Jan/100
Dumb persistence
Business people often talk about the importance of persistence and tenacity. Keep trying, they will urge you, even when things look bad. Never give up!
This raises an interesting question. When you feel like you are fighting a losing battle, how can you tell whether you are fighting for a lost cause or whether a victory is just around the next corner? More to the point, will your actions have any impact on the outcome or are you at the mercy of events beyond your control? If persistence is followed by success, hindsight makes you look like a genius. But when you see failure in the rear view mirror, that same quality of persistence renders you stubborn and ignorant.
Persistence, in itself, is nothing to be proud of. In order to be useful, it must be accompanied by an element of critical self-analysis, rule-setting and intelligent action. Firstly, when you look closely at your situation and think carefully, is there really a chance to succeed? What parallels, analogies or evidence can you find to support your view? Once you have made up your mind, you need to set the rule. Decide what you must achieve and when you must achieve it in order to prove that your view is right. If you find that it is not right, then cease to persist, take what you have learnt and put your energy into a new battle or venture. If you leave it too late, you may find that your energy and resources are too depleted for another fight.
Whilst you continue to persist, give yourself the best chance of success by persisting intelligently. Don’t keep hammering away with the same approach, using the same tools. Be creative and find new ways to approach your challenge. The more remarkable your approach, the more likely you are to attract the attention of your customers or prospects. The more varied your choice of tools, the better your chance of keeping their attention.
From the perspective of your customer or your prospect, dumb persistence can be plain annoying.
Oct/090
You get what you deserve
What do you get when you continue to do what you always did? The answer is, you get the same results that you always got. And that is what you would deserve. So if you want things to be better than they were in the past, you have to do some differently, right?
How good is your marketing now? Think about each piece of marketing you have done recently. What was your return? It can be tough to work out how much you made from a piece of marketing, so keep it simple – how many people responded to your advert, flyer, email or whatever method you used?
For most forms of local marketing, it can seem pointless trying to measure. For example, it’s hard to find out how many people came to you as a result of a recent advert you placed in the local paper. And is it really worth the effort involved in trying to measure that? Let’s come back to that question at the end.
There are many ways to measure. You can sometimes measure effectiveness by incentivising people to respond to your campaign. Other times, it’s simply about training your staff to ask – where did you hear about us? If you’re using email marketing, it’s much easier to measure. If you’re using mobile marketing or SMS marketing, it’s hard not to.
Think of it this way. Of all the different pieces of marketing you could possibly do, there are a few that will work far better; a few where you will make noticeably more money as a result. Do you want to find out which methods make a real difference to your business? Well, you can only do that by experimenting, by trying out different marketing ideas and methods.
In fact, this process is what makes marketing fun. Try something. If it works, do more. If it doesn’t work, try something new. Repeat until successful.
There’s just one catch. You’ll never know what works until you measure.
Subscribe via email:
Share this blog
