Failure is one of those lessons everyone loves to learn from, as long as the lesson is at someone else's expense.
I love reading about failure, not because I like to see people lose the battle with the unknown and the known, but because it teaches us lessons. Either we learn how to fail forward to success, or we learn how to continue to succeed at failing.
The difference is a matter of setting expectations high enough to be both profitable and sustainable.
Back in the days when direct mail marketing campaigns were the rage, companies would play down the poor response rates they encountered by focusing on how few responses were needed to break even.
Today, the Internet has made even poorer response and click through rates seem attractive. Proponents of the Inbound Marketing approach have been very successful at developing a suite of tools and training modules designed to convince marketers that it is possible and profitable to capture new customers from the ether by following what we like to call the Post and Pay Method.
What is Post and Pay?
Post refers to creative content, like this blog post. No matter how interesting it is, it is only helpful in growing my business if someone sees it and acts on it. For that action to be profitable, it needs to lead to a sale, and that means it needs to be found.
That's where Pay comes in. I need to spend money to tell people it is there, or to have a link for it which will appear in search results.
Proponents of this Post and Pay approach will tell you what you are doing wrong if you don't get high responses, leads and conversions. It is your fault if you dont succeed at the numbers game. Similar to the old direct mail marketing days, the more people you reach, the greater the number of respondents.
So, if you are failing, you need to try harder, create more content, add the right tags, build keyword tables, create Calls-to-Action and Landing Pages, with forms and buttons and icons. The list of things you need to do to get someone to find you goes on and on.
STOP!
This is not the kind of failure that leads to breakout success. This is failure that leads to more failure and disappointment and loss of money.
In order to move forward to success, you need to Market Smart.
Smart is knowing how to determine the level of success you can handle, and having a plan to go beyond it.
Smart is starting with the right tools, the right focus and the right mean of tracking success.
Smart is understanding that the only way to grow your business is to provide value to your customers.
It sounds so simple, doesn't it?
It is. It begins, grows and ends with the customer. To deliver value to your customers at a profit to you, you need to create value in your products and services and communicate that value to your customers. This is what Dr. Philip Kotler, Professor, Scholar, Marketing Expert and Author teaches, and it is the foundation of our business.
If you are failing to succeed, it may be because you are succeeding at failure. Why not turn that around?