Stop Trying to Be Everywhere

Why the marketing strategy that actually works starts with a question nobody asks first

There's a piece of advice that gets repeated so often in business circles that most people stop questioning it, be everywhere, show up on every platform, post daily, never miss a trend.

I sat down this week with marketing strategist Niki Hutchison, and one of the first things she said undid that advice completely. Voices like Gary Vee tell people to be everywhere a lot, and there's nothing wrong with that advice for Gary Vee. He didn't start out everywhere either. He grew into it. For the average founder-led business, trying to operate at that level of marketing from day one is a fast route to burning through money and energy without the sustainable growth to show for it.

What struck me most was where Niki starts instead: the business objective, long before any talk of channels.

What do you want to achieve in the next month, three months, six months, five years? Once that's clear, the question becomes who are the people who make that achievable, and where do you go to find them. Niki calls this putting out lots of rods, and the point isn't to put every rod in every lake. It's choosing the handful of channels, digital and traditional, that actually reach your people, rather than defaulting to whichever platform feels easiest to open with five spare minutes.

That distinction matters because social media has become the default for so many of us that we forget it's a choice, not a requirement. Niki's own first business, a kids' hip hop dance company, grew through flyers, posters and door drops long before social media existed as a serious channel. The principle she still teaches is the same one that built that business: find where your people already are, physically and digitally, and interrupt their day in a way that makes them notice you, kindly.

We also talked about something I hear from clients constantly. The conversation that gets to the edge of a sale and then goes quiet. Niki's take is that it's rarely about you. People are often having the same conversation with two or three other options at once, and when the reality of budget or fit sets in, retreating feels easier than saying no out loud. Which is exactly why the follow-up matters more than most people think. Niki shared a stat worth sitting with: most people give up after one attempt to follow up, and 75% of sales happen after the fourth. Not as a pushy, are-you-buying-today message, but as a genuine check-in. What's happening in your world? How are things? That's the conversation that keeps the door open.

The thread running through everything Niki shared was energy. Are you actually excited to sell this thing? That excitement is close to impossible to fake, and its absence is equally obvious. If your marketing isn't landing, the first place to look isn't the platform. It's your own confidence in what you're offering.

If you've been overwhelmed trying to keep up with every channel at once, this conversation is permission to stop, choose deliberately, and go deeper instead of wider.

If this resonates, I invite you to listen to the full episode here: Born To Be Brilliant Podcast

If the marketing feels harder than it should because the confidence behind it isn't quite there yet, that's the work I do with people inside my twelve week Success Accelerator. Private, one to one, built around your business and your blockers.

Find out more here: Success Accelerator