“If you have a great idea, do it to the Max”. I read this many years ago in a business book and it’s stuck with me. But everywhere I look I see examples of marketing effort going to waste because the business owner hasn’t followed through and “done it to the max”.
Here’s just a few of them:
- The business who invested in a Facebook app to increase Likes (using a special offer/competition), gained lots of fans, but never updated their timeline.
- People who join a networking group, pay the 6 or 12 months membership and then give up after a few weeks.
- LinkedIn profiles which are incomplete (and I mean nowhere near complete).
- The blogs which were last updated in 2009
- Email sign up boxes on websites, but no (or very occasional) emails actually sent.
Of course, any marketing expert will tell you that some of your efforts will fail. That you need to try things, do more of what works and stop what doesn’t. But you do need to give things a proper trial, especially with online marketing where many things take time to deliver results.
At the Inbound Marketing conference last week, Hubspot (who are masters of online marketing) shared with us a graph of their website visitors over time. It took over a year of concerted blogging before they started to see a real impact on their website visitors – but then the figures just went skywards.
It took me 6 months to gain my first client from networking – then I took on 2 more in 2 days.
One thing we have to be as small business owners is selective. There is no way you can do everything, so choose which activities you think will best connect with your target market and do them really, really well. This is the reason why Paprika Marketing still doesn’t have a Facebook page – I’m concentrating my efforts on Twitter, LinkedIn and Blogging as I feel they are the best platforms for me at the current time.
When you do things to the max, then, if you decide one of your marketing activites isn’t working for you, you know you gave it your best shot and it’s time to move on.
If you do decide to stop something, do that properly too. Don’t just leave the email sign up box on your website if you’re not going to send any more emails. And leaving a blog with a last updated date many months ago will have people wondering if you’re still trading. Either remove the blog completely, or convert it to a “Useful Articles” section and remove the dates.
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