Hey. Welcome to the new School of Marketing podcast. I'm Bianca McKenzie, and this is the place where we break down marketing strategies that actually work without the overwhelm.
Before we dive in, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land I live and work on, the palawa people of lutruwita. I pay my respects to elders past and present and acknowledge the deep connection they have to this land, culture and community.
Now let's dive in and make marketing work for you.
Okay, I'm going to be really honest with you today.
This episode comes from a place of frustration, like, real frustration. And I'll try not to get too ranty, but it's the kind of frustration that's been building for a while now, and I'm just going to let it out.
I need to say this to you.
I've been in business since 2014.
For myself, I've had other businesses before that, but for myself, it's been 12 years.
So 12 years of, you know, building, learning, pivoting, sometimes failing at things, sometimes succeeding at things.
I started over a few times, you know, refining things and just showing up consistently, even when it was hard and even when I genuinely didn't feel like it.
12 years.
And in those 12 years, I have never, not once, found a shortcut that actually worked.
But if you spend five minutes, you know, scrolling through social media or listening to ads on any platform, you'd kind of think that shortcuts are everywhere.
You would think that significant business results are available to basically anyone willing to spend, you know, $997 on the right course or implement the right, you know, secret strategy. You would think that overnight success is not only possible, but expect it.
You think that if your business is taking longer than a few months to gain real traction, that something must be wrong with you.
Here's the thing. Nothing is wrong with you.
Nothing is wrong with you.
But something is very wrong with the messaging that you are being sold.
And today we're going to talk about it.
Now, let me describe what prompted this episode. Because it wasn't just one thing. It was an accumulation of different things.
So I see ads every day. I mean, I'm sure we all do.
And I'VE noticed that the ads targeting business owners and marketers, they've become increasingly, let's say, ambitious in their claims.
You know, I made 100k in my first 90 days, or how I went from 0 to 6 figures in 4 months.
Or the simple system that generates passive income while you sleep, or build a seven figure business working four hours a week. And look, I'm a marketing expert.
I know how ads work.
I know these claims are designed to trigger something in us that, you know, that particular cocktail of hope and of FOMO and the very human wish that success could be easier than we fear it is.
I know how it works.
And it still gets me sometimes.
That's how powerful this messaging is.
But here's what I also know from 12 years of actually doing this is that those claims are at best misleading and at worst, they're doing real damage to real business owners who believe in them, who invest in them and then don't get the promised results. And then they, they think that they are the problem, that they're not cut out for this, you know, business just doesn't work for them.
You are not the problem.
You are not the problem. I really, I just want to, I don't know, I just want to give you one big hug and tell you you are not the problem.
The shortcut is the problem.
And I want to spend some time today being really clear about why.
Let's start with the overnight success myth, because it's one of the most pervasive and damaging stories in the business world.
You know, someone appears seemingly from nowhere.
You know, a new course creator, a new coach, a new brand.
And within what looks like a very short period of time, they are everywhere. You know, big launches, big numbers, big presence. And from the outside, it looks effortless, it looks fast. It looks like they cracked a code that everyone else is still searching for.
What you are not seeing is everything that came before.
You know, maybe they spent three years building an audience in a different niche before they pivoted to this one.
Maybe they had a career in corporate that gave them, you know, 20 years of experience that they are now packaging for the first time time.
Maybe they had a significant financial Runway that let them invest heavily in ads, in a team, in infrastructure that made them grow faster than it would otherwise have been.
Maybe they had a partner's income supporting them while they built.
Maybe they'd already failed at two other businesses and all of that learning went into this one.
The overnight success story is almost always a story that started years and sometimes the decades before. The overnight park.
You're just seeing the moment that the compounding became visible, not the years of quiet work that made it possible.
I've met enough successful business owners at this point to know that this is almost universally true.
The people who look like overnight successes are, without exception, people who worked for a very long time before the breakthrough moment actually arrived.
They didn't talk about the long part.
That's why you didn't know about it, because the long part is not what's going to get clicks.
Now let's talk about shortcuts specifically, because I think it's worth being precise here.
I'm not saying there aren't smarter ways to do things. I'm not saying that learning from someone else's experience is a waste of time.
I'm not saying that all courses and programs are snake oil. They're not. And some of them are genuinely excellent. I've been part of a few and I know they are absolutely brilliant.
What I am saying is that there is a difference between a smarter path and a shortcut.
A smarter part gets you to the destination more efficiently.
A shortcut promises to get you there without doing the actual work.
And it's the shortcut, you know, the promise of significant results with like, without a lot of effort and time.
That's the one I want to call out.
Because here's what shortcuts actually do. In my experience.
They give you a temporary hit of momentum, but it doesn't stick. Like you implement, you know, that so called secret strategy. You get this little burst of activity and then it fizzles.
Because it was never built on a foundation of real trust, real audience understanding, real positioning.
And then you need another shortcut to feel like you're moving again.
They also create dependency. If you're always looking for the next hack, the next system, the next thing that's going to change everything.
You're never going to develop your own judgment about what works for your specific business.
You're always outsourcing your thinking to, you know, whoever is selling the next thing.
And that's an expensive and unstable way to build a business.
They also erode your confidence.
Every shortcut that doesn't deliver what it promised makes you doubt yourself a little more. You know, maybe I'm not implementing it right, maybe I'm just not good enough at this.
And, you know, that's why you buy the next thing, hoping that, you know, that one will actually be the one and the cycle just continues.
And perhaps most importantly, they waste time that could have been spent doing the actual work.
Every week you spend chasing, like a shortcut is a week that you're not actually showing up consistently building your audience, refining your message, developing genuine expertise, and doing, you know, the unglamorous, unsexy work that actually builds businesses.
I want to share some of what I've actually learned in 12 years of building a business,
because I think there's more value in this than in any shortcut I've ever been sold.
So the first thing I've learned is that trust takes a long time to build and a very short time to lose.
Every piece of content I've ever created, every client I've ever served well, every promise I've kept, all of that has slowly, incrementally built the kind of trust that means people choose me, they refer me, they stay with me.
You can't rush that.
There is no hack for trust.
There are things you can do, but there is no hack for trust.
It accumulates through consistent, genuine, quality action over time, full stop.
The second thing I've learned is that the best thing I ever did for my business was to get really good at the actual work.
Not the marketing of the work, the work itself, you know, the depth of knowledge, the quality of thinking, the genuine expertise that I've developed over 12 years.
It means that when I say something, it comes from a place of real experience.
And that expertise is my most valuable marketing asset.
And expertise is only built one way, buy doing the work repeatedly over time.
The third thing is that slow growth is often more sustainable than fast growth.
I've watched businesses, you know, rocket to impressive numbers very quickly and then implode because the foundation wasn't there, because the systems couldn't hold the volume, because the audience wasn't genuinely aligned, because the shortcuts that created the growth were never going to sustain it.
I'm sure that if you've been around for a while, you know, some of these businesses, too, they kind of just go from 0 to 100, and then all of a sudden they implode. And then the whole business either changes, disappears, and the founder starts again. All of those things. I've seen it happen, and I've watched businesses grow slowly, steadily, year after year, and arrive at something genuinely solid and enduring.
And I know which one I'd rather have.
The fourth thing, and this one is important,
is that the work is the reward.
I know that sounds a little bit philosophical, but stay with me.
The businesses I find most fulfilling to run and most meaningful to be part of are the ones that are built on genuine relationships, genuine expertise and genuine value.
And those things only come from doing the actual work.
The shortcut versions, you know, the manufactured urgency, the inflated claims, the minimal effort for maximum return.
They might generate revenue, but they don't generate the kind of business that feels worth building.
You probably can feel it, can see it as a vibe.
Now, I want to say something about the timing of these ads, because I know a lot of it comes from ads like, it's, you know, those ads that are designed to find you when you're vulnerable.
So I want to say something about the timing of these ads because I think it's important, and it's something the people selling shortcuts understand very well.
These ads find you when you're in a particular kind of pain, when you're tired, when you've been working really hard and not seeing results that you hope for, when someone else seems to be, you know, further ahead of you, when the gap between where you are and where you want to be feels so painfully wide.
And that's not an accident.
The targeting of these ads is sophisticated, and the messaging is carefully designed to speak to that exact feeling.
You know, the tired of working so hard for so little or ready to finally crack the code, or, what if it didn't have to be this hard?
And in that moment of vulnerability, the shortcut is incredibly seductive because you're not in the mood for, you know, this takes time and consistent effort.
You want to hear that there's a faster way.
And so the ad speaks to that wish, and you buy the thing. And then you discover, as you always do, that it still requires real work to produce real results.
It just costs you time and money that you didn't need to spend getting to the discovery.
And I'm not immune to this. Oh, no, I am not immune to this. I have bought things in moments of frustration that I knew in my more, you know, rational moments were not going to deliver what they promised because I'm human.
Because, you know, the messaging is just good.
Because sometimes you just kind of want to believe that it could be easier.
But 12 years in, I have enough perspective to recognise the pattern pretty quickly, and I want to help you recognise it, too.
So if the shortcuts don't work, what does?
And I want to be really direct about this because I don't want this episode to just be, you know, me complaining about misleading ads, blah, blah, blah. I want it to be useful.
What works is unglamorous.
I'm going to say that up front because I think part of why shortcuts are so appealing is that the real path is so unexciting to talk about, you know, showing up consistently over a long period of time works.
Not virally, not, you know, spectacular growth, just reliable.
Just posting content, sending emails, having conversations, being present in your community week after week, month after month. And even when it's not generating obvious results yet, that consistency compounds into something real.
But it takes time, and most people are not willing to give it time.
We live in such a I want it now and I want it instantly culture that we're kind of forgotten the art of waiting.
Also, getting genuinely good at something works.
Not just skimming the surface of your expertise and then, you know, packaging it up, but actually going deep. Especially like, you know, reading, learning, applying, failing, refining, developing that real nuance in your thinking.
The world has no shortage of, you know, surface level expertise dressed up as authority.
Real depth is.
It's rare and it's so valuable,
especially now that AI is starting to take over in a lot of things.
Building real relationships work, not like networking in a transactional way.
How can this person help my business kind of sense, but genuine relationships built on mutual respect, on shared values, and actually caring for each other's success.
Those relationships, they generate referrals, they result in collaborations and in opportunities that ad campaigns can't replicate.
Serving your existing customers really, really well works as well.
We talked about this in our customer service episode.
So if you haven't listened to that, tune back into that.
Your existing customers, they're your most underutilised marketing asset.
So taking really good care of them, it's going to result in retention.
It'll get your referrals and it gets you repeat business.
And all of that cost a fraction of what getting new customers would be.
And patience works.
I know that's the least exciting thing about this that I could possibly say, but patience, like, you know, the willingness to do the right things consistently without demanding immediate proof that it's working, it is really one of the most powerful business advantages that you can have because most of your competitors probably don't have it.
They're also chasing shortcuts. And while they're doing that, you're compounding.
I really love that word, by the way. Compounding.
I want to close this section with something that I think a lot of business owners need to hear and that I wish someone had said to me more clearly in my early years.
You are allowed to take the long road.
In fact, the long road is the only road that actually goes where you want to go.
It is okay that your Business is taking longer than you hoped.
It is okay that you're not where you thought you'd be by now.
It's okay that you haven't cracked some code or found some secret that makes it all easy. All of a sudden.
That experience of it being harder and slower than you expected it to be, that is not a sign that you're doing it wrong. It's a sign that you're doing it for real.
The businesses that last, you know, the ones built on genuine expertise, genuine relationships, genuine, genuine trust, they all took longer than expected, every single one of them.
And they are all better for it.
So please, please stop buying the shortcuts.
Stop clicking on ads that promise you what they can't deliver and feeling bad that you haven't achieved it.
Stop comparing your real, honest, unglamorous progress to someone else's curated highlight reel of manufactured success.
Trust the process.
Do the work.
Take the long road, because it leads somewhere worth going.
Alrighty.
I've shared it with you. It wasn't too ranty, was it? I hope it wasn't.
Anyway, there you have it. The overnight success myth, the shortcut trap, and what 12 years of actually building a business has taught me about what really works.
So I have an action step for you, and it's not a complicated one.
This week, every time you see an ad or a piece of content promising you that you're going to get massive results with minimal effort, I want you to pause and ask one question.
I want you to ask, what are they not showing me?
Because there's always something that they're not showing you.
And getting in the habit of asking that question will save you a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of unnecessary self doubt.
And then go and do the actual work, you know, whatever that looks like in your business this week.
And I don't want you to do it because it's exciting, you know, because often it's not.
But it's what works.
And if you want to build your marketing on a foundation that actually lasts, with real strategy, real support, and zero promises of overnight success, because you know you ain't getting that from me.
That's exactly what we do. Inside the Marketing Momentum membership.
No shortcuts, just good, solid marketing work done consistently.
I will pop the link in the show notes so you can find out more.
Learn more about the membership here.
Thank you so much for tuning in to the new School of Marketing podcast. Remember, overnight success is a miss.
Consistent, genuine effort over time is not.
I'm Bianca McKenzie and I'll catch you next week. Until then, keep making marketing work for you the real way.
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