 Marketing and advertising are probably the last thing you think about when you think about leadership. But if you're running a business, marketing and advertising are probably the most important aspects of your business. Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. Marketing and advertising are a challenge for every business owner. I'm not an expert, but one of our viewers asked us to talk about it. So today I'm going to give you four lessons I've learned in marketing since I started running a business. And stay tuned to the end. I'm going to give you a link where you can download our free leadership development plan workbook and set your goals for the next two, five, and 10 years in your career and build a plan of action to achieve them. As much as 20 years in the Air Force helped prepare me for running a business, marketing and advertising was one area where being in the military didn't prepare me for business. And those are really challenging for me. And there was a big learning curve for me as I was stepping up learning how to do marketing and advertising. And it's still something that I have a hard time with. And it's still something I have to work on quite consciously. So if you're a business owner and you're struggling with marketing, or you just want to learn a little bit more about it, here are four lessons I've learned in the few years that I've been running my business that should help you have a good attitude about marketing and advertising. Most importantly, when you're doing marketing and advertising, it's got to be about your customer's needs and not yours. This means talking to your customers and your potential customers and understanding what their pain points are and what challenges they're facing. It also means figuring out who your ideal customer is and not trying to market to everyone. If your customer is everyone, your customer is no one, as they say. So we've got to figure out who our ideal customer is and how we can help them make their lives better with our services, not just give them what we want to give them and take their money. Lesson number two I've learned is to make connections and not pitches. This is a hard one for me because when I first meet someone or when I'm first cold calling or cold emailing them, I want to tell them all about me, all about my company and all the great things we have to offer and the great qualifications we have. But that's not what everyone wants to hear, especially the first time you're talking to them. So take some time to make that connection. Get to know them a little bit. Let them get to know you. Let that grow organically and let that discussion of what you have to offer them come out of that. And also this is a great time to pulse them about what their needs are, what those pain points are like we talked about in the first lesson. It's got to be about meeting their needs, not about what you want to offer them. Lesson number three is that you've got to use multiple channels. It's not enough just to go to a couple networking events a month or to just use social media. You've got to go meet your clients where they're at, wherever that is, not where we want them to be. So that may mean a mix of social media, physical, in-person networking, cold calling, cold emailing. It may even mean print advertising if that's where your customers are. And when it comes to meeting people where they're at, that means more than just going to the locations where they're at, being advertised in the publications they read. It means recognizing that they might not be ready to buy as soon as they see our advertisement, just like we talked about in the first two tips. We've got to recognize their needs. We've got to recognize where they're at and build that relationship a little bit. Go meet them where they are and where they are in their cycle of being ready to buy, not where we want them to be. The last lesson I have for you when it comes to marketing and advertising is that you've got to put the time and you've got to put the effort in. Whether that means engaging with your potential clients on social media, going to the networking events, going out to meet them in their offices, whatever it means. You've got to go put the time in. You can't just put a little bit of effort in and then hope everything's going to come to you. You've got to get in there, you've got to put the time in, you've got to continue to engage with people. You've got to follow up. Not everyone, we've said this a bunch of times already. It sounds like a broken record, I'm sure. Not everyone's going to be ready to buy the first time. That doesn't mean they're not interested, but you do need to follow up with them and you need to continue advertising and marketing through all of your sales channels. So put the time in. Someone once told me that, especially when it comes to social media, someone once told me that it doesn't pay to be lazy when you're doing social media. So take the time, engage with your potential clients and your audience on social media, and make sure you're customizing your posts for the platform. So you're going to make a post on Twitter different than you're going to make a post on Facebook. So make sure you're putting the time in, engaging with people, and customizing your posts and your advertising and marketing messages for the right platform and the right medium. So I hope these tips are helpful to you when it comes to marketing and advertising, and I hesitate to even call them tips because I'm certainly not an expert on marketing. I don't feel like I should be giving anybody any advice when it comes to marketing. But these are just four lessons I've learned since starting a business a couple years ago, and the lessons I continue to work on and things I kind of need to relearn every now and then. Some of these lessons I've had to learn the hard way. So I hope this video helped you a little bit. Maybe you won't need to learn these lessons the hard way like I did, but give them a try. So when you're thinking about your marketing for your businesses, or even if you're just marketing your personal brand, give these four tips a try. Take a look at these lessons and see how you can apply them. I hope they work out for you. Best of luck to you. If you found this helpful, please like, comment, and share it with a friend or co-worker. If you have any business or leadership questions, leave them in the comments for us or email us at info at EvilGeniusLeadership.com. EvilGeniusLeadership.com is also where you can find out about our coaching and training programs. So if you're looking for a little more one-on-one interaction, go hit us up there and check out what we might be able to do for you in terms of your leadership development and training. Thanks for watching today. I really appreciate it. And remember, the future is out there. Lead the way.