Marketing relies heavily on creativity. It takes creativity to attract your prospective client’s attention. It takes creativity to stand out against your competitors. It also takes creativity to write a great marketing message or land a new client. 

The enemy of creativity is fear. Specifically, the fear of failure.

Today, I’m going to show you how to overcome this challenge, so you be free to create without fear and improve everything about your marketing at the same time. It’s based on a strategy I discovered in the mid 1990’s and it’s worked for me ever since. I hope you find it as valuable as I have.

It looks like this

I decided to improve how I felt about creating, by reframing my marketing as a series of experiments. This was not only extremely helpful. It was also factually correct.

Think about it.

Everything you do to market your business is done to achieve some kind of result. That result is feedback. By measuring the feedback, you learn, and can then improve the result next time. It’s a process of testing and measuring akin to scientific experiments.

Marketing experiments

So, I switched, mentally, from spending my day on a series of projects, to spending my day on a series of marketing experiments. It was such a powerful exercise that I even renamed my first office ‘The Lab’.

What I loved about this approach is that it made me vastly more productive. That’s because the more I experimented, the more feedback I received.

And that feedback is extremely valuable.

• Sometimes the feedback is what I expected.
• Sometimes the feedback is a total surprise.
• Sometimes the feedback leads to a major success breakthrough.
• Sometimes the feedback leads to a massively more profitable, new direction.

However, no experiment ever fails! 

That’s because the feedback you receive equips you to make better and better marketing experiments. With better marketing experiments, comes better marketing results; more new clients, more product sales, better client retention, higher profitability, more enquiries, more subscribers and every other sales metric you need.

As such, fear was eliminated from my creative output. This freed me to become vastly more productive.

You and your business

Could this approach work for you?

Yes. Yes it could.

However, you’ll never know if it works for until you give it a try. So, go ahead. Test, measure and improve your sales results. As often as you wish.

P.S. Here’s why people criticise you and how to deal with it, in just 3 steps.

Photo by Yassine Khalfalli on Unsplash

If you want to make dramatically more sales, you need to start by knowing what your prospect’s buying style is. Once you uncover the way your prospects like to buy, you massively increase the likelihood you’ll make the sale. Over and over again.

It starts by understanding that people buy based on feelings far more than logic. [Note] I explain why, here.

We also need to understand that the prospect is right. And that they’re right every single time.

• They’re always right about what constitutes value for money.
• They’re always right about their past experiences of the type of product or service you provide.
• They’re always right about the last experience they had with someone from your industry.
• They’re always right about their attitude to risk (real or perceived risk).
• They’re even right about whether pineapple belongs on a pizza or not.

That’s because THEY are always the most informed person in the world regarding what they think and how they feel. And as their thoughts and feelings are what determine their actions, you need to discover them fast!

This might include, what they value most when making a purchase, whether they’re in the low price crowd or the premium quality crowd, if they’re someone who likes to take their time or prefers to move along, what their past experience of your industry was, how they feel about risk and any other factor you would like to know.

If you try to get them to make a purchasing decision without you knowing that information, your chances are radically reduced.

• You’ll be making assumptions based on what you know about your service and what you feel are the most important points.
• You’ll be focusing on things that don’t motivate the prospect.
• You’ll be missing things that they need to hear from you before they will buy.

In short, you’ll be trying to sell to them based on hunches and guesswork, rather than knowing exactly what they need to hear or see from you.

How to get it right

Only when you have a good idea of how they think and feel from their answers to your questions, should you start to explain how your service will benefit them.

By matching the focus and tone of your conversation, or presentation, to your prospect’s thoughts and feelings, you’ll be fully aligned with them. Yes, this makes the sales process a great deal smoother and easier.

But more importantly, it can dramatically increase your sales results.

It’s not only okay to make marketing mistakes, they’re absolutely essential if you want your business to grow in any meaningful way.

Here’s why these mistakes are so important. And why you might want to re-evaluate how you feel about making mistakes with your marketing.

Let’s go!

Why are marketing mistakes okay?

They’re okay because they’re temporary.

Temporary?

Yes. Much of the marketing we do can be adjusted in minutes, with useful feedback sometimes obtained in hours.

For example, you can try a new call-to-action on your website. Then, check the conversion rate as soon as you have enough data in. If it’s worse or no better than the previous call-to-action, try a better one next time.

You’ll either win fast or you’ll learn fast. Not bad, eh?

Instead of thinking of your marketing as a somewhat rigid set of activities, try thinking of it as a series of temporary steps. Steps that you replace with something better, as you try new things. Because that’s exactly what the most effective marketing looks like.

Why are marketing mistakes essential?

They’re essential because you can’t possibly know if a new marketing idea or activity will work without testing it first. So, if you’re committed to growing your business, you’ll be committed to testing different ways to improve your results.

With testing comes measuring.

Measuring is where you find out what works.

It’s also where you find out what doesn’t work (the mistakes).

As such, the business owner who seldom makes a mistake with their marketing, seldom tries anything new and is leaving money on the table every day.

You may have heard the story about how Steve Jobs reprimanded team members, if they were not making mistakes often enough. Whether that’s true or just part of the Steve Jobs legend, the fact remains that mistakes are directly linked to progress. In trying to avoid mistakes with your marketing, by repeating what feels comfortable, you inadvertently block your business from the very success you long for.

So, expect marketing mistakes.

No… Scrub that.

Welcome marketing mistakes for what they truly are: A critically important part of the success of your business.

There’s something wonderful and extremely powerful about initiative.

Just think about this for a moment. No one gives you the initiative. You take the initiative.

It’s that last part that is easy to overlook. Initiative us something we take. This means it’s down to us to make things happen. And this is true regardless of where we are right now. Regardless of what season our business is going through. Regardless of how the economy is performing. Regardless of our age, industry, background or our past performance.

Initiative: Your free, always-on opportunity

Better still, not only are we free to take the initiative. We’re free to take it any time we choose to. We have the green light to make something amazing happen.

Those are not just empty words.

Any business owner right now, who’s looking to improve their current situation can make amazing things happen.

And that’s because:

• We’re free to take the initiative and build great relationships with the key people in our industry.
• We’re free to take the initiative and answer important problems, which prospective clients will eagerly pay us to solve.
• We’re free to take the initiative and massively improve the course of our business and our future.
• We’re free to take the initiative and develop a better version of an existing product, which customers will flock to.
• We’re free to take the initiative and endeavour to become a leader in our industry.
• We’re free to take the initiative and strive to provide the best customer service in our industry.
• We’re free to take the initiative and generously encourage others.
• We’re free to take the initiative and connect people who may be able to help one another.
• We’re free to take the initiative and improve one key area of our business, every week.
• We’re free to take the initiative and increase our knowledge.

And we’re free to take the initiative with a thousand other useful things.

Sometimes, what we need in order to turn things around is a gentle nudge in the right direction. A reminder to take the initiative and make things happen, rather than passively wait for someone to give us the initiative.

That’s why I wrote this today. I hope this brief message provides you with a gentle nudge of encouragement.