Marketing Advice for Starting a Business – Keep It Simple!
I’ve been doing this for 26 years. I’ve built brands worth hundreds of millions of pounds. I’ve started three businesses of my own.
And I still don’t feel ready most days.
If you’re waiting for the feeling of readiness before you start your business, post that content, or send that pitch — I need to tell you something. That feeling isn’t coming. Not for you, and not for anyone else either. Not even for the people who look like they’ve got it all figured out.
The private countdown nobody talks about
When you start something new, there’s a clock running in the background. You didn’t set it, and you can’t see it, but you can feel it ticking.
It’s telling you that everyone else is further ahead. That you should have worked this out by now. That there’s a deadline for “having it together” and you’ve already missed it.
I call this the silent countdown. Almost everyone starting something new is running against it, convinced they’re the only one.
You’re not behind. There is no deadline. The people who look like they’ve “made it” are running the same private countdown you are. They’re just better at hiding it.
Winging it is not a dirty word
Here’s something I don’t say enough: I have winged it. A lot.
Not because I didn’t know what I was doing, but because knowing what you’re doing and feeling certain about it are two completely different things. You can have real expertise and still be figuring it out as you go. Both things are true at once.
If you’ve been quietly telling yourself you’re “just winging it” and treating that as proof you’re not a real business owner yet, I’m pushing back. Winging it, done with good foundations underneath it, is just what building something new actually looks like. The businesses that seem to have arrived fully formed didn’t. They just stopped showing you the workings.
It’s all on you now — and that’s the hard part
When you work for someone else, there’s always a next person up the chain. A manager. A team. Someone else who’s ultimately responsible.
When you start your own thing, that person is you. Every decision, every wobble, every “is this even working” moment lands on your desk and stays there. That weight is real, and it’s one of the biggest adjustments nobody warns you about.
You don’t need to carry it by guessing, though. This is where most people go wrong.
My #1 piece of Marketing Advice for Starting a Business is: Guessing will cost you the most
There’s a name for this: HIPPO. The Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. It means making a decision because it feels right to the person in charge, rather than checking it against anything real.
When you’re a business of one, you are always the highest paid person in the room. Which means the HIPPO trap is even easier to fall into — because there’s no one to challenge your gut feeling before it becomes a decision.
The fix isn’t complicated. Before you guess, go back to the fundamental principles of marketing.
Every marketing strategy should consist of Diagnosis, Guiding Policies and Coherent Actions. You should always start with Diagnosis, by doing the following:
- Do your own research. Look at what similar businesses are actually doing, not what you assume they’re doing.
- Mystery shop your competitors. Sign up to their emails. Follow their content. See what they promise and how they deliver it.
- Test small before you commit big. A cheap, fast way to check an idea beats an expensive, slow way to find out you were wrong.
- Speak to your target customers, individually or as a group. Ask for a quick Teams call or a coffee to find out how they’re feeling. The insights you’ll gather from this qualitative research approach will be invaluable.
Research replaces guessing with knowing. It’s the difference between hoping something will land and having a reason to believe it will.
When your content feels wrong, it’s rarely a talent problem
If you’ve ever posted something and immediately cringed, or stared at a blank caption box for twenty minutes with nothing coming out right, you’ve probably decided this means you’re bad at marketing.
In my experience, that’s almost never what’s actually happening.
Most of the time, it’s simply a clarity problem. You don’t have a settled sense of who your brand is yet (its personality, its tone, what it stands for and how it should sound). Without that foundation, every piece of content is a fresh guess. No wonder it feels like hard work.
Once you know your brand’s DNA (the identity underneath everything you make and say) content stops being a guessing game. You’re not inventing your voice from scratch every time. You’re just expressing something you already know.
You don’t need to feel ready to start a business. You need to understanding the fundamental discipline of marketing.
Confidence doesn’t come first. Foundations do. Once those are in place – market orientation (diagnosis) and your Brand DNA & Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning (Guiding Policies) the confidence to deliver marketing communications that land with impact tends to follow.
I built a number of tools that will help you get where you need to be, including my free guide to Marketing Planning which you can download below.
You can browse my other free tools and paid courses in my shop.
