Just about every day, an email arrives in my inbox telling me how I can dramatically increase my marketing reach/followers/sales/open rates with a clickbait headline and a wildly discounted price that is only going to last for a few hours and I need to act NOW or be left in the wake of my successful competitors. In a world where things go viral, and influencers and reality TV celebrities sell the dream of instant stardom, it's easy to think that this is the speed at which things move, including your efforts at branding and marketing. Spoiler alert: this is not the case.

Marketing to build your brand, audience, trust and convert to sales takes time. There, I said it. Not just time, it also takes consistency, measurement, tweaking and re-measurement. There are all kinds of analogies to illustrate this statement, but underpinning the implementation of any marketing, brand or comms strategy has to be the strategy itself. Unless you are able to clearly understand who your customer is, and why they would buy your product, then it is difficult to know how to reach them and on what channels in your marketing implementation.

A business and its brand is a consistent, thoughtful process of growth. The problem is, it's vulnerable to be in business, and even more so to continually put yourself out there into the public domain. As Brene Brown says, vulnerability is defined as risk, uncertainty and emotional exposure, which could also be the definition of being in a small business, or any business for that matter. These conditions push up against our biology, we are hardwired for connection with each other, and hardwired to move away from things that may cause us discomfort or to disconnect.

The fear of making a mistake, or being canceled, or not having a 48x conversion often stops us from doing the courageous act of getting up and getting out there again and again to grow our brands. Add to that the comparison and belief that EVERYONE else is killing it and are #blessed from the content of their Insta reels and its easy to feel like no matter how much we do, it's never enough.

To keep up, we look for a quick fix, or get mad, or want to blame lots of external things, or get super busy in the doing rather than the tedium of analysing our Facebook and Instagram stats and tweaking our SEO, then get exhausted and despondent (I see you). What to do? The answer lies in the question that spawned this blog... "I've tried lots of things." If you've tried lots of things, how long did you take each time to really implement and understand whether that strategy was working or not.

Jumping from silver bullet to silver bullet is disruptive and ultimately takes a lot more effort and energy than sticking with something and really making it work or understanding why it isn't working and adjusting it. Marketing and branding success is built on consistency. Which is why there is a need to have a solidly researched and crafted marketing strategy to begin with.

Once you know your demographics, your avatars/personas, what they need and want and how your product or service can get them to meet their needs, and you know where they hang out, how they like to receive information, what motivates them to purchase, you can begin to build a digital presence that executes on that strategy. Consistency means that you are regularly creating new content, posting, engaging, measuring, testing and revising in a cycle. Regularly doesn't have to be constantly or exhaustingly multiple times a day, it just has to be predictably regular, with the odd unpredictable post to keep things frisky.

The most underdone part of this from what we see in the Digital Ready Coaching program is the testing and measurement part. Progress is hard to quantify if you don't have some form of metrics by which you can measure where you have gains or losses and an understanding of why. This part can be time-consuming and for many people who want to do action, to be creative, to be with people, or in their business, this feels like the least desirable part of the process, but it is critical, and once you have worked out how to do the measurement that is right for your business, you can more easily check your metrics, see what is working and what isn't, and then revise your strategy.

One of the other issues people have with implementing their strategy which relates to the measurement is actually stopping to see the small progress. Growth doesn't usually happen monumentally fast, to be sustainable, it happens slowly and regularly. This can be hard to see (or easy to miss) if you are imagining it is going to be exponential or viral. Having week-on-week, month-on-month, and year-on-year metrics allows you to see the growth and the patterns of growth. Celebrating small, consistent wins is worth doing, even if it is just as a reminder that you are doing the best you can with what you can control, and that often hard, tiring and tedious effort is making a real difference.

Good marketing strategies make haste slowly, they take time to create, time to implement, time to make content, time to reflect, time to measure. On average, it will take around 5 years to sustainably grow into the market, with a lot of learning along the way. Perhaps if we thought about the longitude of that 5 years or more, the front end of our marketing time investment and the ensuing dedication towards it would feel more easily justified. This is an investment in time, not an expense, so move your marketing activities into that column in the ledger of getting things done, and commit to the sometimes invisible work that reaps the results over time.

Got the blues about your marketing strategy and how its working? Business shouldn't have to be a solo sport, and our Digital Ready Coaches love to support you and cheer you on to victory. Why not start with our Digital Ready Fundamentals course, designed to give you all you need to get on track in a quick, easy, actionable video format. Then go deep with some one on one Digital Ready coaching experiences and you will be match fit for marketing your business.