Sit, Stay, Paw, Lay Down.

The last few weeks of my tips have been pretty in-depth, even intense. Maybe that’s a solid reflection of the work that I’ve been doing with clients lately. Really digging in, down and dirty, and trying to align programmatic structure to data metrics to come up with the best marketing strategies that make sense for their capacity, quality control, and budgets.

For this week’s insight, I’m going to try and keep it simple.

Simple.

What is simple when new perspectives enter a business where marketing is stagnant?  

Last summer we did a pandemic dog adoption, Finn. He has a rough and sad background and similar to our other dog, needs some serious TLC and extensive training. Our daily vocabulary has become, “Sit, Stay, Paw, Lay Down” on a constant rinse and repeat method to train his muscle memory to follow and adhere to new behaviors. It’s all about consistent and dedicated repetition to see results. We have weekly training classes where we break down each step, like “Sit” into small bite size pieces not only for Finn, but for us the owners too. It makes the training understanding, obtainable, and effective. And it occurred to me this pattern is exactly what the business owners I’m working with need when we’re on the marketing journey mixed with complex data and analytics. They need it simple and in bite-size pieces. Thank goodness my slide decks that collect and showcase complex data metrics are just that!

Here are my two marketing and branding insights for you to consider this week. 

1. Just like a dog needs consistent and dedicated repetition, so does your brand. Keep your message simple, clear, concise and your call to action easy. And then, rinse and repeat it over and over and over again. You will get tired of it, but your audiences won’t. Keep going. Watch the analytics and give it time. Marketing is like a train engine, it takes time to build speed, it’s not a ‘build the plane as we fly it’ mentality.
2. If you have never done any kind of strategic marketing before (meaning when the marketing efforts are specifically connected to sales and operations), then it can be a bit overwhelming to learn and embrace. This is where I coach business owners to take it one step at a time – crawl, walk, run. If you don’t need to double sales today, and you want to do a slow growth to control internal capacity and ensure consistent quality control. Then we will take on appropriately sized marketing projects to ensure that the push we’re doing on the outside is matching up with the programmatic structures on the inside.

Until next week!