It can be very overwhelming to be a business owner today with the sheer amount of marketing advice being thrown at you. Ads, emails, cold calls, social media posts, advice from random people.
How do you know what to pay attention to?
I was thinking about this last week after talking to lots of business owners who had seriously broken foundations in their marketing infrastructure - archaic websites with wrong or incomplete information about their products and services - but were more focused on the sexiest new things: all kinds of AI tools, social media trends, ranking in generative search results, etc.
Of course, this is human nature. We crave novelty.
As a former newspaper reporter, I know this well. You don’t report what matters the most, you report what’s new. A newspaper that just printed the same important, proven, reliable information every day wouldn’t sell very much.
But, if you know little about the history of certain subjects, or the fundamentals of certain concepts, news about those things isn’t helpful. You need some foundational knowledge to put updates on those topics in the right context.
Health news is a notorious example. Every day there are headlines about some food or supplement being good or bad for you, often contradicting previous advice. But the basics of human health don’t change that much from what you can find in a textbook. You’d be better off first getting that baseline knowledge and ignoring all the clickbait trends.
In marketing, the equivalents are headlines like “XYZ is dead,” declaring some other new technique as the only way to succeed. Or it’s a tool of some kind that will supposedly change everything.
However, if you don’t have the essentials set up, this is all just noise.
It’s boring, but what matters more is making sure you have a clear strategy of what you want to do, and you execute it consistently.
Once you have that, you’ll have a much easier time deciding what to do with new information, and what you can simply ignore for now.
The news will still be there when you’re ready for it.
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