Started my diet this week (still not skinny 😭)

“You’ve been sending a LOT of emails,” she said. “How do you find the time?”

“I’m planning to do them daily eventually,” I said with a laugh. “And besides, it doesn’t really take me that long. I just come up with a story and it sorta flows from there.”

“But has it been working?” she asked. “Like, what kind of results are you getting?”

“That's like asking me how much weight I've lost on my diet,” I replied.

“But you only just started your—Oh.”

(If ONLY dieting was that easy. 😭)

“...You’re gonna end up making THIS one of your email stories, aren’t you?”

I shrugged before taking a sip of my coffee. “I might.”

To be honest, I wasn’t planning on making it a story (at least, not yet), but then I had a similar conversation with another person. Less about my emails, and more about marketing in general. It centred around two very common frustrations:

1. “I’m not getting anything out of it.”
2. “It shouldn’t be this much work.”

Maybe you’ve had a conversation like this before. It’s a common mentality in business—especially in small biz, where positive cashflow can be the difference between whether or not you can afford to feed your family this month.

It’s why a lot of marketers and agencies annoy me. They treat a “mom-and-pop” store with the same clinical detachment as a multi-million dollar corporation. When a client gets nervous they moan behind their backs:

• “They’re just being cheap.”
• “If they spent more, they’d see results.”
• “Results take time, what are they complaining about?”

But when you’re a small business owner, that money isn’t just another line item on a spreadsheet. It's the mortgage. The school fees. The vacation you've already put off for the last two years.

It’s just another justification for why I believe small biz owners should only pick one or two marketing channels and go deep. If you spread yourself too thin, you’re only making it far more difficult to get traction.

Of course, this is specifically in relation to “organic” marketing, aka your “earned” and “owned” channels. There is no get-rich-quick scheme for these channels, and anyone trying to sell you one is a bloody liar. If you need results today, pay-to-play ads are probably your best bet… assuming your audience is actually using the platform you run the ads on.

But the second you stop feeding the meter, the lights go out.

Plus there’s a whole host of other considerations, like your cost per acquisition and customer lifetime value and can your cashflow even afford the media spend, let alone the agency retainer. You could try and run them yourself, of course, but do you even know what you’re doing? I sure as shit don't. The platforms make it look easy… but they also want your money, so it’s worth taking every recommendation from Meta or Google with a pinch of salt. 🧂

The reality is that healthy marketing—much like a healthy diet—is a mix. People much smarter than me, like Les Binet and Peter Field, have literally written the book on this (It's called The Long and the Short of it, 10/10 recommend). Short-term activation helps you keep that cashflow in the black, but if you want to grow sustainably, you shouldn't skimp on your long-term brand building.

If you're constantly thinking in 30-day increments, you'll be stuck in a cycle of feast-and-famine. You’ll get quick wins that don't compound.

It’s the same lesson I’ve learned at BNI, the networking group I joined a year ago. Their core value is “Givers Gain”—the idea that you get out exactly what you put in. But you have to actually be willing to put it in first.

Digital marketing has trained us to obsess over immediate ROI. We’re told that if a post or an email doesn't have a direct line to a sale, it’s just “vanity metrics”.

🤨

…Does anyone else think that's kinda ridiculous?

Surely it's not just me?

If you buy an investment property or a portfolio of stocks, you don't expect a massive windfall in 4 weeks. You know you're looking at a 5-to-10-year horizon minimum. Yet, for some reason, we expect our marketing to defy the laws of compounding interest and deliver a 30-day miracle?

So yes, I’m sending a lot of emails. Yes, I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. Yes, I put in a lot of time into in-person networking. Yes, I'm breaking my own rule of only 1 to 2 channels… but writing and marketing is literally my job, so do as I say not as I do. 🤪

No, the results aren't as “sexy” or instant as a high-spend ad campaign. But I'm planting seeds. I'm basically in the “bulking” phase of my brand's diet lol. It might seem backwards and inefficient now, but it'll look fucking killer later.

It's called the long game, baby. One that builds real muscle… erm, relationships.

Because, to me, that’s what marketing is really all about.

Cheers,
Cass

P.S. Need help with your brand building diet? BrandForge is where I'm basically your personal trainer. Check it out here → cwh.cl/brandforge