Do you ever feel like everyone online is offering a “quick fix” for your marketing problems? And if you take a closer look, each one of them is pointing in a different direction, offering a different answer?

How are you supposed to know what the right answer is for your particular challenge?

And let’s be clear… every “marketing challenge” comes down to one of these:

• How do I grow my business?
• Where do I find my next customer?
• How do I make more money?
• What do I need to do to feel confident and satisfied about my business? 

Finding the answers to these questions can be very confusing. Add to that a multitude of people offering a variety of “quick fix answers” can bring an amazing amount of stress to an already stressful situation.

So let’s create some clarity. Here’s what I want you to know…

First, there are no “quick fixes” to promoting and growing a business. 

Marketing is a long game. 

How long? We have to think in terms of years! For as long as your business is open, you’ll be promoting it. So if you truly do hear of anyone offering a “quick fix,” I highly recommend that you be wary. 

Quick fixes are often about alleviating an immediate pain with a short-term solution. Instead, we should be thinking about long-term answers that are structured and sustainable. More on that in a minute… 

Second, we need to keep the bigger picture in mind as we decide whether any particular “answer” will fit our unique situation.

Each of the things that we see people pointing to as “answers” to our marketing problem does not serve as an entire answer. Each of them – Instagram, Face, email, blog, video –  is just a small piece of the larger puzzle.…

They are all individual tactics meant to support your overall marketing strategy.

Will they help? It depends on some very specific things within your marketing strategy. And this is where you can lean in and get clear on which tactics will work for you and which will not.

Here are 3 questions that you can ask to determine whether a particular marketing tactic will work for you:

1. Will it help you connect with your audience?

The most important thing that any of us can do in our marketing is connect with our audience. It’s through that connection that we build relationships and find our next customer.

That’s why this is the first question to ask. 

For example, let’s say that someone has suggested that you would do well on LinkedIn. If your business is B2B (business-to-business), then yes, that could very well be true! But if you help people with personal challenges or you sell jewelry, that doesn’t work.

2. Will it work for YOU?

No matter what the tactic is, if it doesn’t work for you, it should stay off the table.

For example, consider your preferred style of communication. Let’s say you prefer to write, but talking through your ideas has never come easy. It would still be true that a video or podcast could work to help you promote your business, but it may be harder for you to execute on verses writing a blog.

And whether it’s something easy or difficult for you matters because marketing is something you have to sustain over the long game. Marketing is not a one-and-done kind of deal. Whatever we choose to do, we have to do over and over and over… and so, whether or not a particular strategy will work for YOU is one of the most important questions you can ask.

We’ve been talking about this exact question in my Group Coaching program recently: If social media isn’t comfortable for me, do I have to do it? What are my options? And I love this question because I think we forget that we do, in fact, have options! 

So no matter what tactic you’re considering, I invite you to be honest with yourself about whether it is something that will work for you over the long haul. Can you envision yourself still doing it 3 years down the road?

3. Will it fit your overall marketing strategy?

When considering new marketing tactics, it’s important to look at what you’re already doing and make sure that it fits in with what else you already have going on.

If you’re already on Facebook and you’re thinking about adding Instagram, that’s not a big shift. But if you’re thinking about adding a podcast and you aren’t doing anything like that, it’s a big shift that will require you to step back and consider how you want to integrate your existing activities with what you are already doing.

To pull these all together, here’s my own example: 

I just started a YouTube channel. This is something I’ve thought about doing for a long time.

Will it help me connect with my audience? I believe so, in part because it would give me a better outlet for creating longer content that lets me get detailed and go deeper. When I go live, I'll be able to have conversations with the audience I’m trying to reach.

Is it something that fits me? I already do Facebook Live and I enjoy working with video. I’m a verbal processor, meaning that I find it helpful to talk through my ideas before I write them down. So yes, absolutely!

Will it fit my overall strategy? This is where I had to slow down and really consider the plan. I’m most comfortable with Live video so that won't be a problem. But I'll also be pre-recording a lot of my videos so there’s a shift to the approach. Also, the process has added lots of new activities to my weekly marketing schedule and I’ve had to rearrange the order of when things happen… there’s been a lot to get my head around! But since I realized that YouTube would enable me to serve my audience better and I have been interested in the platform, I decided to bring it into my overall marketing strategy. It’s taking a lot of work to make the shift but I’m really pleased with where it’s headed.

Here’s one more thing…

If you're an introvert or an ambivert (that is, you fall someplace between introvert and extrovert) and you’re still trying to figure out what your best marketing strategy is, I invite you to download the Introvert’s Tactical Guide to Digital Marketing. In it, I walk through the 5 marketing tactics that I’ve found work best for the introverted clients that I’ve worked with over the years. It’s designed to help you decide what marketing tactics you’d like to use to promote your business by offering guidance on why each of the suggested activities would or would not work, depending on your personal style.