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How often has your marketing failed?

You’ve tentatively put together an offer; you’ve waivered about the price; you set a date for sending out your first email …. and then nothing.

Not one nibble.

It’s enough to send you crying back under your duvet, isn’t it?

Well, here’s the truth about marketing; it’s never meant to work exactly how you wanted it to.

Because you are selling to human beings (well, at least I assume that’s who you are selling to!), you never truly know what response you are going to get. Human beings are naturally unpredictable and even when you have tested and tested and felt you’ve got your campaign working, for no apparent reason, it fails the next time you run it.

What gives??

I Don't CareNow, I know that you can – and many experts will tell you that you should – be testing and measuring every piece of marketing you do. From tracking your visitors to your website and conversions on specific pages to measuring the open rates and click throughs on your emails, you can – in theory – track every bit of action taken by your potential client through your promotional campaign.

But here’s the thing about running your own business and selling yourself … tracking every action, click and step taken takes a lot of time, energy and quite often money to ensure you know what’s happening. And even if you do track every action, click and step taken, does it ever guarantee successful marketing?

As entrepreneurs and business owners, you care passionately about what it is you do. When you put yourself out there in your marketing, it’s really easy to care passionately about the results you get.

No amount of tracking and measuring can take away the feeling of failure when a promotion doesn’t go according to plan.

Well, that’s how I have felt on and off throughout the years. Yes, that’s right … even a brilliant marketer like me LOL fails at her marketing.

I can laugh about it today – as I write this article – but when I’m stuck right the moment of abject failure, I can feel frustrated enough to blame myself for my crappy marketing. To beat myself up when I don’t get the results that I wanted. To punish myself with thoughts such as “Maybe I’m not good enough” when I don’t get the numbers I’m was hoping for.

But what if business was just a game?

What if you ended up feeling successful, no matter what results your marketing gave you?

Yes, there are always aspects of your marketing that you could be tracking. And yes, you will always care about the clients you serve.

But what if your marketing just didn’t matter?

How would you show up each day and promote your business?

I will leave you with this clip below from a 1979 Bill Murray film called Meatballs. I’ve never heard of the film before I saw the clip. And going by the promotional poster I found on Google images, I’m not sure I will rushing to watch the whole thing! But this short clip shows one of the best motivational speeches I’ve seen in a long while and goes a long way in helping us all deal with our marketing “failures”.

It just doesn’t matter!

 

What do you think? Do you care more about working with great clients or more about your marketing results? Or do you believe that there is no difference? Would love to read your thoughts and comments below.

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