Marketing In The Moment - A 3-Part Series

This week I plan to briefly discuss marketing. Today we start things off with monitoring your marketing. Wednesday we'll talk about measuring your marketing and on Friday we'll discuss multiplying your marketing.

By monitoring I mean you take a good, hard look at your marketing. So many of us are stuck doing what we've always done even though it may have stopped working many years ago. We just keep doing it because it's all we know to do. And perhaps we think doing something different is beyond us.

One business owner told me years ago - during a conversation about leveraging the power of an online presence - "You might as well try to teach me to fly the space shuttle." That sentiment is too prevalent, especially among traditional, non-hi-tech business owners.

I can understand how business owners in their 50's or older may be intimidated, but that's no excuse - or reason - to avoid marketing in the moment. Romanticizing what once worked is futile. The past isn't coming back. It's over. Time to move on and figure out what we need to do today. THAT is precisely why I'm starting this little series on monitoring or taking a closer look at what you're currently doing.

The hard part of monitoring is seeing things as they really are. Blind spots galore surround marketing efforts. Lots of marketing challenges stymie us: 1) marketing people who have an agenda to do something other than drive business growth, 2) false belief in efforts that haven't worked in a long time will eventually return to their former glory, 3) failing to realize (or remember) what the marketing efforts are supposed to accomplish, 4) believing that doing what we know to do is better than doing nothing (or better said, believing that there's no other option - like learning something new), 5) failing to believe that learning and implementing a new strategy will help us and 6) a million other excuses (or reasons).

Step 1 - Forget yesterday. It's over. Market for today while keeping an eye on tomorrow.

About twice a year I go out my front door and there on the porch is a big fat paperbound book. It's 2 to 3 inches thick and wrapped in plastic. It's one of those 3rd party phone books that some marketing outfit convinces poor stupid business owners to advertise in. I pick it up and immediately toss it into our recycle bin. I'd bet 99% of the people who get these throw them away. The other 1% are just keeping it to look at the ad they bought.

Things that once worked - and perhaps worked well - stop working. Things change. Technology has altered our lives forever. And it's going to keep changing things. Twenty years ago I recall hearing Steve Jobs talk about how voice was going to be the future. I didn't understand that. Nobody I knew understood that. But with Siri, Alexa and all the other voice-activated tech that now surrounds us --- I get it. Voice is faster. While driving my car I can tell Siri to text my wife, then I can dictate the message and say, "Send." Done. My phone never left the cradle while I kept my hands on the steering wheel.

The things we could do in the past to get people's attention - those things don't work any more. Newspaper ads. Billboards. Yellow Pages.

My son started a home inspection business last year. I advised him to do two things, knowing that dazzling the client wasn't anything I had to teach him (he learned that when he was just a kid). One, use your iPhone and record short videos of some interesting things that can help homeowners, real estate agents, and potential clients. Two, encourage clients to leave you a 5-star social media review. He's done both and mostly he's got all the business he can handle. By the way, you'll notice that the two things I told him to cost no money. They require some time and effort, but they're not capital intensive,