Are you writing a lot of great content for your blog and still not seeing results from it? Are you grinding away at your work yet still not making the sales you need to reach your goals? Do you honestly feel you’re great at what you do, but you’re failing to actually bring in orders or clients? There’s a reason for this. And luckily, it’s something that can be fixed. Read on

Marketing is More Important than What You Sell

Most of us feel our craft is the most important thing in our business, correct? Perhaps you’re a musician. Maybe you’re an attorney, a Realtor or some other professional. Maybe you run a coffee shop or a boutique clothing store. Whatever you do, it’s likely you care about what you sell a great deal. But how much do you care about your marketing?

Do you passionately care about connecting with your audience and selling to them effectively, as much as you care about what you sell? This is vital! Whatever it is you sell, it’s important that you love it. It’s true. But it’s also essential to realize that without powerful marketing, you have no business. Quite literally, you can be an absolutely amazing guitar player, but if you don’t have an agent and a seriously effective business plan (which you put into action religiously), the odds of you being a rock star are slim to none. Just go to any bar blues bar in Austin, TX and witness the amazing talent on display there night after night, all from amazingly talented and passionate musicians, whom you’ve never heard of. I don’t like those kind of odds, do you? On the flip side of the coin, look at all the mediocre musicians we hear on the radio daily.

A great product is not what makes a great business. Great MARKETING is what makes a great business. Product quality is secondary.

Bottom line, if you want your business to succeed, you need to study marketing. Oddly enough, when you become a competent and effective marketer, you will find your marketing skills fix a multitude of problems in your business. I mean this very seriously, good marketing makes nearly EVERYTHING run more smoothly for you. It’s not just about increasing sales and making more money. It’s about improving your business inside out.

Success Principle: Marketing First, Everything Else is Second

The reason so many of us suck at marketing is because we don’t put a priority on it like we should. In most businesses, marketing is an afterthought. We create a product or service, then we try to sell it. Really, we should do the opposite. We should spend a good amount of time interacting with our audience through blogging, networking, keyword research, Twitter and other tools. We should spend our time testing ideas, paying attention to how our audience responds. We should listen to what they care about, talk about and whine about. It leads to understanding, and understanding leads to fantastic products.

When you put marketing first in your business, some amazing things happen. Here are a few:

• Since you spend the bulk of your time networking and listening to your audience first (BEFORE you try to sell anything) you end up creating products that people are dying to have, so they sell well immediately.
• Your sales efforts are a lot more relaxed and natural, because you’re selling something people really want.
• You develop a natural confidence that you can provide value and make sales.
• Your confidence allows you to stop working with clients and customers who beat you up or who are not respectful of you, because you KNOW there are a lot of other people who DO care about what you’re doing. Clinging to horrible clients and customers is the bane of many small business owners’ existence. When you know for a fact you can always go out and get more business, cutting the bloodsuckers loose is very easy.
• Your sales increase. Booyah!
• You save a lot of time and money. You don’t spend time and money developing products and services that no one wants, because you put marketing FIRST, not second.

I hope you can see from this list that marketing should actually be the leading force in your business, not your craft. When you put marketing first, you can let your marketing actually shape what you offer, and that’s what makes the difference between a good offering and a fantastic one. Let me know what you think!