3 Reasons Why Great Marketing Doesn’t Have to be Externally Visible
There’s always a challenge in avoiding the shiny objects, in order to focus on getting to where you really want to be…
There’s a big difference between looking good at what you do and being good at what you do. The best results are often the ones you don’t hear about.
These are my recommendations for keeping focused in the right areas:
1) You should be focused on achieving a goal…
In marketing especially, it’s very easy to get carried away with trying to be everywhere so that people can’t ignore you.
However, the reality is you don’t need to be everywhere.
You need to be in the right places.
2) “Fake it ‘til you make it” only takes you so far…
It’s poor advice to pretend to be something you’re not — sure you may get some success, but you’ll likely get found out by making promises that you simply can’t deliver on and hit a ceiling very quickly.
Focus on producing an outstanding product or service and then marketing becomes the icing on the cake to help you grow once you’re ready for it.
If marketing is the cake, you’ve got a serious problem…
3) Not everything has to scale…
There’s always an obsession in trying to get everything perfectly scalable from day one. e.g. “let’s run a big event that can get us in front of 1,000 people… If we can do that, at 1% we can convert 10 into customers…”
Stop! Why don’t you just get in front of 10 of the right people instead?
Make them feel important, invite them to lunch/dinner, ask them for advice, create a tailored plan on what you can do to help them…
Do things that don’t scale — it doesn’t have to work forever, just find out the best way to get the result you need right now, you can worry about how to scale later.
There’s always a natural tendency to do the public facing work that may get you recognition, but it’s important not to confuse recognition with success.
My recommendation is focus on internal success first, then you can earn the external success afterwards.
About The Author
Kevin Gibbons is Managing Director of Re:signal. You can connect with him on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
