All great founder-led businesses outgrow their marketing

Or rather, they should.

You didn't start your business with a carefully mapped-out marketing strategy.

You knew your clients. You knew what excellent work looked like. You worked out your pricing through experience. 

However, over the years, your services changed as the business changed. Your reputation brought in more varied work, and good opportunities opened up new avenues for the business.

You got your business to where it is because you are very good at what you do. You held the whole business (including the marketing) in your head, and for a long time that worked perfectly well.

But the business you have now isn't the business you started with.

You have more services. Your pricing has changed. You might be speaking to several different types of clients. You've added a newsletter, Instagram, maybe a lead magnet, maybe LinkedIn. Other people are now involved in the marketing.

This is when things start to feel unnecessarily difficult.

Rewriting the website becomes a six-month project. 

Content takes far too long. 

Nobody is quite sure which service should be getting the attention. 

Different audiences are being spoken to in the same place. 

Anyone new has to work the business out by reading old posts. 

The newsletter goes out because you've decided you should have a newsletter, but nobody has really decided what it's there to do.

These look like problems with the website, the content, the newsletter, or your Instagram.

However, marketing confusion, procrastination, or the sense that you are spending time, money, and worry without a clear purpose usually comes from upstream factors that have never been carefully looked at.

Your business goals, and what marketing is meant to do about them. 

How you want to position the business. 

The offer. The price. 

Who you are trying to reach, and where. 

Which part of the business you want to grow.

What is long-term marketing? What is short-term marketing? Do you need both? Is picking something in the middle ok?

What needs your immediate attention?

The website is one of the clearest examples I can give you.

Yours might feel wrong. Ugly. Pointless. It might be all three, but the likely thing is that you don’t have that type of website problem. 

How it looks does matter, but it is a down-the-line decision, only to be considered once you know the answer to some or ideally all of these:

• What do you want this website to do for the business? Are you using it for that? 

• When the right person lands on it, do they recognise the business is for them? 

• Are people moving through it the way you want? Are they getting in touch?

• Is the copy reflecting your positioning? Is it attracting your ideal clients?

• Is the offer clear? Do visitors know how to hire you?

• Is it doing more than converting? Is it capturing possible leads, those “not quite ready to pull the trigger” visitors?

• Are you articulating your UVP - why they should hire you and no one else, your style and taste, or that special thing that makes you right for them?

None of those are design questions.

A marketing strategist will ask you these and other questions before they suggest a rebrand of the website, or before they do or suggest anything at all. 

Unless this work is done, every freelancer you hire decides it for you by default.

Your marketing will be scattered, the results watered down, and you won't feel like you understand where any of it is going.

Your business is amazing. 

You worked very hard to get it here. Now it needs marketing built for the business you have, not the one you started.