Does Failure In Marketing Leave You Feeling Doomed?
Does failure in marketing leave you in a cold sweat? How comfortable are you with failure? Many of us aren’t.
Many business owners become frustrated when their marketing seems to fail, fail and fail again. And it can be easy to assume your marketing is doomed!
I think this is how we approach failure in our society too. For example, do we really teach our children to be comfortable with failure, or is the straight A student agenda pushed more often than not?
Many people grow up fearing failure, as if it’s the worst possible scenario. Failing equals 'I am a terrible person and must be cursed to fail forever.'
The founder of Spanx and self-made billionaire, Sara Blakely, has a story about being encouraged to fail by her Dad when she was growing up. He asked, "What did you fail at this week?" every week.
And now, she attributes her success to failure, something many people still feel uncomfortable with. Blakely said in an interview for TODAY that he would actually be disappointed when she had nothing she failed at, which helped her to reframe failure and to not be afraid of hearing no.
It encouraged her to be a risk taker, important for obliterating fear of failure, learning new skills and evolving and inspiring creative thinking and self-trust. I know reframing the way we look at failure doesn’t take away the frustration from a lack of marketing results alone.
What if marketing was just a series of failures, until it’s not? As marketing is about experimentation and tweaking as you go, there’s a lot that won’t work immediately as you can’t always predict when you’re selling to REAL people.
Sure, data can help and be used to inform decisions, but until you’ve hit the ground running, you can’t monitor what is and isn’t working.
As frustrating as it can be, failure is inevitable in marketing, because failure is a part of success.
But to help with the frustration, here are some of the main marketing mistakes people make, which learning about as you go can help speed success along.
You're using too many strategies at once.
It’s tempting to throw every strategy you can find at your marketing and business. There are a few issues with this.
ONE: how do you know what’s working if you’re trying everything?
TWO: how do you sustain that without getting burnt out and overwhelmed?
THREE: Isn’t there a better way that involves trialling the effectiveness of strategies first, ditching the ones that don’t work and utilising the ones that get the results? And wouldn’t this then be a win-win: marketing results WITHOUT a sacrifice to health and sanity?
You're trying too many social media platforms at once.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed and like you can’t keep up with your social media platforms, or you’re choosing which platforms to set up, it’s often best to just pick one or two.
If you master one platform, and it seems to work for connecting with your audience, you can then think about setting up another platform.
It’s always better to be consistent with one first, instead of trying to be everything, everywhere, all at once and no one to anyone! That is, meaningless to your ideal customer! No business wants to be meaningless, right?
Also, why not add things one at a time as you go to make your life a hell of a lot easier, and be free to ditch things as you go too?
You don't have a solid foundation.
A solid foundation is the first place to start. Essentially, this is everything I teach in more depth in my self-paced 6 Steps to Marketing Clarity course, such as nailing your brand’s personality, values, benefits and essence, unique selling proposition (USP) and unique emotional proposition (UEP).
It also includes getting to the heart of the emotion by niching your ideal avatar and client, methods to save time, as well as marketing reviews to ensure your messaging connects with your audience.
All so you can spend your time, energy and money in the most effective places!
So, this week, what hurdles have you jumped over? What is your biggest takeaway?
How have you failed?
