As I’ve written before, business owners love to complicate the task of marketing.
Many guru’s give advice that nearly requires a complicated setup! The problem is that this stops people from believing they can be effective with the resources they have.
If you are always looking for the next tool, you’ll get lost in thinking that your success is directly tied to how many tools you can afford, or how fully-featured they are.
I’m not against using tools.
The fact is that much of what I do today would be impossible if not for the tools I use! And I’m sure that, over time, I will be upgrading those to get even more/better functionality.
I think a better way is to think in terms of action. What action can you take right now—with what you already have—to move the needle?
Good marketing comes down to two things: Testing and tweaking.
Test
Part of your company’s culture should be testing. But it’s more than that. Why?
Because testing assumes that action is being (or has been) taken.
By getting something out there—perhaps a “Minimum Viable Product” (MVP), a “Version 1,” a “beta,” a “trial run,” or whatever you’d like to call it, you start gathering data. And data-driven marketing is the best way to make sure you’re being effective and giving clients what they want.
Frankly, you should be in the habit of getting a good idea out there and validating it before moving to the masses and making it a part of your offerings.
There’s a reason the formula is not “develop, test, and tweak.” You can drag your heels when it comes to developing things!
So test things—which means they have to, at some level, be created first. Cultivate an experimental mindset. It will keep you from stalling out.
Tweak
This second phase is just as important, though, because there is where the real “money” is.
If When something is not working, change it! Make small, incremental steps, and find out where the problem is.
Is it the product itself? The delivery? The packaging? The messaging? The customer? The email list?
There is a host of things your testing phrase will reveal. Use those to your advantage, and make small tweaks throughout the life of your product to get the maximum value out of it.
To your success!
