As an entrepreneur, I wear many hats. I’m my company’s chief accountant, salesperson, strategist, and product-builder. I’m responsible for making sure that my business stays thriving six months and six years from now. It’s exhausting, scary, and highly rewarding — all at once.
The biggest challenge that I face is that there are only 24 hours in the day. With 8 hours spent sleeping, I have very little time to be everything to everyone. I’m constantly in the trenches, working with my existing customers, which means that I have very little time to build marketing campaigns, guest blog, and build the infrastructure that I need to keep my business growing sustainably.
The irony is that my company is a marketing company. I help other companies grow their demand generation, customer acquisition, and retention programs. When it comes to my customers, I’m all in, but when it comes to my own marketing operations, I need to carve out time where I can find it.
The biggest lesson that I’ve learned is to invest in initiatives that make a lasting impact — to build marketing into my day-to-day operations and to maximize the impact of each and every moment that I spend doing what I already do. It’s this mindset that has helped me grow my business to more than 50 startup and enterprise clients in the last two years. It’s these skills that have helped move me ahead:
1. The ability to write
The Internet makes communication more important than ever and that’s where business writing comes to play. Running a content production company, I see firsthand that companies are struggling to build thought leadership within the communities that they influence. That’s why, in addition to my client work, I always make time to blog about the topics that inspire me personally and professionally — the ability to write ensures that I’m always a part of the conversation and that my target audiences can find me if they Google the the topics I’m writing about. It’s this dedication that has helped me build a strong inbound sales channel. I’ve only cold-pitched one customer in my entire career.
2. Comfort with ambiguity
Success in marketing comes from experimentation. Too often, budget-strapped entrepreneurs will be reluctant to invest even $100 in running a test campaign because they want to know exactly how much web traffic to expect.
The fact is that with marketing, you rarely know what you’re going to get unless you run a small test first. Even more importantly, you need to run experiments continuously, so that you can quickly identify opportunities for growth.
One of the reasons why I’ve been happy — and able to move forward — as an entrepreneur is that I’m extremely comfortable with ambiguity. I’ll willing to take calculated risks in initiatives with outcomes that are less-than-certain. I’m open to committing small budgets to experiment with marketing campaigns, and I’m okay with generating a loss sometimes.
Some campaigns will fall flat. Others will be awesome. And you need to be comfortable with both scenarios.
3. The ability to focus
Successful marketing programs take time to build. It’s very easy, as a result, to become distracted. When you’re taking the time to figure out whether something is working, you might be tempted to quit, try something new, or abandon your idea altogether.
Don’t give up so easily.
Focus on a few key initiatives, and stick to them. You need to develop an eye for what is likely to work and what isn’t, so that you’re investing in the right channels instead of chasing dead ends.
An example marketing initiative has been my guest posting strategy. I love writing blog posts for Entrepreneur, The Next Web, Business Insider, and Forbes, but I wasn’t quite sure, for the first few months, that my contributions were yielding the value that I wanted. But I stuck with it.
At the six month mark, I started to see some leads and feedback coming in through my contributed pieces. My credibility began to increase, and I was able to grow my client base. Focus was my biggest asset.
Final Thoughts
Marketing requires an understanding of the big picture and a commitment to smaller details. In addition to focusing on specific optimizations, it’s important to know why you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s this ability, along with these three skills, that will be your north star.
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Ritika Puri is a storyteller, entrepreneur, and educator. She founded Storyhackers to help companies create structured, impactful, and truly inspiring content programs. Follow her @ritika_puri.