I often talk to business owners who are looking to increase their sales, looking for any way to take their business to the next level.

These are hard working, intelligent professionals who have mastered a craft and provide incredible services.

But most of the time, they aren’t marketers and have little experience in this area.

It makes sense - unless you went to school for marketing or have done it for years, it isn’t what you’re great at.

So naturally, they turn to tactics that they’ve seen online or intuitively think makes sense.

Running ads, posting on social media, adding listings in the newspaper, etc.

Because of their lack of knowledge, they come up with a random array of different activities - taking up time, resources, and money from what they do best.

They’re doing everything they can think of to find new business. But it isn’t working.

And this sucks - spending time and money trying to find new business, using every tactic under the sun, just to be left with a blurry picture of what actually works.

So, why are they failing?

It’s not that they aren’t doing enough to promote themselves. They’re doing a lot.

They’re on every channel, posting constantly, and spending tons of money. It isn’t a shortage of effort or inputs.

The problem is, they’re actually doing too much.

Sounds odd, right? How would there be too much marketing?

More marketing means more people see your business, know your name, and inevitably will call you when it’s time to use your service, right?

Well, maybe.

But because they’ve chosen to use so many tactics, they’ve become spread too thin. And they can’t really tell what’s working and what’s not.

There’s too much randomness and not enough focus, which leads to a lot of average results.

Average results are bad in marketing. Average means you’ll hardly get any return on your investment.

And the only way to break through being average is to focus. To go all in on one thing until you get great at it.

Marketing is hard. Acquiring customers is hard. It takes time, effort, and focus to really get good at anything. Marketing is no different.

You’re competing with agencies and experts in the space who have done this for years and know every trick in the book.

And when you try to compete with multiple different tactics across multiple channels, you won’t beat them.

You’ll be mid-tier in every channel, which is a recipe for disaster.

You don’t do enough to see concrete signals that it’s actually working. And you don’t spend enough time figuring out how to make each channel work. And you never get enough data to know what to do next.

It doesn’t work.

Facebook ads are different from email campaigns. SEO is very different from purchasing leads.

The only way to really get a marketing tactic to work is to go all in on it.

Successful marketing is based on learning. The more you spend and test, the more you learn, which allows you to improve it. You launch, analyze, and optimize over and over until you get it right.

And to do this properly, you’ll need to overinvest in time and money up-front.

You must be laser focused on one area, attempt to get it working well, optimize it, and master it before you move onto the next.

Otherwise you’ll be in this endless cycle of trying new things, starting the learning phase all over, and underinvesting until you give up again.

This is what I see most businesses doing.

You have to go through the growing pains to learn and optimize. There is no other way.

So, right now, look at all of the marketing you’re doing. Rank each one in order of importance, focusing on what brings you the most new business. Then, select 1 of them to focus on for the next 3 months. Put everything on the back burner for another day.

Get good at the one thing, look at the data, and iterate and improve it until it’s your #1 lead and sales source.

Double down on it, and move to the next channel once you have it working perfectly.