049. Why Marketing Feels Hard and How to Make it Easier

Welcome. I am marketing expert and business coach Melissa Kellogg Lueck. And this is the Doing Business Like a Woman podcast, where we are exploring and teaching you how women are reinventing the way business is done and money is made to help you create greater impact and financial freedom one business at a time. Well, hello there, my friends. How are you today? I hope you're having a fabulous day. Thanks so much for joining me. I'm so glad you're here because this is going to be a really great episode. We're talking about why marketing feels hard and how to make it feel easier. And if marketing has never felt hard for you, fabulous. But it has for me and has for pretty much every woman I talk to that's in business and marketing. So. But first, I just want to give you an update. I'm so excited that this is my favorite time of year, this like beginning of fall. And I am getting ready to go today up to our women's mountain retreat. It's our second year of having it and I'm really excited to be headed up there. We've got six of us women that are going to be in a house together in the mountains, just working on ourselves and our businesses and having great community and girl time together and hikes and hot tubs and lots of learning and sharing and growing. And so I'm really excited and actually even excited for the drive because I imagine it's going to be beautiful with the leaves Chang in. So, yeah, that's what's happening around here. What's up with you? I hope things are well. So, yeah, I want to dive in here. And I've been thinking a lot about why marketing feels hard for us sometimes. And so I know that this has definitely been a journey for me. It's a journey for many of my clients. And so this is why I wanted to talk about it with you. It's some of the best work I think I've done around growing my business is really simplifying and making things easier. So that's what I want to talk with you about today. So first of all, I want to just think about why, because it's not really your fault that marketing feels hard. And here's why. Because we are taught, and especially I can say from my experience, having gotten my MBA in marketing, like, I literally have been taught the core corporate marketing culture. And like we see, you know, big corporations and million, multi million dollar companies and we see their marketing all the time, right wherever we go, we're being marketed to. And so when we see those types of things. It's like we feel like we have to kind of do those same things. So if we want to make a million dollars in our business, well, we've got to do it like, you know, Coca Cola does it, or like Lululemon does it, or like, you know, some of the major brands that we see all the time. And so what I really want to just draw a distinction between big company corporate marketing is one way of marketing, and that's when you have big budgets and big staffs, right? And then the kind of marketing that most of us are doing, the our economy here in the United States is made up primarily the majority small businesses. Small businesses are considered those with 100 or less employees. And I know for me, I'm way less than 100. So for us as small businesses, marketing is very different. And so I'm going to define what that is for you today and really just help to delineate, make, set apart us as women entrepreneurs building small businesses. We're very different in our marketing from that of big corporations. And so we don't have to be big corporation marketing. There's a lot of things that we can do at our level. We actually have a strategic advantage of being small. I'm going to talk about that in a little bit too, But I think that's why market one of the reasons why marketing feels so heavy and hard because we're trying to be, you know, big corporate marketing. And that is just not possible at our size and our level with the resources and the people that we have. Right. And then also I think there is a. A like bro marketing, masculine type thinking and marketing that is predominant in our corporate culture. And when we try to fit ourselves into that box as women, it often can feel very uncomfortable and very heavy. I know for many, many years in my career and in my business, I thought that if I wanted to be successful and make a lot of money, I had to do it like the boys did it. And over the past few years, I have realized that is not true. I can create a business and a marketing strategy and mindset that works for me as a woman and make even more money than I ever did trying to do it the boy's way, right? So that masculine thinking and strategy often can feel heavy if we're trying to fit ourselves into something that is not aligned with who we are. Also, perfectionism is a problem. And I can speak from experience on this too. I'm a recovering perfectionist that, you know, especially from having a corporate marketing training and background, like having everything curated and looking good and looking perfect. That was my job, right? And that is the service that I provided to my clients for many, many years. And so that perfectionism, now that I am the one, you know, marketing myself, I have to let that go, right? Because humans want to connect with other humans. And that's really what marketing is, is creating connections. And as a human, I am imperfect. And so all the humans that I am connecting with in my business, they're also imperfect. So if I'm trying to pretend and make everything perfect, they're not able to connect with that because they're not perfect, right? So it really, perfectionism really can create a barrier between us and the connections that we are trying to create with our audience, with our clients. So if you just allow your humanity, as you are, to come through your imperfection, your imperfected humanity to connect with other imperfect humans, it is so much more effective than trying to be perfect and trying to create that curated everything. And it's just so exhausting, really, to try to be perfect. Believe me, I've tried for many, many years. You know, I just discovered recently that my perfection, and I think this is true for many of us, my perfection is really a protective mechanism. It was a way that I kept myself safe. Because if I was perfectly following all the guidelines, all the rules, all the way best practices, all the things that everyone else says I should do, if I do it all perfectly, then I won't fail, I won't be humiliated, bad things won't happen. That's kind of what my thinking was. But you and I obviously know that that's not true, right? That even perfect things fail, even perfect people fall down. Like our. My mind was thinking that perfection will keep me safe, but it actually doesn't, right? So I have had to let that go. And that's definitely a journey that I am on and will continue to be on for probably the rest of my life. I'm a recovering perfectionist. Once in recovery, always in recovery, right? Another thing that I think makes marketing feel really hard is having not enough thinking. So thinking I'm not enough, I'm not doing enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not good enough at marketing. Like all this not enoughness really makes marketing feel heavy and hard. I'm not consistent enough, you know, all these not enough things. And I hear this all the time from people and it really is holding us back, you know, when we are just consistently thinking we're not enough. And then it's our unwillingness to fail. And that kind of goes Hand in hand with perfectionism, right? Our unwillingness to fail makes marketing feel hard. We feel like, oh, this post or this email or this, you know, brochure or this ad is going to be the thing. This one piece is going to be the thing that's going to, you know, create the sales. And so we put so much pressure on ourselves and we so much pressure on this one thing, or maybe it's this one strategy that. And we're unwilling to try and fail and iterate and fail and tweak and fail. Like if we're not willing to fail, we're not going to succeed. Your success, which I'm sure you've had success in your career, in your business, in your life, is always built on a mountain of failures. And so the more we fail, the greater success we can enjoy. So, and it's the same with our marketing, right? We continue to go out, have fun, try new things and that is how we're going to find our thing, right? But if we're unwilling to fail and we have to have everything perfect, it just makes it marketing feel so hard. We don't get anything put out there. The website is never done, we never post. The blogs are never written. Right. Never finished. Because we want everything to not fail and whatever that might me, right. Also something that I see a lot is thinking that makes marketing feel really hard and heavy is thinking of our critics, for example. And this comes up a lot on social media and for me too, right? So it's like if we're going to write a post, we're thinking about, oh, what is so and so gonna think? What you know, are my parents gonna think, oh, what's my mother in law gonna say? What, you know, we're thinking of all these people that might be critics in our lives and what they're gonna think about our content rather than thinking of the people that we're actually wanting to reach with our content. So, you know, I, I've seen this with clients that are leaders, you know, like thought leaders in their industry and they're resistant to post something or publish something because someone might argue with them or you know, call bullshit on whatever they wrote and say that they're wrong or their opinions are wrong. But that's not who we're writing for, that's not who we are speaking to. And so when we're thinking of those critics, we're actually just giving airtime to our inner critic is really what it is because nine times out of 10, we're not going to hear those critical voices but we'd hear them inside of us because it's our inner critic, right? And so that makes marketing feel really hard. If we have to try and write things or create things that no one will have any objection to, then it just is an impossible task. So. And then finally, the final thing that I see that makes marketing feel very hard and heavy is shame and lack of feeling safe to be seen. Many of us, especially as women, we are ashamed of how we look, frankly, certain things about our bodies or our voice or whatever we feel shame around. And so because of that, we don't want to put ourselves out there. We don't want to be in front of the camera. We don't want to stand up on the stage and speak. We don't want to put our voices out there. And so it keeps us small because of that lack of feeling safe. And I think this is a huge issue with us as women in really standing up and stepping out because we have been conditioned that we need to stay part, you know, stay under the radar and part of the. Part of the pack, so to speak, and not stand out. Because then when we stand out, it's often dangerous for us. You know, are speaking for me personally, when I used to step up and stand out when I was working in corporate, it opened me up to being harassed by men, right. And being, you know, advanced upon by men. And so I decided to stay small because I, I was not safe going big. And it's one of the reasons I started my own business, so I didn't have to, you know, so I could go as big as I wanted in my business without experiencing that type of treatment from male colleagues or bosses or whatever. So. But that, that kind of fear is still out there because, you know, I put something on, on social media, and then I have a half a dozen men that are, you know, messaging me. Of course, you know, in that context, it's really easy. You block them, you delete them. You know, it's easier than when you're in the office, right. But there is this sense that it isn't safe for us to be seen and to stand out. So just have awareness of that. And there, you know, I. It's not. There's nothing wrong with that. I just want us to have awareness that, yeah, I, that might be why I feel. I don't feel safe having my face in pictures on social media or recording videos or whatever it is because I have either shame about something, some part of myself, or I don't feel safe. And so that can make marketing Feel hard. And so this can sound like all of these things can sound like thoughts that come up, like, I don't know what to say, or I don't like pictures of me, or maybe I don't know how to bring all of this stuff together that I've learned and seen and what everyone else is doing for marketing. I don't know how to bring it all together for me. Or it can sound like I'm not doing enough or my audience is too small, or maybe it's, I need more eyeballs on my stuff. Those can all be thoughts that feel heavy and make marketing feel hard. And so I want to just share with you. And I can say this because I've thought all those thoughts, felt all those feelings. And so I want to share with you how I have made marketing easier for myself and my own business and how I teach my clients to do the same. So, number one is really understanding what marketing is for us as small businesses and us as women. And for small businesses and entrepreneurs like us, it's marketing is simply creating connections with other humans. And so I love this because we as women are innately relational and really great at creating connection. That's just who we are, most of us. I mean, that sounds like a generalization, but we are wired to create connection, and so we are uniquely qualified. And this is one of our superpowers, right? So if we just sit back in that and understand that we innately know how to create connection with other humans, then we already know how to be a great marketer, right? This is our competitive advantage. This is our competitive advantage as women and also as small businesses. Big corporations cannot create the connections and the relationships like we do. They're just not equipped to do that. And so let's just, you know, step into that and really lean into that for ourselves. And so how can we do that? So I want you to remember that all things being equal, people want to work with people they like. And even all things not being equal, people still want to work with people that they like, right? So what does it take to know if you like someone or if someone likes you? It takes getting to know each other, right? And that's really what marketing is, is allowing connection, allowing other humans to get to know us and for us to be reaching out and getting to know other humans. So think about how you like to do that, how you like to connect and show up and create relationships with other people as just a person, a normal person with a really great gift and value to offer, right? And so that's what I like to think about. And I also like to think about simplifying. You know, I'm all about simplicity. And so simplifying your marketing, which to me means stop trying to be all the places and do all the things right. Just stop it. We want to be on all the social media platforms, we want to be writing the blogs, doing the, you know, videos, all the things. Stop it. Just stop. And chances are unless you've got a team supporting you, you're just half assing your marketing all over the place. And so it's almost like if you think about creating relationships and marketing is like creating relationships with a romantic partner. Like if you're just out having first dates with a hundred people, that's great. And if that's what you want to do, that's great. But you're not going to ever create deep, meaningful relationships with any of them if you're only, you know, just kind of going a mile wide and an inch deep is how I like to think about it. And that's what we're doing when we're have a very complex marketing and we're not keeping it simple and keeping it deep. We're just like surface level all over the place. But that doesn't allow people to know us, like us or trust us. So we need to create those connections. And in order to do that, we got to stop trying to be all places, all things to all people in all places and doing all the things right. So you can simplify your marketing by breaking it down to its fundamental principles. So number one that I like to talk about is owning your business value and communicating it out, learning how to communicate it simply. And that includes knowing what your unique mix of tangible value is, business value and intangible value, which are those qualities of how you provide your product or service that are unique to you. So the number two from there then you grow your visibility, which is basically picking out and leaning into and amplifying your favorite ways of showing up and go all in on those few ways, for example, whether it's email marketing or networking or social media. And if you're on social media, I suggest just a couple platforms that you're really involved in and having conversations and developing friendships and relationships there. Right? So and then number three is to make compelling offers that feel great for you to make feel great for clients to say yes to and pay for and just keeping your marketing super simple like that. And yes, it really can be this easy. This is how I have grown a six figure coaching business, right? Is really by owning my business value, communicating it out, growing my visibility and really focusing in on where I want to show up and then finally having really compelling, irresistible offers that I love offering and people love buying and people get, my clients get great results from. That's all I do. And so when we simplify it and really lean in to infusing our marketing and our business with our personality and not trying to be some corporate thing or not trying to be like some other entrepreneur or fitting ourselves into someone else's box and doing it like somebody else, but just really leaning into how we want to do it. And this really is what I love teaching and, and if you want my personal coaching and to work with me personally on how to do this in your business, I want to invite you to join me. I am hosting a live one day, live in person workshop and coaching event called your Marketing unleashed in October. October 14th. This is 2022. It's full day. Well, not really even a full day. We're going to be there 10 to 3. I'm going to be serving lunch and you're going to be in a room full of other women doing the same work and supporting each other and growing this community of women and just really changing the face of how business is done and, and money is made. Right? So I just invite, invite you to join me. The link will be in the show notes. You can visit my website, you can visit any of my socials. The link to sign up, it's 99 you guys. So it's a great, great value and we will make sure that you get everything you need that day to really make marketing easy and simple and feel great and just unleash you and your brilliance in your business and in your marketing and you're going to be able to just crush those Q4 goals and be all set up for 2023. So I hope that you consider joining me for that. But in the meantime, start thinking about how you can make your marketing easier, simpler and less heavy. Right? Because anything that's heavy in our business is a signal that it doesn't belong. We just need to get rid of it. All right, I am off to my retreat and to enjoy fall weather in the mountains. And I hope you have a great day week weekend whenever you are listening to this and thank you so much for being here and if you like this podcast and what you've learned here today, I just invite you to subscribe and even leave a review. I would love to if you would leave a review and let me know what you're thinking and how I can make this better and any suggestions you have, I'm here to listen. All right, my friends, I'll see you soon. Take care. Bye. If you like this podcast, then you have got to sign up for my free on demand video training, Grow youw Sales Doing what yout Love. Where I teach you in depth my simple process that you can implement right away to harness your mindset and your skills to grow your sales to whatever level you want. So go grab that now. The link is in the show notes and I'll see you next time.