I Went to a Marketing Summit So You Don’t Have To

Yesterday I had the pleasure of securing a free ticket and spent half the day at Marketing Summit Australia in Brisbane. I took upwards of 290 dot-point notes, which feels excessive even by my standards, so naturally I thought I’d share the things that actually stuck out to me.

Full transparency: I went into the event thinking it was for marketing experts. That’s on me for not doing quite enough research beforehand. In reality, I’d say it was aimed more towards people looking to do their own marketing, entry level, if you will, so if that’s you, absolutely go to the next one.

That said, I still walked away with plenty to think about from the first half of the morning. I couldn’t attend the second half because I had places to be. Aka a massage. I’m nothing if not committed to professional development.

The host was the wonderful Ethan Donati, a TEDx and international speaker who has co-headlined events with celebrities including Seth Godin, Mark Bouris, Janine Allis, Naomi Simson, Eric 'ET' Thomas and more. He was also painfully shy as a kid, which is something I relate HARD to, so I was emotionally locked in from the beginning.

Anyway, here are the things I scribbled down furiously enough to still remember today.

★ The Business Prison is very real. ★

Ethan spoke about what he calls a ‘Business Prison’, which is basically when you’ve technically created a business, but somehow managed to create yourself a job where you are simultaneously the boss, the employee, the IT department, the receptionist and the person who is expected to know why the printer isn’t working.

You work all these hours and then when you go away on holiday, get sick, or simply decide you’d like to have a personality outside of your business, everything suffers because you’re not there to sustain those hours.

Which is not exactly the freedom most of us had in mind when we quit our jobs.

Eventually, you have to start thinking about scaling if you want to create a viable business that can continue operating when you’re not personally holding every single piece together. That might mean hiring internally, outsourcing, automating, delegating or one of the 29 million other versions of what scaling can look like depending on your business.

But the problem is, no one cares about your business as much as you do.

And my hot take on that is that I personally know that no one cares AS MUCH about my business as I do, but that doesn’t mean people DON’T CARE. It’s not one or the other to me.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a family business. I saw how much effort both of my parents put into building a successful business. I saw the tears, I heard the chats they had when things felt tricky, I witnessed the fights and the frustrations when something completely outside of their control happened.

I’m now running a successful business myself, and I know I’ve been given a bit of an upper hand when it comes to growth because my parents are a phone call away when I need advice. But I also know how much goes into a business.

So when I tell you I care, I FUCKING CARE.

I think your success is my success, and I want every single person I work with to feel successful, however that looks for them. I think that’s something worth remembering when we talk about outsourcing, hiring and scaling. Yes, no one will care about your business exactly the way you do, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people who will care deeply about helping you build it.

★ You probably didn't start a business to work 24/7. ★

You probably didn’t quit your job because you had a lifelong dream of answering emails at 10:47pm while eating dinner over your laptop. You probably started your business because you wanted financial freedom, more flexibility, more control over your time, or because your previous boss was slowly driving you clinically insane.

So why are we spending 24/7 working on the business we supposedly built to give us more freedom?

At some point, you have to hand over some of the reins to other people, who are probably better at certain things than you are anyway. And I think that’s the bit business owners struggle with. We get weirdly attached to the idea that if we can do something ourselves, we should do it ourselves.

No. You absolutely do not.

You do not get bonus points for personally doing every single task in your business. There is no little trophy coming in the mail because you spent four hours figuring out how to fix your own website instead of paying someone who could have done it in twenty minutes.

★ Try the thing. ★

One of my favourite quotes (and Georgia’s too who was reading the notes live) from the day was:

‘If you try something that doesn't work, you're going to die anyway so you may as well try and if it fails, keep trying.’

Morbid? Obviously. But also, annoyingly, very true.

I think business owners can get so caught up in making the right decision that we forget sometimes the only way to find out if something works is to actually do the bloody thing.

Launch it. Test it. Put the offer out. Run the campaign. Make the reel. Send the email.

Because sometimes we spend three weeks researching something that would have taken us three days to just try. And if it flops? Great. Now you know.

★ Never let a good crisis go to waste. ★

‘Never let a good crisis go to waste.’

During Covid, a lot of businesses pulled their marketing budgets, which also meant pulling their ad spend from Meta and Google. Because fewer businesses were advertising, the auction price dropped significantly. Suddenly, businesses that continued advertising could spend less and get significantly more visibility because there was simply less competition fighting for the same attention.

Obviously, “just keep spending money during a global pandemic” is not the takeaway here.

The takeaway is that when the market changes, everyone else panicking doesn’t necessarily mean you should panic too.

Sometimes everyone else running for the exit is exactly when you should be looking around asking, hang on, is there an opportunity here?

★ Don't be the best kept secret in your industry. ★

Imagine there are 100 businesses in a room. Ninety-nine of them aren’t running ads and one is. Your potential customers are going to see the one business that is actually putting themselves in front of them. And that one business might not be the best business in the room. They might not have the best product. They might not provide the best service.

But they’re the one people remember because they’re the one people keep seeing.

And that’s the slightly uncomfortable truth about marketing: being good isn’t enough if nobody knows you exist.

I think a lot of business owners secretly want to be the “best kept secret” in their industry.

Why? What a weird goal.

You don’t want to be a secret. You want people to know about you. You want people talking about you. You want someone to see your business and think, oh, I’ve been looking for exactly this.

Don't be the ‘best kept secret’ in your industry.

★ Your competition is… cat videos. ★

Your competition isn’t the guy next door in the same industry as you. It’s not even the guy down the road.

It’s cat videos.

Your ads and your content are competing for attention with everything else on the internet. Including those viral, probably AI-generated videos where a cat is riding a bicycle.

You know the ones. Your mum sends it to you saying, ‘wow look at this cat I wonder how they got the cat to do that’. You respond, ‘MUM THAT’S CLEARLY AI’. And then somehow your entire algorithm is cats riding bikes.

That is what you’re competing with.

Not just your competitor’s Instagram post from Tuesday. You are competing with every single thing that could possibly steal someone's attention.

Which is why I think there’s a huge difference between posting and actually marketing. Anyone can post. Your business needs to give someone a reason to stop scrolling.

And if your content is giving “corporate newsletter from 2017”, good luck competing with a cat on a bicycle.

★ Shiny Object Syndrome is coming for all of us. ★

Business owners are particularly susceptible to SOS, aka Shiny Object Syndrome. And right now, AI is probably the shiniest object in the room.

AI is currently the marketing industry's favourite new toy, and some of us are behaving like toddlers who have just discovered the junk drawer.

Yes, you can use AI to automate huge chunks of your business. You can build websites with it, write copy with it, create systems with it and probably get it to make you a sandwich if someone develops the right integration.

But that doesn’t mean you should.

Sometimes AI is incredibly useful. Other times, it is actively doing you no favours. If your entire website sounds exactly like every other business in your industry, perhaps getting AI to write every single word wasn’t the genius business decision you thought it was.

Because if everyone is using the exact same tool to say the exact same things in the exact same beige corporate voice, congratulations.

We’ve automated personality out of marketing.

Technology should make your business better. It shouldn’t make it indistinguishable from everyone else’s.

★ ‘I love what you do, I just can't afford you.’ ★

This one was particularly interesting from a marketing perspective.

If someone comes to you and says, ‘OMG I love everything you do, I just cant afford you’, it’s probably worth asking yourself whether you’ve actually convinced them that what you’re offering is worth the investment.

And no, I don’t mean immediately slashing your prices. Please do not read this and immediately go and change your $3,000 offer to $1,500 because Susan from Facebook said “I could never justify paying that”. I don’t mean only posting about your services and telling people to ‘book a call’ or ‘sign up via the link in bio’ either.

I mean actually looking at your marketing and asking: have I explained the value? Have I shown them the transformation? Have I made it clear what problem I’m solving? Have I given them a reason to believe this is worth spending their money on?

Because people will spend money on things they really want. You know this. You have absolutely spent $87 on something you did not need because you convinced yourself it was “an investment”.

Sometimes the problem isn’t the price. Sometimes the problem is that you haven’t made the value obvious enough.

People will find a way when they want to.

If someone wants to find a way, they’ll find a way.

★ Time is money, and successful people spend their money to buy back their time. ★

I think this is something business owners can struggle with because spending money on help can feel unnecessary when you technically have the ability to do something yourself.

But having the ability to do something doesn’t necessarily mean you should be the person doing it. I can technically do my own bookkeeping. I can also technically cut my own hair.

Neither of those things means I should.

Your time has a value too.

★ Keep it stupidly simple. ★

Kayla Itsines was asked about business ideas and spoke about the importance of keeping your offering simple.

Her advice was: ‘Show your mum, make it simple, and if you dont understand it then its not simple enough’.

Honestly, put that on a fucking billboard. We have a habit of making our businesses sound far more complicated than they need to be because we think complicated = professional.

It doesn’t.

And we’re also privy to all the ins and outs of our offers, which means sometimes we’re simply too close to it to see the issues. You might think your 14-step process makes you sound incredibly clever. Your customer might just be wondering what the fuck you actually sell and what the hell is that special offer anyway?

If your customer needs a 45-minute Zoom call and a flow chart to understand what you actually sell, we have a problem.

★ M.M.F.I. aka Make Me Feel Important. ★

This was probably one of my favourite concepts from the day.

M.M.F.I. Make Me Feel Important.

Kayla told a story about a restaurant in Adelaide sitting in the middle of Chinatown. Every other restaurant was Chinese, except for this one Argentinian restaurant. Restaurants would close, reopen and change hands, but this one restaurant remained.

Despite being surrounded by Chinese restaurants, it stayed busy. When asked why he thought that was, the owner said M.M.F.I, Make Me Feel Important.

And honestly, it makes perfect sense. It’s not necessarily about having the biggest restaurant, the best food or the flashiest marketing.

It’s about making the person in front of you feel like they matter.

If your restaurant is fully booked but there are three tables available, make the customer feel like you will do everything in your power to get them one. Remember their name. Ask them about themselves. Remember what they ordered last time. Make them feel seen. Make them feel like they aren’t just another transaction moving through your business.

Make me feel important.

And I think that might actually be one of the biggest lessons of the entire day. Because marketing can get very caught up in algorithms, funnels, Meta Ads, AI, content pillars, SEO and whatever the internet has decided we should all be talking about this week. Everyone is looking for the next hack. The next trend. The next secret funnel. The next magic little button that will apparently make people buy from you while you sleep.

But underneath all of it, you're still selling to a person.

And people want to feel like people.

So, despite going into Marketing Summit Australia expecting to hear groundbreaking marketing secrets from the marketing gods themselves, I actually walked away thinking about something much simpler.

Make good shit. Tell people about it. Make them care. And, for the love of God, don't build a business that requires you to be chained to your laptop 24/7 just to keep the lights on.

Not a bad morning's work.