Are you willing to fail your way to great marketing Success? Success is a learning process. It's an ongoing process - a continual quest. Do you believe that marketing success is a learning process? Then you must be willing to accept that you'll stumble (i.e., fail) along the way - sometimes a whole lot. But if you're willing to pay attention to what works and what doesn't, you can learn from your mistakes. You can fail your way to success! I hear it all the time from clients as well as other small business owners. "When I put this marketing piece out, it really has to be good. I really need to get it right." Really? Why is that? I mean if you weren't very good at marketing to begin with, then why does your next piece have to be so good? What is wrong with making it as good as you think you can and putting it out there? Even if it's not a rousing success you should be able to learn from the experience. Fear of Failure is such a powerful obstacle to achieving great marketing success. Too often it's what keeps us from realizing that it is absolutely possible for our own small business. We are taught in school that failure is bad. For a lot of us growing up, that meant anything less that an 80% (certainly less than a 70%) was failure. I know it kept me motivated most of the time. Then when we get into business, we tend to think some of these same rules apply. And when we fail (or at least we think we fail) with our ideas and our marketing, it's devastating. Failure is bad. We fear it. We don't ever have to want to go through it again. Fear of Failure can be paralyzing. You might assume that the best way to not fail is to not take a chance in the first place. Ah, but then doing nothing is a sure path to failure. What are you to do? Be Willing To Fail Your Way To Marketing Success Failure really isn't bad at all - well at least not if you are willing to learn from it. What if you simply thought of all of your marketing as testing? No, I'm not talking about like those tests back in school where you had to score 80% or higher to succeed. Let me illustrate with an example. Say you send out 100 direct sales letters and only get two responses. A 2% response rate on a direct sales letter is not necessarily failure. In fact, it may be great success. The value of one or two new clients usually far outweighs the time and costs of producing and mailing the letter - especially if you consider the lifetime value of the client. But only getting two responses out of 100 sure does feel like failure to many small business owners. Now do you realize that a simple change in your headline or your offer could increase response by over 500%? That's the power of testing. You put it out there and pay attention to what happens. Then you look for the opportunities to increase your results. I'm not suggesting that you just start throwing your stuff out there to see what takes. Your marketing should be planned and part of an overall coordinated effort. If you follow any of KPD Marketing's work, you know how important I believe analysis and preparation are to success. No, what I'm suggesting by failing your way to success is a willingness to put your marketing out there and test to see what happens. As long as you're willing to pay attention to (and accept) what works and what doesn't, you can learn what you are doing right and wrong. Then simply refine it and test it again. Test and Test and Test Some More! Does anybody think the Wright brothers got it right the first time? Of course they didn't. In fact, we know they tested and failed for years. Even their first real flight would be considered a colossal failure by today's standards. But the Wright brothers kept on testing to continue improving upon what they achieved each time. The same is true for some of the most successful marketing businesses today. Don't think for a second that their first ideas and first marketing strategies worked flawlessly. They had failures. Some had several failures. Some had major failures. The Secret to Failing Your Way To Success... If you fail, you learn. When you learn, you can refine. When you refine, you can test again and eventually you will succeed. Now, in order to learn from your failures, you must monitor and track your results. You might think you know what's working and what's not, but if you're not tracking anything then I'd be willing to challenge your notions. Testing and tracking is really not as hard as you might think. It is important to take time to reflect on your failed experiences. What went right and wrong and where could you do things differently to garner different results next time? Clarify your most wanted response. When you are putting together any marketing piece, or marketing tool, or marketing campaign; determine and be clear about your objective. What do you most want to happen? What is your most desired response? So often business owners put something together, but they can't clearly articulate what they thought should happen as a result. There is no way to measure or monitor if it worked if you were not sure what was supposed to happen in the first place. It is not the failure that defines us, but how we respond to failure. We all fail sometimes. Get over it. Don't be afraid of it. Pick yourself up and learn from the experience so you can move forward again. You just need to be willing to Fail your way to great marketing Success! (c) - Kevin P. Dervin, KPD Marketing |
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