Growing your business is all about marketing. Sure, you need to offer a great product or provide spectacular service, but even those things are largely affected by marketing. Marketing is the stories we tell each other, and ourselves, about the work we are doing. So if the stories aren’t hitting home and your business isn’t growing, chances are your marketing isn’t working.

So what can you do about it? The good news is that you know the problem — it’s your marketing.

The bad news is that it’s going to take some effort to turn things around.

There’s no quick fix here, but that’s how marketing works.

It’s a slow burn. It’s drip by drip over time.

It’s connecting with one person at a time and leaving them with an amazing story to share. Little by little, drip by drip, things start to grow and grow and grow.

Why isn’t your marketing working as it should? I have some ideas and some things you can do to fix them.

Think about what you’re doing for your marketing right now. You might be blogging or advertising, doing webinars, sharing video, only using social media, or email marketing. Whatever channel or medium you’re using, there are common threads that apply. That’s what I’ve listed below, some of the common reasons why marketing just doesn’t hit home.

As you read through the list below, keep in mind that there’s usually not just one reason why your marketing isn’t working the way you’d like it to. Typically, it’s a combination of several things going on. Try to be objective about what’s working for you and what’s not.

Common reasons why your marketing isn’t working and how you can fix it

It’s all about you

One of the most common marketing mistakes I see is making everything all about you. You might be trying to convince people of how great you are, so you talk about your credentials, where you went to school, your experience, and on and on. This is not what your customers care about. They want to know how you can help them. How can you make their life better?

How to fix it: Make your customer the hero of the story you’re telling. Talk about all the good things they get when they choose to do business with you. Make it all about them. Show them that you understand their struggles, you feel their pain, and then show them the solution. You’re not the hero of the story, they are. Make sure they know it.

You’re not consistent

Marketing takes time. It takes time for people to get to know, like, and trust you. One mistake I see entrepreneurs make all the time is not being consistent. In the beginning, they’re super excited and so they start blogging once a week. This goes on for a little while but then they get busy and miss a week, and then it drops down to once a month, and then they’re only blogging once a year, and then they can’t figure out why their business isn’t growing.

How to fix it: Be consistent. It may not seem like much is happening at first, but stay the course. It takes time to gain traction with content marketing, but it’s the best way to grow your business. Come up with a posting schedule that works for you and stick with it. This is easier said than done, I get that, but for a solopreneurs, this is how we do our marketing, this is how we build our audience, this is how we grow our business.

You’re too focused on vanity metrics

Vanity metrics are those things we focus on that look good on paper but don’t really mean all that much. Vanity metrics are things like the number of page views you get on your website, how many people clicked on your ad, how many likes you have on your Facebook page, or how many Instagram followers you have. It’s very easy to get tricked into thinking that these vanity metr...