When I first started in business it seemed like about 90% of all the advice I got said “you've got to get good at marketing – it's the number one skill”.

Become a brilliant copywriter. Master SEO and content marketing. Excel at conversions. 

I lapped it up.

Perhaps I should have noticed that the people giving the advice all sold marketing training :)

But it seemed to make sense. When you start a business your biggest challenge is getting customers. So surely marketing is the big thing you need to get good at? 

Not necessarily. At least not in my experience.

You reed great results from your marketing. But you don't need to be all that great at marketing to get great results.

If you've got a great product or service and you don’t play in a super-competitive market then frankly, half-decent marketing is all you need.

You don't need the higher-level skills that could squeeze an extra percentage point of conversion from an already hyper-optimised landing page. You just need the basics that your competitors probably haven't got.

Improving from 90% to 95% is really hard and needs world-class skills. It's worth it for a business doing millions in a competitive market.

Improving from 20% (where most small businesses are likely to be if they're lucky) to 60% is way easier. But relatively speaking it has a much bigger impact on your business.

And often you can do it based on simple principles and using templates and examples that have worked time and time again.

Templates and examples alone will never get you to 95%. But they'll get you to 60% or 70% which is all you need.

People trying to sell you marketing training are biased – and usually they can't see it.  They live in the ultra-competitive world of marketing services so they tend to assume that all markets need the same level of sophistication and skill.

They don't.

Whenever you're looking to get better results from your marketing, sanity check the advice you're getting. Does it apply to your particular market? Or is it calling for you to reach a level of mastery that just isn't needed (and would take far too long anyway)