What if i told you …
I'm watching another small business owner panic-buy an Instagram strategy course at 11pm on a Tuesday, and I have to say it:
MARKETING TACTICS ARE THE GREAT THEATER OF OUR TIME.
It’s not a scam, exactly. swirls chai latte
Just … the wrong starting point. By a wide and devastating margin.
Hear me out.
It is incredibly easy — almost RUDELY easy — to convince yourself your business problems will be solved by:
A new Instagram Reels strategy
The TikTok trend where everyone points at things
Pinterest, but only if you redo all 600 pins (lol)
LinkedIn "thought leadership" (oh no)
A funnel
Another funnel
A landing page from that YouTube guy who SHOUTS in his thumbnails
Cold DMs that begin with "Hey friend! 👋"
SEO, where you blog 47 times a week about "how to choose a notebook"
A podcast (you do not have time for a podcast)
Paid ads
Going viral
Going viral, but on purpose this time
An influencer named Brianne
And on, and on, and on, into the great tactical abyss, where small business owners go to slowly lose their minds, their savings, and their last shred of faith that English is a real language.
Meanwhile? Ten million people are out there doing all of the above and watching their bank accounts achieve a kind of perfect, untouched, monastic stillness.
Why?
Because the dirty little secret nobody on the internet wants to tell you, on account of it doesn't fit on a sales page:
No tactic on earth can save bad messaging.
You can run the most beautiful Meta ad of all time. If the words on it sound like an HR memo had a baby with a Mad Libs book, IT WILL NOT WORK. It cannot work. The algorithm isn't the problem. The platform isn't the problem. Brianne isn't the problem. YOUR SENTENCES ARE.
This is the difference between:
A Tactic-Led Business ("Maybe THIS tactic will finally hit.")
and
A Message-Led Business ("I know exactly what to say to get people to pay attention. Now I'm just picking where to say it.")
One asks, "What channel should I be on?"
The other asks, "What am I actually trying to communicate?"
One chases the trend.
The other delivers a point.
One thinks marketing is a math problem.
The other knows it's a language problem.
One is very, very busy.
The other is, irritatingly, effective.
You do not have a reach problem, my literate love bug. You have a say-something problem. And no amount of dancing in your kitchen with a ring light is going to fix it. (Sorry. I know. I know. I'm very fun at parties.)
So, the very first step is to stop chasing marketing tactics and start honing your message..
You need ONE message that tells the truth about what you do, in language a real person might actually use in a real person mouth.
The point is not to crown yourself with a Tagline™. The point is to find the one true thing your business actually says — the spine of meaning that holds the whole sweaty operation up. And how much better does that feel, by the way? To think of it as a spine instead of a slogan? You don't need a snappy little phrase that fits on a tote bag.
You simply need a message that does the one thing 99% of small businesses on this godforsaken internet cannot do: make sense in a single message. Not "we empower." Not "we elevate." Not "we're passionate about helping our clients achieve their goals through innovative blah blah blah" — a string of words so limp it could describe a yoga studio, a tax firm, or a guy named Brad selling supplements out of a Sprinter van.
Nope. We want a message that could only describe your business and no one else's. A sentence so unmistakably yours that if a competitor tried to steal it, their own mother would call them out.
Once you have the message — the real one, the spine, the thing — the rest tumbles out of the dryer warm and folded.
NOW you know what your homepage should say. (And it is not "Welcome!")
NOW you know what your Instagram bio should say. (And it is not three emojis and a flame.)
NOW you know what your ads should say.
NOW you know what your sales emails should say.
NOW you know how to answer "so what do you do?" at a dinner party without the other person’s eyes glazing over like a Krispy Kreme.
Because you have the one thing nobody on the marketing internet can sell you, no matter how many "frameworks" they cram into your inbox:
A point.
A position.
A line in the sand.
A take.
Words that mean something specific to a specific human — instead of words that mean nothing to everyone.
And while I do despise the word "messaging," hot diggity damn, it's the single most leveraged hour you will ever spend on your business.
Because nobody on earth has ever read the word passionate and reached for their wallet. Nobody has ever heard "we elevate" and felt elevated. Nobody has ever seen "in business since 1987" and thought "finally — a brand that's been around since perms were both a hairstyle and a personality."
The aesthetic is not the problem.
The funnel is not the problem.
The font is not the problem.
The message is the problem.
It has always been the message.
So if you're sitting there nodding, wondering okay, but how the heck do I actually figure out what mine is — I built you a thing.
It's called The "Done-With-You" Messaging System — and it walks you, step by step, to find the one sentence your business is actually trying to say. The spine. The thing.
And you'll have your spine in under an hour.