People always want things to be simple. Cut and dry. When it comes to marketing people are always asking me what works and what doesn’t work. They wanna know what’s hot! What should I do right now, Cale – what’s the big thing?
There are at least one hundred ways to cover this topic, and I will probably cover 98 of them. +
A friend reminded me to discuss this topic when she mentioned she was pulling efforts on several social media platforms and concentrating on just one. As a small business owner, she, like most small business owners, does not have extra time on her hands. She didn’t have to do a deep dive into analytics to figure it out. In fact, she could easily sense from which platforms she was getting attention and new business and which ones she wasn’t.
I believe it is usually easy to know what marketing or advertising will work long before executing your strategy. First, you have to be clear in your goal – what are you trying to get out of your marketing and advertising efforts? Not sure? I can tell you what you want to get out of your efforts, every singe time I guarantee I will be accurate for at least 99% of you. You say; I want to increase brand awareness, I want to increase market share, I want more leads, I want to increase traffic – blah, blah, blah. That’s all bullshit. You want to increase sales. Say it any way you want, but at the end of the day, it’s all crap. You just want more sales. You wanna make more money. You wanna beat your competition.
If you are new to your business, forgive me for oversimplifying here. You should probably know how to sell your product or service. If someone were in the market for your product or service and standing right in front of you, you’d be able to tell the story that would sell your stuff. You could see the questions coming, and you could answer on the fly. That’s all marketing and advertising are when you boil it all down – telling the story that sells your stuff.
To get a feel for what marketing and advertising approaches will work, consider what is involved in telling your story. What tools would help tell your story? Would it be; beautiful artwork, charts and graphs, a lengthy presentation, a video? If you could devise the perfect storytelling machine, how would it tell the story? Don’t over-complicate it. Don’t over-think it.
Now consider which channels can help you tell your story. Don’t invent reasons to use specific channels, don’t stress about not seeing yourself on your favorite platform; focus on telling the best story to sell your product or service. How do you do it? And then what platforms lend themselves to being able to do it well.
If you’re feeling like your efforts outweigh your results, but you are afraid to stop because you’re not positive which channels are working and which are not, you can do some simple analysis. A word of warning here, many people will bias their analysis by justifying their favorite advertising channels even when they are not working. Usually, this is a matter of your ego getting in the way of logic. So, don’t do that.
The friend of mine that I mentioned earlier is an excellent designer, a great creative. She stopped using Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook and focused on Instagram. 75% less work and no reduction in leads OR Brand awareness. Perfect.
