Marketing Overthink - Your Worst Enemy
OK - so I'm probably more guilty of this than many business owners but 'marketing overthink' is a dangerous foe that must be defeated at all costs. Why? Because 'marketing overthink' leads to 'marketing inertia' which in turn leads to never doing the simple marketing that you need to do.
It's tempting to believe that, if only you could think of the perfect marketing strategy, then all your problems would be solved. As a result, small businesses often spend ages trying to come up with that perfect, creative, quirky answer - and that's marketing overthink.
In fact, marketing your business can be surprisingly simple - decide what makes you different (your message) decide who that will benefit the most (your target market) and then get to work telling your message to your targets (your methods).
Marketing inertia sets in when you complicate this process so much in your mind, that you end up not doing anything at all. The best marketing advice I've ever heard is to stop thinking and start doing.
So here's a simple process to get your marketing moving:
1. Define what makes you special
2. Define who can benefit from that and how
3. Create a compelling offer
4. Get started with some basics that get your message and offer to your prospects cost effectively - networking, mail, phone calls, doing sales calls, standing on the street corner shouting about what you do - whatever ....
5. Take a good look at the numbers and decide what's working and what isn't - improve where you can and drop the stuff that doesn't work to focus on what does
6. Use the contacts and customers you get to start generating referrals
7. Use the revenue you get to reinvest in improving and expanding the marketing you're doing
8. Put all this down into a straight forward process with targets to hit each week or month (i.e. I'm going to do 10 calls a day or go to 3 networking events each month) - keep doing this consisitently and don't fall into a stop/start approach
9. THEN start looking for little marketing experiments that you can try as an addition to your core, everday marketing - if they work you add them into your routine, if they don't you don't
10. Rinse and repeat
Doing something will always give you better results than thinking about it but never doing.
It's tempting to believe that, if only you could think of the perfect marketing strategy, then all your problems would be solved. As a result, small businesses often spend ages trying to come up with that perfect, creative, quirky answer - and that's marketing overthink.
In fact, marketing your business can be surprisingly simple - decide what makes you different (your message) decide who that will benefit the most (your target market) and then get to work telling your message to your targets (your methods).
Marketing inertia sets in when you complicate this process so much in your mind, that you end up not doing anything at all. The best marketing advice I've ever heard is to stop thinking and start doing.
So here's a simple process to get your marketing moving:
1. Define what makes you special
2. Define who can benefit from that and how
3. Create a compelling offer
4. Get started with some basics that get your message and offer to your prospects cost effectively - networking, mail, phone calls, doing sales calls, standing on the street corner shouting about what you do - whatever ....
5. Take a good look at the numbers and decide what's working and what isn't - improve where you can and drop the stuff that doesn't work to focus on what does
6. Use the contacts and customers you get to start generating referrals
7. Use the revenue you get to reinvest in improving and expanding the marketing you're doing
8. Put all this down into a straight forward process with targets to hit each week or month (i.e. I'm going to do 10 calls a day or go to 3 networking events each month) - keep doing this consisitently and don't fall into a stop/start approach
9. THEN start looking for little marketing experiments that you can try as an addition to your core, everday marketing - if they work you add them into your routine, if they don't you don't
10. Rinse and repeat
Doing something will always give you better results than thinking about it but never doing.
posted by Mark at Really Practical Marketing at 12:36 PM
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