Quick & Dirty - What if You Suck at Marketing

Zack Greenfield • April 6, 2021
All right guys, we're back in the saddle here at quick and dirty marketing. And today I want to talk to you about kind of one of my favorite topics. And that is What if you suck. So, and of course that's from a marketing standpoint. So stick with me and I'm going to talk to you about that because there is a better answer than you might think. 

What have you suck at promoting your business? What if you suck at writing emails, what have you suck at trying to fix your website? I mean, what have you suck at all of this stuff? Okay, well, here's the answer it's okay. Because everybody starts out sucking and even if you're expert at your field. So let's like we do a lot of work in healthcare and local healthcare marketing. 

I love working with doctors. I especially love working with veterinary offices, but we've done a ton of projects like that. And, and these, these folks are highly trained. They've been to a lot of school. Some of them have been in practice for years and they are really in a lot of cases good at what they're doing. But that doesn't mean they're good at everything. And they sometimes, you know, marketing is a weird thing these days, right? Everybody is aware, everybody is aware of marketing and internet marketing and all of these things that, you know, we, we cover on this channel, but you know, are just kind of prevalent in today's society. Now everybody's aware they're being advertised to, there's just a level of consciousness now about all of it. That is, you know, kind of the status quo. And that's true for folks that are experts at whatever their field is. 

And in this case, we're talking about doctors. So they are experts at being doctors and they are certainly conscious of the requirements and the needs of marketing and their practices. And they might even be aware of all these cool things like auto responders and sales pages and retargeting and, um, pay per click. You know, every doctor knows about pay-per-click and you know, they, so they know the terms and they kind of know roughly what all that stuff is. But then you look at everything that's happening and the whole thing just sucks, right? Like they're not bringing on enough patients. They've got attrition rate that they know everything they're conscious, you know, aware, but they suck. And there's a couple of reasons why one is they didn't they went to school to be a doctor and then spend the last 15 years figuring out marketing or, you know, they didn't, that's not what their focus was. 

And the other thing is that in today's environment, um, and this is where there's going to be more. So you really want to subscribe right now because I've got some cool stuff I'm going to drop about how and why there's so much failure with marketing for local businesses. So if you have a small business or a medium business, or, or you're a local business owner, or you have a small e-commerce store, this next series of videos, we're, I'm going to talk to you about why you, you constantly feel like you're failing with your marketing and partly why you're not. And of course, how to get through that. Okay. So either way, the, the story though, is, is that as much as you could be an expert at what you do and an expert on your products and services, you may not be great at promoting them. 

And it's okay to suck because here's the thing. Marketing is just like a lot of other things in life that you might suck at. Like, it's just like going to the gym and it's just like working on your golf swing. And it's just like working on your relationships. And it's just like going to med school because on day one of any of those things, you suck, right. And on day two, you still kind of suck. And even on year two, you still kind of suck. Okay, but you don't suck as bad as you did when you started. So the other thing I want to say about that is if you feel that way, it's probably because you're aware and you want to solve the problem and you want your business to grow and you want to be better at it. You wouldn't be hyper, you know, self-critical, if you didn't know that it could be better. 

I mean, if you're sitting there and you're watching this video and you're like, Zach dude, I'm an awesome marketer. I know exactly what I'm doing. I get as many patients, customers, clients, and, and sell as much stuff as I want every single month, all the time. And I barely even have to get out of bed to do it. If that's you, which I mean, come on, get real. If that's you though, go ahead, click off this video. You don't need me or anyone for anything. In fact, start making your own videos because I want to hear what it is that you're done because in general marketing, your business is like going to the gym. It's not one in a day. It's not one in a week and it's not even one necessarily in a year. It's one over time. And that time is how you get out of sucking and into producing great results. 

The problem with this and where I see so many local business owners, doctors, or, or, you know, and e-commerce people, it get frustrated and, and sort of label the whole thing as is because they were willing to suck at whatever it was that got them success in their niche and got through that. But they're not willing to suck at promoting and marketing their business. So they will go along and try, try, try and fail, fail, fail, and set of building on those failures, right? Failing forward, or failing faster. However you want to express that we all need to do it. But instead of doing that, they immediately, um, protect their own ego. And we'll off load the causes of that to everything else. Oh, well, pay-per-click, doesn't work. Our Instagram is not my audience and well, YouTube, you know, you know, videos just don't work for my business, right? 

Everything is somebody else's fault. Right? All the marketing is a fault, Oh, we hired the wrong agency or that guy sucked or, you know, whatever it was the website. I mean, if I just had a better website than my, then I would, I would have more customer. I, you know, this, I hired this guy, paid him 5,000 bucks for the website. And like, it just doesn't do anything for my business. Like, so the issue with that is they're, they're either they're going to bring in enough people, they can blame, or they're going to do it enough and just blame the world because they don't want to acknowledge that they're in the process of failing to get better. And that's a shame. So while I'm saying on this video today is if you feel like right now, you're watching this, that your marketing sucks, your advertising sucks. 

You feel like you might be losing money. You feel like you don't know what to, how to put it all together. And, and it's, and it's frustrating. You guess what? You're on the right path. You're, you're headed in the right direction. Welcome to the party. It's okay to be totally crappy at it for awhile. And, and here's what I need to promise you. If you don't deal with that and continue to just build on how build on all of that and build forward, then I promise you you're going to suck forever. I mean, that's, that's, that's the promise, right? I mean, if you quit the race, you are guaranteed to lose. 

We were just screwing around because we, I, that I said a while ago that, uh, I thought we needed to do more videos for our business. I wanted to share what I had learned. It was time, you know, after 10 years of doing this, that it was time for me to, to, to tell my stories. And we made some, we made some videos. They suck. I, when I watch them now, I just cringe. I mean, I'm not really saying much different stuff. It's still me, but the videos suck, the way we shot him, the sound was just bad. But guess what, you know, we did, we committed to being for however long that took to where we got to this, which is still going to get better. 

It's just, this is to me, you know, an example of going from total crap and having to have the humility to go through that to now where, you know, we can have a little bit of pride in what we're putting out. Okay. So if you are struggling and if you feel like you suck cherish that moment, man, or sister of mine and live through it, be present and make incremental improvements. Okay. Which is a hint to some of my next videos. So go ahead and subscribe like this video fit, encouraged and lifted you up a little bit. I want you to keep sucking just in a way that gets you forward to your objective. And of course, I'm going to keep sharing my stories. 
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