You wouldn’t start a business with the expectation you’re going to bomb. But you’d be realistic about your chances at success, since 50% of small businesses do fail after five years. Similarly, you should maintain realistic expectations about marketing your business – and know what marketing can and can’t do for you.

The goal of marketing is to get your jewelry business in front of as many qualified customers as possible – that’s it. Once you’re able to do that, then you can take appropriate steps to build relationships with those prospective customers, portray your jewelry in the best way possible, put your jewelry in front of prospective customers when it counts, and find ways to delight those customers on a regular basis, building trust and staying top of mind.

When you’re getting started with marketing for your jewelry brand, you must adopt the right mindset and know that you’ll need to maintain that mindset for the long haul. In his article “How to approach marketing with realistic expectations”, Clifford Jones writes, “Marketing and business success is a thinking, planning and execution game. The rewards can be huge. Welcome the risk. Embrace the fear. Let it go.”. Marketing is just as much about embracing uncertainty and remaining positive yet realistic about the future as it is about creating a Facebook ad or sending an email marketing campaign.

With your first marketing steps, expect that you won’t have all the answers and immediately know how to best market your products. You can take some educated guesses about marketing your jewelry brand, but you simply won’t know until you start testing your theories and moving forward with them.

Furthermore, you should only judge your results as they relate to your goals and not out of frustration. For example, if you didn’t get as many Instagram followers as you wanted in one week, that doesn’t necessarily mean your marketing strategy has failed. It could mean nothing, especially if your final goal is to generate sales – maybe your sales ultimately won’t even come from Instagram, and that’s okay.

Marketing will not magically convince anyone to buy your jewelry. Marketing will not make a lackluster product appealing. It should not serve as a bandaid to cover open wounds in your business model or make up for a lack of exceptional product offerings. Most importantly, marketing requires patience.

The next time you feel impatient with your marketing efforts, read the Duct Tape Marketing post, “How Long Should It Take For My Marketing To Work?”. Marketing expert John Jantsch explains, “Done properly, it is likely going to take six months to a year for you to see the kind of long term momentum that you want.” Of course, you could get lucky and start seeing results sooner than that. But if you’re not prepared to wait that long to see results, then you may want to rethink starting a jewelry business in the first place.

Another reason that mindset is important for jewelry marketing is because you must learn not to let past marketing results dictate how you feel about your potential for future success. Many clients come to us saying that they’ve worked with other marketing companies in the past and had felt very disappointed by the results. As a result, they’ve adopted a fear-based mindset, and they’re typically not as receptive to new advice and may not be very open to trying new marketing strategies without the guarantee of some specific result.

In both marketing and life, fear will provide you with the illusion that you’re protecting yourself, and most of the time fear is actually just holding you back from your full potential. In no way are we suggesting that you should blindly move forward with new marketing strategies for the sake of implementing them, but you should trust that each new calculated marketing strategy – especially when it’s planned by someone with knowledge and experience – is an educated experiment that will either succeed or provide you with valuable data that you can use to make more informed and better business decisions in the future.