How to Create An Authentic Marketing Strategy For Service Businesses

This episode explores why conventional marketing advice fails and how to create an authentic marketing strategy that actually works. Here is what I have found to be true: every marketing strategy and platform works. Short form, long form, writing, video, audio, webinar, ads, email, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, X, LinkedIn, podcast. So if they all work, why do so many businesses and entrepreneurs struggle with marketing?

In full transparency, this has been one of my greatest struggles. So I am going to share my own journey through it as the owner of a marketing agency, as a director of marketing for a company, and as an entrepreneur trying to build my own authentic marketing strategy.

I have always struggled to create content. I have always had the desire, a very strong desire, but not necessarily the skills. I have tried everything and I have tried all of the platforms, but I do not really have graphic design skills. I had zero editing skills for video. I am not good at cinematography. I am actually terrible at taking pictures. And I have always struggled to be consistent. Add all of that up and it is basically a recipe for failure.

But I did thrive in person. I enjoy talking to people. So the way we built our business in the early years was that I went out and did in-person networking. We joined the chamber, I went to functions, I sat on a board, I joined networking groups, I passed referrals, I asked people to go to coffee. That worked really well for me. That is how we built our business and how we got clients, because when I was face to face with people I was doing the thing I am most comfortable doing, which is having a conversation and asking questions.

There was a time in my business when we were really struggling. We were completely broke, and we knew that if we did not turn things around we were not going to be able to stay in business. At that point in my life I had zero confidence in myself as a person. I definitely did not have the confidence or the experience or the credibility to go out and sell or pitch my services. I did not know what I was doing. I had just gone full-time in the business and was figuring my way through this web design and digital marketing world.

But I knew we had to do something. So I joined a local networking group. I knew that I could be interested in other people and ask other people questions, so I started asking people if they wanted to go to coffee. I would say I would love to learn about your business, can you tell me more about it. Then I would sit there and ask about their story, how they got started, what they were struggling with, and build genuine connection and relationships through the process.

I started to learn a lot about business from other people's perspectives, which I was then able to apply in our own business. That is also how we built trust with other people and started to gain business because of it. We started making traction and working with clients and learning things along the way.

But I still had not actually created a marketing strategy. There was no system. I was not taking what I was doing in person and applying those same concepts virtually. Everything I was doing depended on in-person interaction. It was not scalable. And we did not have anything out there on social media or in content that matched the authenticity and personality I actually had in real life.

I tried multiple times. But all the platforms require different skill sets and have different kinds of focus. I am a decent writer, but I do not love to write. I write when I feel inspired, and that is not a consistent system by any means, nor is it my preferred way of communicating. My preferred way is talking, and then being able to talk through something and maybe write it out afterward.

I also value depth. I value quality over quantity. I would rather sit and have a one-on-one conversation with someone for an hour or three, sometimes even five, than go to a networking event and have 20 conversations that are five minutes each, covering surface level things before moving on and forgetting the name of the person you just met. That is not my way of communicating or connecting. I find that stressful.

I also struggled with short form: the pressure and the time limit. I did not know how to succinctly communicate or create a whole idea within 90 seconds or three minutes or within one image. So I really struggled to figure out how to create a system that was not dependent on me going out and networking in person. That became even more important later, when we left Montana and left our local network and moved to a relatively remote place in Alaska and started completely over. At that point I knew I absolutely had to figure out the digital landscape.

Back in 2016 I knew we had to figure out some sort of marketing strategy, especially since we were a marketing company. I was learning more about my own unique abilities and trying to be more aware of what I enjoyed doing and the value I was able to bring to the business. I saw that my ability to ask questions and have conversations with people was valuable, so I started focusing on how to develop that and how to scale it.

In 2016 I started with video. The problem is I had zero video skills. I had no idea how to edit a video, let alone do something fancy with it. But I knew how to talk, so the question was how to do that digitally. I started with Facebook Live videos, because no one expects you to edit a live video.

For a whole year I committed to doing one Facebook Live video a week, and it was the most consistent I had ever been at content creation in my life. I did a lot of them on my own. I would sit down in our office, turn Facebook Live on, and start talking about marketing, SEO, ads, figuring out your messaging and your brand. The more comfortable I got, the more I started inviting other connections and business owners into the office to do them with me, so we could record the conversation we were having. That ended up bringing in more awareness and generating more business.

In 2019 I ended up going to work for one of the clients we had generated through one of those Facebook Live videos. I entered the gas and welding world and took on the role of director of marketing, helping a business that had been around for 70 years launch an official marketing department and campaign, because they had never done that before.

I had to figure out how to create content and marketing for a totally different kind of business, and it did not match the strategy I was using for my own. I knew nothing about gas and welding, and no one wanted to sit and listen to me talk about something I did not know. Talking head videos and interviewing other business owners were not going to work for that business.

What I found was that the team in the different departments, whether they were drivers or in the plants filling gas tanks or installing new equipment or delivering products, were doing a ton of really cool stuff. There were so many different applications for what was happening. So the question became how to tell that story, how to capture everything the company was doing and share it with the community in an easy and authentic way.

So I started hopping in the truck with people and going around to the different departments. I started taking video of what the guys were doing on their day-to-day routes and in their day-to-day jobs. They were not going out of their way to do anything special. I just started capturing and documenting the things they were already doing, and then posting those videos on Instagram and Facebook consistently.

Over the course of two years they went from zero social following to thousands. We started connecting with new businesses, and it helped in recruiting and hiring, because we were telling the story of who the business was, the brand, the values and the people, focusing on messaging pillars around being a relationship-driven business that cared about their employees and their customers and delivered amazing service by going above and beyond. We started to tell that story because they were already living it out.

That was the first time I saw firsthand a business that had never really done anything with marketing, and watched how being clear about their values, their unique brand positioning and their messaging pillars was an authentic strategy for building presence and awareness. That was when I believed it was possible, and when I knew I had to figure it out in my own business.

So I started a YouTube channel in 2023, going back to the knowledge that my ability to communicate is one of the most valuable things I can bring to the table. The question was how to get better at it, how to develop it, how to grow in my ability to articulate different ideas. I committed to a YouTube strategy, creating videos once a week.

I still did not have much editing skill, but at that point I started learning. I started learning CapCut. I learned how to trim the beginning and the end of a video, and then how to trim in the middle. Josh started helping me upgrade the camera, and we got a nicer one, and then better lights, and then we redid the studio and tried to improve the quality. Week in and week out we were learning about SEO and how the platform worked.

I was not great at it and had a lot to learn. My first early videos were shot on a webcam and recorded in the Windows camera app. But little by little, video after video, week after week, they incrementally got better.

Then we moved to our remote corner of the world in Alaska and started going all in on the idea of being clear on your brand, clarifying and communicating your messaging, and authentically standing out. I knew I had to really have a marketing strategy and system, to figure out what works and commit all of myself to it.

So I did all the platforms again. I did Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook. We ran ads. I tried a webinar. I went down the rabbit hole of all of these different platforms and methodologies and systems to see what was out there, what it was going to take, and how I was going to generate leads and build an audience and build awareness in a way that worked with my gifting, my offer and my audience.

I found what I liked and what I did not like, and it was a good experience because it helped me understand what was possible and what was required for each type of strategy. Eventually I ended up on a podcast. In September of 2025 I launched this podcast, and for me it was the best of all the worlds that worked for me.

It was long form content. It was something I could do weekly rather than daily. It gave me a structured enough outline to communicate my thoughts and convey an idea, while still being organic enough that I could pour my heart and my emotion and my stories into it.

When we first started we did not use video at all. For my first 40 episodes I did not film the podcast, because I was just trying to wrap my head around how to do a podcast. It was audio only. Little by little I got comfortable and figured out my rhythm, and eventually we started filming. Our episodes vary from 20 to 40 minutes. I loved it because it gave me the freedom to authentically learn how to communicate an idea and tell stories in whatever time frame it took to convey them. The more practice I got, the better I have been able to articulate an idea and make my points.

Part of this journey was also learning to embrace telling stories rather than just strategies. That is something I had always led with in the past, leading with strategy and ignoring story altogether, because I did not see the point in telling a story. I just wanted to convey this is what you do, these are the steps, this is how it is going to help you. And I never understood why that never worked.

In 2025 I listened to Russell Brunson's teaching on the power of story in the conscious mind and the subconscious mind, and that was an aha moment for me. It explained why so many people say using story is really important. I also found that I simply enjoyed telling stories more, and that helped me figure out my own format for communicating on the podcast. Week in and week out it has slowly evolved.

When I started the podcast I did a lot of research on the industry, on pod fade, and on how there are about four million podcasts out there but only about 400,000 of them are actually active, because so many people start and do not stay consistent and burn out and do not even make it to their tenth or twentieth episode. Only about 7 or 10 percent make it to 100 episodes.

So when I started I decided I was going to make it. I was not going to quit on the podcast, and I was absolutely going to make it to 100 episodes no matter what. This is episode 74, so we are on our way, and we are not stopping at 100. I have learned to thoroughly enjoy the art of podcasting, the art of communication, and the ability to connect with other people. I said I would consistently commit to this once a week, and I have not missed a single week since we started.

In 2026 I started having guests on the podcast, which brought in my joy for asking questions and listening to other people's stories and experiences running their service-based businesses, and talking about topics I find interesting, like how they are differentiating themselves in the marketplace, how they are hiring people, how they are engaging their team, how they are serving their customers and how they are honoring God through the process. Being able to have conversations with other people and record them and create content from them is a privilege and an honor.

Once we found a good rhythm for podcasting, we started using it as our anchor piece of content and creating other content from it. I pour everything into the podcast, into the outline, into the show notes, into the questions, into communicating the ideas. From there we started creating a weekly email, and then pulling clips from the podcast to put on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. We schedule those in batches with scheduling tools, so I do not actually have to be on social media.

That was something I committed to a year ago: not spending my time scrolling or being on social platforms, because I really wanted to focus on creating rather than consuming. I also really wanted to focus on putting God first in my life and hearing his voice more than anybody else's, seeking more time and space and margin to hear from him and to develop my own authentic voice, rather than being distracted or tempted to copy what other people are doing.

I wanted to create in a vacuum a little bit, to see what came to the surface authentically, to see what our own ideas and thoughts and opinions and strategies were, instead of looking at what other people were doing. We had spent 15 years looking at what other people were doing and trying all kinds of different strategies and getting distracted and giving up on something and trying something else, constant pivoting that really kept us from ever experiencing any real traction.

Over the last year we finally figured out how to build our own authentic content marketing engine in a way that aligned with my gifting and with Josh's gifting and his abilities with websites and SEO and link building and landing pages and everything happening on the back end with this podcast, including how we use SEO and GEO and AEO. That is his area rather than mine. It was the combination of our skill sets together, created in a way and a rhythm that aligned with the business we are building as well as the life we are building.

So that brings me to the strategies. If you are a business struggling to create your own authentic marketing strategy, every platform works. It is not about the platform. Over the last 15 years, through a lot of trial and error and struggling through this myself for years and finally experiencing my own breakthrough, there are really four things you need in order to have an authentic marketing strategy.

The first is clarity. You have to be clear on your brand, on your messaging, on knowing who you are, what you stand for, who your audience is, your messaging pillars, and why you are doing this. When I started doing content marketing, a lot of the reason I pivoted so many times is that I did not know what I wanted to talk about, I did not know who specifically I was talking to, and I was not really clear on why I was doing it.

So I would get caught up in the likes and the engagement and the comments and the views, or the lack of them. I would get so discouraged by that and I would obsess over the stats. And because this is a long game, I would get discouraged and not stick with it long enough to ever see any breakthrough anywhere.

But when I got clear on who I am, what kind of life I am building, what kind of business I am building, why I am doing this, who it is for and who I am talking to, and that I am doing this because I care so much about the message, that why is what pushes me through all the weeks and months of not feeling like I am getting any traction. That is the pivotal thing in order to ever get anywhere. Any content marketing expert, anyone who has done this for themselves, will tell you that you have to keep showing up.

The second thing is that you have to align your strategy with your brand, with your gifts, with your messaging. It is understanding what naturally makes the most sense for you as an individual or for your business. Is it writing? Is it talking? Is it interviewing and asking questions? Is it designing and taking pictures? Is it taking video of what is going on at your job sites or in your projects or in your portfolio? And then having a person or a system to make sure that is actually being captured and built into what is already happening.

The reason I was able to make the podcast work is that I enjoy talking, which is my primary method of communication, and I also really enjoy asking questions. Having guests come on the show and creating content from asking them about their experience and their story was a natural and easy way for me to build this. I also chose a platform that let me go deep into long form content while only committing to posting once a week, staying out of the rat race of posting short form content daily, because I knew that is not what I wanted for my life or my strategy.

But you could do a webinar if you love to teach. You could be a podcast guest rather than a host and connect with people that way. I found all kinds of opportunities across all the different strategies. It depends on your natural gifting. If you are a great writer, LinkedIn is a great platform, or X, or email marketing, or Substack. There are platforms for every type of gifting. It is a matter of finding the one that aligns most naturally with what you already bring to the table.

The third thing is that you have to be authentic. That means embracing real stories over rigid templates, and story over strategy, which is something I had to learn. I spent so long trying to be professional and be the expert and show what I knew, instead of showing who I was. That kept me from connecting with people in a marketing context, even though I was able to do it in person. I did not know how to carry it over into my marketing until I started doing the podcast. When I started embracing the things I have lived through and learned through, and trying to be the same person online and digitally that I am in person, that is what opened so many more doors for our business.

The fourth thing is consistency. Finding something you can sustain for the long run and continually show up for, day in and day out or week in and week out, whatever that looks like for you. It is a process of developing. It is a process of training and discipline. No matter where you start, you are not going to be at the level you want to be. The first podcast I ever did was not great, and neither were my first 40 or maybe even my first 50.

Every podcast I just had to commit to getting better and taking it one step at a time, starting with figuring out the hosting and the equipment and the uploading, then figuring out the editing, then figuring out how to structure it better and communicate better, then adding video, then starting to repurpose content. I could not do it all at once at the beginning. It was something I had to take a little at a time, knowing that was okay and that it is a journey. Now, a year later, I am doing so much more with my podcast than I was a year ago, and continuing to try to make every episode better.

A lot of it is a season of planting. It is a season of sowing. It is a season of training and discipline, and so we do not necessarily get to see the fruit or reap the harvest while we are doing it. We are planting seeds and we are building, and we do not get to see the full complete picture of our work yet, but we show up day in and day out. A lot of it is training and discipline. It is the little things and it is the boring things.

That has taken me a long time to embrace, a long time to accept and to willingly pursue with the help of the Holy Spirit. It was something I had to be convicted of, something I had to repent for, something I had to ask God to help me through. He needed to help me through it in multiple areas of my life. But the more I learn about God and his character, the more I realize that being disciplined and consistent and showing up is actually part of a godly character. It is something I want in my life, and I also recognize that I need it in order to ever experience any kind of success in my business and in my ability to market my business and generate leads.

So those are the four things you have to have, regardless of your platform and regardless of your strategy. You need clarity, you need alignment, you need authenticity and you need consistency. If you do not have those four things, no strategy and no platform will ever get you the results you want.

If you need help clarifying and communicating your message to figure out that clarity piece, which is the foundational piece everything else builds on top of, you can learn more about how we help at clearauthenticbrands.com.