When She Says Your Marketing’s a Good Size…
April 16, 2009 :: Mike DoughertyThere’s a quote that I use to keep taped somewhere on the wall behind my monitor. It was:
“Go BIG or go home”
For the longest time I took that to mean that the actions I took in marketing, design, and in life, had to be larger than life. Ultimately, I learned the hard way that ‘big actions don’t all ways result in big rewards’. I also learned the time it took me to plan, prep, and execute my Big Whatever resulted in me being well behind the time that it could have been effective or, more often than not, out a greater amount of time, money, and effort than what came back to me.
Frustrated and determined to not “go home”, I gave up on trying to create catchy messaging, flashy visual displays, and the big song and dance and focused on my results. I toiled and planned and stressed over how to get the biggest bang of my buck, or my best Return On Investment (ROI) for those savvy.
I pinched every penny…twice. I argued with my vendors to get the cheapest things I needed. I used the cheapest materials from my local office supply stores. I was confident that I could, alone, produce the same quality with lesser effort and get greater results.
Man, was I wrong.
Too wrong, this ultimately ended up with a very polite guy coming up to me at a networking event and saying, “Is everything…ok?” He explained that my materials looked like I didn’t care about my business. That I was asking more from the people who’d invest in me that I was, appearing to, invest in myself. I explained to him what I was trying to do. He politely smiled and said, “Try the middle ground.”
I went home, dejected, and thought about it. It took some time, but I realized he was right.
Initially, I spent too much time focusing on the “Look at me” factor. What I thought was amazing, attractive, eye catching, and compelling…was only that way to me. I didn’t stop to look at it from my future, and current, customers’ perspectives. The mindset of “I like it so everyone else will too” ultimately cost me more, as far as lost time and money, than it did me good.
When I changed my focus, I still didn’t think of my customer, I thought of myself. I thought of the gobs and gobs of money I would get by saving money and time. I still wasn’t focused on my customers - I saved some coin in the long run, but I didn’t gain much either.
Essentially, I went back to the chalk board and started smaller, but more detailed. I started looking where my best customers were coming from, where they needed the most help that I could provide, and what I could do to catch their attention, or be in a position to come to mind quickly, when they needed my services. I started focusing on having my big result be only double the effort I put out and grew it from there.
I recently replaced the “Go Big or Go Home” quote with one I found while reading Juliette Powell’s “33 Million People in the Room: How to Create, Influence, and Run a Successful Business with Social Networking”. That quote is:
“Do business as if you were playing a game, have fun, know the rules, and when it’s time, make up your own.” ~ Guy Laliberte, Founder and CEO, Cirque Du Soleil
Don’t get me wrong, I still love to “go big” and do things that are, sometimes, a little over the top, but I realized to improved my results that I would have to change my focus for Big to mean the impact that my marketing had on my customers. From their experience to the outcome, the interactions my customers had with me, and my company, had to reflect that the “show” was worth the “price of admission”.
Until next time…stay wicked.
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