketing and start implementing it, the Collective is where we do that.

Listen to the episode and let me know what resonates

You can find me at www.instagram.com/gemmacliftonmarketing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello, right. So I want to talk today about self-leadership and how we lead ourselves, especially when it comes to our marketing. The problem I find with so many people when it comes to their marketing is that often we blame marketing, we blame our environments, or we blame something. But actually, what it comes down to is this really harsh reality that we are the leader of what we do, and how we lead ourselves is so important, not just with marketing, but with everything like your habits, your discipline, like when it comes to working out, like with the food, the food that you eat, like the rest and recuperation that you get, everything. And I remember being told this, like it's all down to your self-leadership. And I was like, what the hell does that mean? What does that look like? What is it? I don't understand what that means. Now, I want to talk about this because, like I said, I found it really difficult, but actually stepping into self-leadership has been one thing that has changed everything for me, and I want it to change how you act and how you behave and how your marketing then comes across. Because I promise you, once you sort of master this skill, everything will start to change. Okay, so self-leadership is basically how do you lead yourself? How do you show up? How do you how do you basically live and act in a way that is as all as of authority? So how do you behave? How do you act? How do you live in your day-to-day life? How are you leading yourself? Essentially, if I break it down to the simplest form, how are you leading yourself? Now, as we are adults and as we grow, it's really really easy for us to sort of slip back into that. I'll just wait until I'm told, I'll wait until I've been told to do something. We are in charge of ourselves, but we can sort of be like, Well, I'll just wait until the last minute. Like, we don't have that natural discipline because we don't always have someone breathing down our neck, especially like if you live on your own, it's really really hard, or especially being your own boss as a business owner, you don't have necessarily like deadlines which are fixed because you can create your own deadlines and they can fluctuate. So, this is where I really want to talk about self-discipline because it is so important because it's been something I've been lacking for so long. I've always thought I've been disciplined, I've thought I've been able to lead myself, but actually, when there are difficult situations and when things do get a bit tricky, I'm like, oh, actually, I'll just give that a bit of flex, or I'll just um yeah, not not do that, not do that right now. I won't eat the frog per se. Um actually it's those hard things that you need to do and how we lead ourselves through those, through those like little hard habits, little hard actions, which actually make all the difference. And it's not until this has happened that I'm like, oh my god, this is this is the thing, this is the thing most of us are missing. So when people come and say to me about like my marketing isn't working, or I don't have any ideas, or I can't quite work out like why it isn't working, why it's not sticking, the problem most of the time comes down to is self-discipline, self-leadership, and how they how you guide yourself as a business owner to make sure you market your business properly. Now, this like I said, it eats into everything, you know, how what your food you eat, uh rest you take, the what like the way you move your body, like everything, like how you consume media, for example, like there's so many different things. So when we get down to the crux of it, is how do we behave? Do we behave like a person who has just started their business and is posting on Instagram and just trying to get anyone to work with them? That's how we all probably started. Like, I know that that's what I did, and I worked in marketing for Christ's sake. Like, is that how we behave? As a business owner now who's probably like three to four years in, we don't behave like that, and we definitely don't want to behave like that if that's still what we're doing, okay? So we have to start leading ourselves and acting in a way that is where who we want to become because that's who we are, and it's all about this becoming of the person, the business owner that we want to be, but we now are acting as. Does that make sense? I hope it does. And it's not until you start to do this you realize how important this is. So, take for example, starting a business, you're posting on Instagram. Great, you've got a few inquiries, maybe you post on Facebook, you might post a few Facebook groups. I'm just thinking of where I started. Okay, now as and as of when we grow, we don't want to just be relying on one media channel, like marketing channel. We don't want to just be doing one thing, targeting one audience. We want to be growing, we want to be establishing ourselves, we want to be building authority, building a community of people who actually know like and trust us. So we want to expand that. So we want to um we want to speak into multiple channels, we want to we want to broaden the way that we reach people, so we don't want to just be focusing on social media because we realise that actually that is only a tiny part of marketing. We want to make sure we're building our email list, emailing regularly, not just setting it, creating an email, letting it sit in our drafts box for a month and then not sending it. We want to be sending regular emails, we want to have automations, we want to have our PR and outreach set up so we can start guest speaking, we can start guest blogging, we can start speaking in masterminds and class like masterclasses, all of these things. We want to be collaborating with other brands, we want to be using other people's audiences. We want to have a plan of action that is not just a spray and pray approach because that's not who we are anymore. Now, this is really hard because it can seem really overwhelming, and you're like, Oh god, I've already got so much stuff to do, and that's absolutely fine. So we're not saying we're doing it all in one go, but this is who we are, so we have to take a little bit of accountability for making sure that we actually get the shit done. Okay, so we as a person, as a business owner, as a grown up like grown-ass woman, we have to make sure that we lead ourselves in that way. So, what can we realistically do that helps the chip away this goal of who we are becoming? Okay, so if it is creating an email list and sending emails regularly, what are we doing for that? Okay, are we creating regular email content? Are we actually scheduling it? Are we giving it to a VA to um send out? Are we creating any long-form content? What are we doing? Where are we making time for it in our calendars? Because I appreciate we're all super busy, most of us are mums, most of us have got multiple things going on. We don't have huge amounts of time, so where can we optimize our time to make sure we make this as a priority? Because I promise you that when you were that person who started out posting on Instagram, just fluffing about a little bit with marketing, it wasn't done intentionally. You're probably sending like a quick 10-minute post in between the school run, you're probably doing something whilst you make breakfast. It wasn't really intentional. Okay, so where do we have the self-leadership now to actually get stuff done? Where are we blocking up time in our calendar? It doesn't have to be like four hours or anything like that, even a half an hour, you can get a good chunk of stuff done a couple times a week. So this is a short, sharp little kick up the bum to be like if you are struggling with your marketing right now, I promise you there is a self-leadership issue. Okay, if you're like, I'm so damn self self-leadered, leaders, I'm so in charge of who I am and I know who I'm becoming, I am doing all the things, then I promise you this marketing, your marketing luck wouldn't be a problem, okay. Well, if you're still not at the place you want to be, I prom I know that your identity of who you are becoming isn't quite at the right level, you need to level up, okay? Because if you don't have a self-leadership issue, then it's an identity issue. So I want you to go through and be like realistic with yourself and think: am I leading myself in the way that I know that the future me, the future that I am becoming, the future her, am I doing in a way that is intentional? Am I am I dedicating time to my marketing? Am I acting in a way that has good habits that she would have? We need to start acting as if, because it will then start to arrive. I hope this makes a lot of sense because it's taken me so bloody long for me to work this out. It's not just about being told what to do, we have to physically enforce it ourselves. And as business owners, we don't always have the luxury of being told what to do by other people. Um, you might be told by your spouse what to do every now and again, but majority of the time is you have to work this shit out on your own, which is really, really, really, really hard. So, block out the time, get really realistic of what you want to achieve, what you can achieve in that time, and start to make it happen. And I promise you, a couple of weeks of this of this intentionality, everything will start to make sense, things will start to simplify. You'll start to be like, actually, I'm creating creating an email, I can multiply, I can like use that into different things, I can create social media captions from that, I can create a LinkedIn article, which I can also create a blog post, I can create a YouTube video, extract the audio, and make that into a podcast. There are so many things you can be doing. Now, it's the action that causes it's the action that causes the momentum. You can't get momentum without action. And that's what I really want to clear on today, and I really hope that this helps. Um, short of them. I promise you that this is probably the missing piece that you're missing at the moment right now. Um I can't wait to hear your example.