Be careful of who you follow in your marketing – for they may lead you to a place you may not want to go. When I attend marketing classes or webinars or talk with business owners at our numerous meetups, I am struck by how easily people tend to follow what others suggest them to do.
Now, I am not averse to good advice / coaching.. or for that matter bad advice or coaching – how would you eve really know which is which – even if you succeed or fail?
What I am more concerned about is the lack of thinking that goes into the decision making around marketing strategy. Ellen Langer (one of my heroines in science) wrote about this in one of her books – she calls it mindlessness (the opposite is mindfulness which is not spiritual or meditative – but more about the following.
1. Not being open to information that may point in a contrarian way. This is not necessarily about being a rebel or a revolutionary but more about being open to the information.
2. Not considering other categories or styles of thinking.
3. Not open to different perspectives.
There is another form of mindlessness: when you fail to see what would work for you rather than trying to fit another person’s winning sales formula onto your business. This may be like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole – it may not fit! If it does fit, you are lucky .. for now – but luck has a habit of running out.
1. Define clearly what you want to see happen in your marketing efforts in the next one year.
2. Be specific with your measures of success e.g. at least $550k of gross income for the next calendar year.
3. Define the possible strategies that will help you fulfill those goals.
4. Does the strategy address possible and probable failure points?
5. Set up frequent dialogue opportunities with a coach or friend or business mentor to go over your strategies to see if they are working.
6. Does the strategy ‘feel right’ to you? If not, what is missing to have it ‘feel right’?
Your Business Meetup Audience with Sunil Bhaskaran. How to Leverage Meetups Like a RockStar.