After owning a marketing agency for 18 years, I can tell you there are a few things I hear over and over before a business owner finally calls me.

“My social media person told me I need to post one to three times a day.”

“I think I just need to run ads.”

“My branding does not have to match everywhere. People do not care about that stuff.”

 

WRONG! The idea is not wrong but the method or thereby lack of strategy is totally void!

Yes, you should show up on social media when it makes sense. When you add value to your followers. Creating know, like and trust absolutely value. Posting incesently 1-3 times a day becomes absolute noise. Think about your feed. Do you want to see endless posts from someone posting just to post? Likely you will put them on silent for a bit.

This is also NOT where you are hard selling. This is where you are creating repeat future customers and followers. Leave the hard sell for your paid ads.

 

Yes, paid ads can bring in leads faster than waiting around for people to find you on their own. BUT running them with nothing else is a huge money suck.

They can bring attention, traffic, leads, calls, appointments, and sales. But they will not fix a weak offer, a confusing website, slow follow-up, or a business that hasn’t figured out what it wants people to do after they click.

You can spend money sending people to your website all day long, but if they land there and still have to dig around to figure out where they make their purchase or find out more about you before they hit that buy button they will bounce off the page and go to someone who gives them that “quick fix.”

Consumers WANT simplicity. Most people are busy and you have seconds to get their attention and a minute or so to get them to convert into a buyer. So what you do with your marketing matters.

Despite what you have been told, Yes, your brand matters. Everything you put out should represent who you are. From fonts, colors and even style it should be easy to recognize whos marketing it is. Think of national brands you can see or say “swoosh” and you know who just popped into your head. That is marketing a brand.

People may not say, “Your messaging feels inconsistent,” but they feel it when your ads sound one way, your website sounds another way, and your social media looks like it belongs to a completely different company.

People trust what feels clear and familiar. They need to understand who you are, what you do, and what they can expect when they work with you.

This is why your website, the media you own, your email list, and CRM should sit at the center of your marketing plan. You don’t own those social media platforms. Those medias can change the rules, change the costs, or disappear over night (remember the TikTok panic of 2025?) Need I say more… and then you are dead in the water. NEVER depend on a third party company to control your narrative, the way your customers buy or how we communicate.

 

All the pieces work but as a system. The plan is what tells those pieces where they belong and what they are supposed to do.

Believe it or not every channel is not for everyone. Find what works for you and your audience. You build the strategy, create the plan, put the right pieces in place, test what is working, fix what is not, and keep moving based on actual results instead of somebody’s latest marketing advice on the internet.

 

Marketing is a multi channel and multi faceted system that connects everything back to a single source- your website/owned media.

You have to realize marketing is a long game and paid ads are the quick wins to make money. Nothing works though without a plan. You have to have the strategy, plan, the implementation, testing and before execution of a full launch. There is a method to the madness that IS marketing.

Not sure where to begin? Contact us! We are here to help set you up for success. msj@msjmarketinginc.com