When we have a new idea, a new business concept, or a new product or service, we’re motivated to move fast. We see everyone else out in the market, seemingly crushing it, and we strive to get in on the action. We think that speed is the key to success. When the opposite is true.
I thought the best way I could be helpful to you today is to just make your marketing a little easier. A little bit less stressful or overwhelming, so you can focus on other things.
Marketing efforts don’t fail. They stop. Like New Year’s Resolutions, our marketing efforts simply peter out and fade away over time.
What are you actually supposed to do to get the clients you really want?
Your marketing isn’t going to work. At least, not at first. It’s something I call “The Principle of Expected Failure”.
It’s frustrating when potential clients balk at your prices, even though you’re great at what you do. Even though you know and follow all the industry best practices.
A lot of us were raised to believe that, if we’re having fun or doing something we find easy, we’re not really working. And that feeling can stick with us even as business owners, consultants, or creators.
“I can’t write about that, everyone in my industry already knows it.” A friend recently said that to me. They were worried that the marketing content they were working on was too rudimentary, too basic to be impressive. Have you ever worried about that?
I used to think the secret to getting what I wanted was to have an ambitious goal, to state it publicly, and to exert as much effort as I could in that direction, as fast as I could. But I was wrong. That doesn’t actually work.
For anyone who struggles with coming up with topics for their content marketing, I can relate.
Frequent marketing meetings are often a sign of marketing struggles. Of course, when marketing is struggling, we tend to meet about it. But the meeting itself is part of the problem, or at least a symptom of a greater one.
When we think about “the future” of our business or our marketing, we’re not considering real events. We’re imagining what might happen. No matter how skilled we may be at marketing, our vision of the future is quite literally a figment of our imagination.
