Burning down your marketing tactics
If all your marketing tactics disappeared one night — Instagram, email newsletters, events, your personal network, whatever — burned down while you and your cat shared an ice cream cone and watched…
I often fantasize about my house burning down.
It’s dark, but I mean this.
‘Course, I want us to be away and my cat, Flutes, to sense what’s about to happen, bust through a window, and watch it all go down from a safe distance.
I wouldn’t have to continue the guilt-inducing (but thoroughly liberating) process of minimizing our possessions. I wouldn’t have to have those sunk-costs conversations with myself (why the heck did I buy 100 1-gallon plastic plant pots. Dang, that used to be MONEY.)
I could start fresh and whip together only my favorite possessions from scratch (much like my 10-Minute Best-Ever Buttermilk Pancakes — recipe link in comments), and live blissfully in my light, airy, syrup-drenched home (also much like my buttermilk pancakes).
A quick aside: Yes, my first blog post on my new big-deal Marketing Strategy website is a pancake recipe. I’m okay with it.
My dreamer tendencies, courtesy of my INFP personality type, make this house-fire fantasy seem legit. Life would be sooo much easier if my house would hurry up and burn down.
(Caveat: If you have been part of a house fire, please know that I’m sorry for what you went through and don’t wish that on anybody. Here, it’s a metaphor for my marketing strategies.)It’s the same with your marketing strategy. It can be agonizing to pare down your marketing tactics or the products you offer.
But what if I need this again? you wonder. What if 10 perfect clients are right around the corner, I just have to keep updating my blog approximately every three months?
Or you think: I spent so much damn time developing a funky logo for my glasses that also take sneaky pictures. I’m invested. For better or worse, it’s part of me, like my Double-Denali-Moose-Tracks-Trex-Helicopter-Bear-Shark-Peanut-Butter-Swirl-Xtreme ice cream-induced love handles.
So you have to burn it all down, in your brain.
If all your marketing tactics disappeared one night — Instagram, email newsletters, events, your personal network, whatever — burned down while you and your cat shared an ice cream cone and watched…
Which ones would you start over again? Which of your marketing tactics are worth it, not just habit?
Which ones put money in your account, and which ones are you holding on to because of sunk costs, attachment issues, or fear of making a mistake?
As exhilarating as it can seem to burn it down and start over, there are less-traumatic ways to pare down your marketing strategy to something useful and minimalist.
That’s what I’m here for. Through conversations and exercises, we figure out how to get just the right amount of marketing for your business.
And after that, we can work on getting more or less a close approximation of a decent amount of baking powder in your 10-Minute Best-Ever Buttermilk Pancakes.
P.S. Let’s not mention any of this to State Farm Insurance.
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