You started your business because you’re good at something. Maybe really good. And then somewhere between week two and week three, you realize you also had to become good at marketing. So you Google it and now you’ve got 15 browser tabs open, three people telling you to be on TikTok, a half-finished Canva post, and a growing suspicion that everyone else figured this out way before you did.
They didn’t, by the way. Most businesses are just louder, but they’re still lost.
Today, I want to talk about what actually matters when you’re starting from zero. Not the full playbook or the ultimate marketing strategy. Just a few things that are actually worth your time when you don’t have much of it to spare. Because the gap between zero and one isn’t closed by doing more. It’s closed by doing less.
I’m Jiun and this is Anti-Viral, where we take a more human approach to marketing.
The Overwhelm Problem
Marketing can be very overwhelming in very many ways. There are way too many options. Too many things that you can do. And I usually tell people that nowadays anything can work, whether it’s the old school things like radio and TV and billboards, or the modern things like ads, or anything in between.
All of it can work. And that causes a lot of issues, because there’s just so much that you could do. What do you pick? That’s analysis paralysis right there. The other point about this is that each and every one of those things is also its own ecosystem. Think of social media or think of SEO as an example. All of them are very specific, unique ecosystems that you have to learn and figure out what you need to do for each one.
And the more you add on, because everybody’s opinion is always be everywhere all the time. You’re putting your social media out there. You’re putting your website out there, you’re working on your SEO, you’re trying to figure out ads, you’re trying to figure out all of these things together. And there’s an almost infinite number of things that you can optimize in each one.
There’s always something you can make better. Better writing, better graphics, better tools, better anything. And that creates a lot of different versions of overwhelm. Like, I don’t even know where to begin. And when I begin something, I don’t even know how long I have to be in it for it to start working. As a business owner, you came into your business because you wanted to have a business. You wanted to work on your business. You didn’t want to be a marketer. You just kind of ended up with it. And now you have to do all of this work and figure all of this out just to get it going. And you’re already wearing too many hats. As a business owner, that’s usually what we do. We’re already running around putting out fires all the time.
As I mentioned in my intro, this is going to be an overview of what to do when you go from zero to one, which is arguably the hardest part as an entrepreneur. How do you go from no clients to one client? And I should say that this is probably true everywhere, but in this realm in particular, the two things that matter for marketing are time or money.
If you don’t have the money to spend, then you have to spend your time. And if you don’t have time to spend, then you have to spend your money. One of these things needs to happen, and you have to figure out or create a balance for what’s happening with your business at any given time.
When you’re starting out, most of the time, most people don’t have a lot of money to put in there. So they have to spend their time. And you have to think about how you want to spend that time wisely. Because you’re going to be wearing all these different hats, right? The business owner, the sales person, the financial advisor, and the marketer all in one. What is the best use of your time?
Learning Before Perfecting
One of the greatest problems that I see people doing all the time in marketing is that they spend too much time trying to make things perfect. And I’m not entirely sure why, but they spend a lot of time crafting something in Canva or making their website the best it can be, or spending money on making things look pretty. Because it feels like it’s something you can control, I guess.
And they’re not spending their time doing what would most likely move the needle. For me, I think the best use of your time at the start is learning how all of what you’re trying to do works. Just as simple as that. If you’re creating a website, how do you best create a website? Not just “I’m going to build a website now and then we’ll figure it out as things come.” Because that’s what creates a lot of problems with SEO, with everything involved in a website. What is the best way to create a website? Not just the tool that you want to use, but the way that you do it.
Is there a strategy behind it? Is there a way to do it that feels the best for you? And same with SEO. How does it work? What does it mean? Search engine optimization, these big words that you’ve probably never heard of outside of marketing. What is this and how does it relate to me? Is this something that I actually want to be a part of? Is this something I want to pay attention to right now?
Because you’re going to have too many things to pay attention to. And I typically suggest that you focus your marketing on very few, very specific things that you think are going to be the differentiators for you. The things you think are going to bring clients in at the start of your business. Pick one, maybe two of these things, whether it’s social media or ads or whatever it is, and focus on them. Learn about them. Make them better over time.
Try to improve on what it means, on what it is to have this or to do this. And you’ll probably start seeing more results through that than just trying to do everything that everybody on YouTube always says to do. You’ll be doing a few things fairly well, instead of all of these things very poorly, because you’re actually spending the time to do them properly.
The Alter Ego Problem
I think people usually try to be something they’re not in their marketing. They treat their marketing as something completely separate. Like, in person, they’re the nicest people. They make people laugh, they’re really outgoing. And then when it comes to online, everybody stiffens up, right? Everybody wants to talk the same way, show up as the same professional kind of idea.
Part of the reason people spend so much time on marketing is that you don’t start your marketing trying to be you. Instead, you’re trying to become something else. And because you don’t know what that other thing is, it takes way longer to try and figure out what this professional version of you would say here, or would create as an image here, or create as a video here. It’s not stuff that you would normally come up with. It’s not ideas that come out of you naturally because you are you and you experience the world a certain way. You’re trying to create ideas from this alter ego, this pretend person outside of you, and that makes it really hard.
How do you come up with ideas like that? How do you talk that way? That burns a lot of time from entrepreneurs. So choosing the right path, choosing to focus on what’s worth focusing on for you, the few marketing channels you want to focus on, and just trying to be you as much as possible, is going to streamline the amount of time you spend on your marketing.
Creativity Over Automation
The opposite of this idea is that I see a lot of people who spend very little time creating the strategy behind their marketing, or even just the creativity behind it. You want to just pick it up and do the marketing and let it go so you can figure out something else.
Automation is something that a lot of people value. And creativity, which is arguably the most important part of marketing, the part of what to say, what’s worth saying, what’s worth creating, you spend too little time with that. It’s important to learn the craft. It’s important to learn the channel, how to make it better.
If you know everything there is to know about social media or Google Ads as an example, and you spend as little time as possible with the actual writing of it, then your output is going to be just as bad as people that don’t know what they’re doing and have never put the time in learning how it works.
So managing your time effectively comes down to figuring out what’s worth focusing on for the little time that you have, and then spending the right amount of time not only to make the marketing, but to think about the marketing. The creativity of it, the ideas. Is this the best idea that I can do?
I usually tell people, does it get you excited when you come up with an idea about marketing? Like, “oh, that is really good. I really want to do that.” Then follow that. Because chances are that’s probably going to be a better output, a better type of marketing, than something that you came up with in the moment like, “well, I guess we’ll go with that.” If it excites you to want to create it and put it out there, chances are someone else out there is also going to be excited to receive it. Because it caused something in you. You felt something for it. So chances are there’s another human being out there who’s also going to like it.
Finding the Right Channels
So choose a few things and forget the rest. Put blinders on when it comes to your marketing. And in order to figure out what those channels should be, the questions I usually ask are: where does your audience spend time, and what can you maintain consistently?
Knowing where your audience spends time requires you to actually understand your audience. It’s not just “they are 35 to 45 and they live in a place.” It’s understanding them more deeply than that. Like, they are people that are technologically minded, they really like the latest and greatest technology. So chances are they’re going to be in these specific groups or at this specific convention sort of thing. And that’s where you start figuring out what you should be focusing on, instead of trying to target people individually.
The second one is what can you maintain consistently. Consistency is the name of the game here. It’s not about doing something once and having it go viral and then that’s it. No, that’s not how business works. That’s not how life works. It’s what you can maintain consistently over a period of time, over and over again, as you keep improving it, as you keep making it better.
If you don’t have the time to maintain it consistently, it’s not going to go anywhere. I’ve seen a lot of people create every single social media account on all the platforms as soon as they start, and then a year or two later they’re using maybe one or two and the rest are just abandoned. Or they post once every six months because they just don’t have the time. They get really busy during the summer season and it’s only during the winter that they have time. And by then, the audience they used to have has already moved on.
So what can you maintain consistently is also going to help you figure out what’s worth your time. In my limited amount of time, what can I keep going? Is it writing? If I’m someone that likes writing, maybe I should take on blogging because that’s a good enough channel and it allows me to do something I can probably keep up all the time. Or I really like speaking, so maybe I start a podcast. Or I really like drawing, so maybe I start social media and put my drawings out there. What is it that you can maintain consistently?
Another question I typically ask is, what does your business need right now? When you first get started from zero to one, you’re probably going to say yes to everything. But when I ask this question, you’re usually looking for one of two things: awareness or conversions. Because those are two different ways of doing marketing.
Awareness vs Conversions
Awareness means, hey, I am here. I exist. You’re not asking them to buy anything. It’s just that I am here, I am in the conversation, I am part of this world, I exist. That’s all awareness is.
Whereas conversions are about getting a client to actually give you money so that you can perform a service or give a product. Usually people always tell me both, but those two work in very different ways. You technically require a different way of doing marketing for each.
When you’re doing awareness marketing, you just want to reach as many people as possible. It doesn’t matter if they buy or don’t buy. If they buy something, well, that’s a bonus. But it’s just, what are the places that have the most traffic or the most of my audience that I can just be there and be like, hey, here I am? That’s all it needs to be.
Whereas conversions. Now you’re talking about crafting a marketing journey that takes people from probably not knowing you to “I should buy this because this is worth my time. This is worth my attention. This is worth something for me.” And that is a very different craft. So you should be thinking about what you’re actually trying to do. If you’re just looking for awareness right now, there are certain marketing channels that are better suited for that. Think of social media as an example. It’s free and you can post as much as you want. It’s just about being there. That’s not to say you can’t do conversion marketing on social media. I’m just stating that as an example.
Whereas conversion marketing usually tends to lean more around advertising, because it targets people that are ready or are looking for something right now. And then you’re just trying to give them the right information so they make that informed decision. And usually that informed decision is that you are better than your competition in some way. You are different. And the people that care about this difference are the ones that should come and buy from you.
So think about what channels you’re looking to have handle one or the other. Your marketing should have a line in the sand between the two. Are you doing awareness marketing right now or are you doing conversion marketing right now? You can’t do both at the same time. It doesn’t work that way.
Busy Is Not a Strategy
Another point that I usually like to explain to people. I get a lot of people telling me they just don’t have time because they’ve opened all these social media accounts, they have all this website SEO, they’re running ads, they’re doing all the things. They just don’t have the time.
And I think there’s a very big problem with that line of thinking. That means that if you’re busy, something must be working, right? Like if I do a lot of things, one thing at some point is going to work. But that just means you’re busy hoping that the busy actually results in something. Busy is not a strategy. You can be busy doing something that provides nothing for you.
Your marketing has more to do with whether you have something worth saying. As we’ve talked about in a previous episode, it’s not about adding noise to the internet. Because busy can just be noise. You can just be adding things that make no difference in someone’s life, that offer no original thought or original experience for people, and that’s going to get you nowhere.
The better idea is to think about whether you have something worth saying. What are the things that really make you different as a person or as a business? The things that you value. Working on those things, being very specific about the channels that you choose, is going to get a much better result.
If you think you have something worth saying, like nobody talks about it this way or everybody always does this thing but really this is the problem, that’s going to start making a difference in your marketing. And it’s going to start giving you ideas as to what marketing channel you should be picking as well.
The Numbers That Matter
I think the next thing I want to talk about is potentially the thing that most small businesses really don’t pay attention to, and that’s reporting. Looking at numbers, looking at data. I’ve talked about how you should take reports with a grain of salt, because numbers are really good at compressing information in a way that you understand. But they’re also really good at compressing information, meaning there’s a lot that that number is doing that doesn’t get said.
But it’s a really important tool in marketing to understand, is this working? Now that you hopefully have a clearer idea on how to select the proper marketing channel for you, how do you know whether the effort you’re putting in is actually making a difference? Reporting is an easy way of doing it. And it’s what most platforms and most tools have available.
But I want to make it clear about what actually matters to you as a business, because similar to marketing having too many things you could do, there’s also many numbers you could report on that makes it equally confusing.
From a reporting standpoint, and I’m talking in generalities here, reports usually fall into three main numbers: impressions, clicks, and conversions. Impressions means how many people have seen your website or your ad or your post. Clicks means how many people actually clicked on your post, on your website, on your ad to go and do something, to generate an action. And from clicks you have conversions. Conversions just means they’ve converted. They’ve filled out a form, they’ve called you, they’ve done something that has the criteria of becoming a client.
That’s not true for every single thing. There are a lot of conversions that are just “I want to see whether something is working, so my conversion is that they actually landed where I wanted them to land.” Sometimes conversions don’t equate to the action of becoming a client. But I would say 99% of the time that’s what it means. And these are almost universal. You’re going to see them in Google Analytics, in your social media reports, in your Google Ads reports. Everywhere.
But the number that actually matters is conversions. All other numbers in your reports don’t matter. Because from zero to one, all you’re trying to do is get a client. That’s the focus. That’s the work. And more often than not, you’re going to be in that place, looking for that as consistently as possible. That’s the number to look at. Every other number, just put blinders on. They don’t matter. You can learn about them if you want, but right now they don’t matter. The only one that matters is conversions.
Sometimes you see these numbers displayed a little differently. Impressions is sometimes called reach. They basically mean very similar things. You sometimes see click through rates or cost per click. All of these are numbers that might be worth knowing about, but to start, just look at conversions. If you get one, then you’re doing something. Because if you get one, chances are you can get another one. And that’s just how you start.
Let’s talk about click through rates, sometimes shortened to CTR. A click through rate is just how often people are clicking through to go somewhere. It’s essentially the in-between of impressions and clicks. How many people saw your ad or your post, and how many decided to click on it? That difference gets converted into a percentage. And then you’ll know that in general, maybe about 5% of people that see your ad end up clicking. And then you can start doing math and figuring out, okay, if I want this many clicks, I need this many impressions.
You can do the same thing with conversions. The percentage from clicks to conversions is often called the conversion rate. So let’s say you have a 5% click through rate from impressions to clicks, and a 5% conversion rate from clicks to conversions. If you need ten clients a month, doing the math on those percentages is going to tell you what numbers you need to be at.
That’s kind of the reason those numbers exist, and they’re useful numbers. But to start, just look at conversions. If you get one, you’re doing something. Because if you get one, chances are you can get another one.
There’s usually another one that’s pretty popular, especially in the advertising world, and that’s cost per click. That just means how much does a click cost you. If you’re spending money on advertising, that tells you a certain amount per click. And again, you can do math to figure out how much you should be spending to get a certain result.
All of these reports will change slightly based on the channel you’re looking at. For emails, you’re going to have things like open rates and bounce rates. An open rate is just how many people opened that email. A bounce rate means the email went to their inbox and bounced off, like it couldn’t be delivered or was blocked for some reason.
If you go to Google Analytics, which tracks what’s happening on your website, you’re going to see events. Events are just what people are doing on your website. And engagement time is usually a very interesting one, because it’s how much time people spend on a page or on your website. The longer people spend on your website, the more Google will see that and rank you higher. And by long time, I mean it could be like a minute.
Most websites usually have seconds of engagement time on average. But that just means the majority of people actually clicked on your website and read something or stayed for a while. And that’s usually fairly good for a website.
At the end of the day, anything else around these things, a lot of the numbers in marketing reports, are just vanity metrics. Numbers for the sake of giving you numbers, either to confuse you or to make it seem like something is happening when it’s likely not.
I usually don’t understand why people go through great lengths to create reports that have all the numbers possible. Who cares, right? At the end of the day, what you’re looking for is whether this marketing channel, whether you’re spending time or money on it, is worth your resources. If it is, you stick with it. If it’s not, then it’s not. And any attempt to hide how well it’s doing is going to give you the wrong impression, or it’s going to keep you there for longer on something you really should stop, because this marketing channel clearly isn’t working for you.
The Kill Switch
That leads me to the next thing. Now that we have the right marketing channels and the right concept of what we should be doing, and we know that we should be focusing on conversions to figure out whether it’s working, what do we do when it’s not working? How do you know when to stop?
Is it not working for a period of time because there’s a learning period where you have to figure things out? Of course it’s not going to work right away. But how long is too long? At what point is it just taking your time for no reason? That can be for many reasons as to why a channel might not work for you. For the most part, I would say it varies. There’s no easy answer for that.
But I want to be very clear that you should be focusing on improvement. Whenever you start a new marketing channel, whenever you start your marketing for the first time, you’re not going to know everything. There’s going to be a lot of mistakes and a lot of things you don’t do well at the start. And that’s okay. You should be focused on improving, even if you get zero results. The idea is that next time you’re going to get at least one. At least those numbers on the report need to go up a little bit, because that’s going to tell you that you’re improving.
But if after a fair amount of improvement, which is going to be dependent on the channel and the time that you have, I usually suggest people think about having a kill switch. Whenever you’re doing something for the first time, like marketing, let’s say you want to do SEO and that’s going to be your focus. Develop a kill switch as you’re getting started.
A kill switch just means, what are the things that when I hit these parameters, this is when I stop? Because it’s clearly not working. And that can be any number of things. It could be “I didn’t get enough clicks over six months” or “I’ve been doing this for a year and I haven’t gotten one client from it.” That can be a kill switch.
It can be anything, but it’s just those parameters that tell you, here is where I stop. Here’s where I draw the line and move on to something else. Because it’s very easy to start something, and then you clearly see that it’s not working or you don’t have the time to pay attention to it. But you think maybe one day you’ll have the time, or maybe one day you’ll spend money on it and make it better, or you keep spending a little bit just to keep it alive. All of that is just going to burn resources for no reason.
So it’s better to have a kill switch for your new experiments. And those experiments, if they start working, then you categorize them as “this is what I do in my marketing.” Like, I started doing public speaking and that seems to be going really well. So now it’s not an experiment anymore. Now it’s a core thing of what I do. Otherwise you have the kill switch there, and when it hits that parameter, that’s when you can make the decision. I said I would stop if I hit this. Here’s where I can say I’ve done enough. I’ve tried it, and I can’t make it work at this point. And that’s when you move on and try something else.
Closing the Gap
At the end of the day, going from zero to one is the hardest thing you can do as an entrepreneur. It’s the hardest gap to close. Once you know how to bring in clients and how your business is bringing in clients, you can always find ways to do more. And that’s where the growing starts happening, of how fast or how often you can bring in the next client. But getting that first one is really hard and really stressful, because it’s the thing that tells you whether your business is a business or a hobby.
What I think gets you to that one person, to that one client, is picking one thing, saying something valuable to those people, to that audience that you have, and showing up again tomorrow. Consistency. You don’t have to be great at marketing today. Think about it. How long did it take you to actually be good at whatever it is you do for your business? It probably took years. You’re probably an expert at something you’ve done for the last ten years or whatever it was before you went out on your own. How long did it take you to learn to play the guitar? It’s not fast and it’s not easy, but you’re going to get there.
Don’t expect immediate results. Expect improvement. The overall point of going from zero to one is to fail consistently until you learn how not to fail.