The Importance of Sticking with Your Online Marketing Strategy
Imagine yourself on a road trip, reaching a large desert. You’ve got choices about how to get past it: go around it to the left (mountains), to the right (a river), or straight through. Any way will get you where you want to go—as long as you prepare yourself correctly and stick with the path you choose.
Developing an online marketing strategy is a little like choosing your path around the desert—and following through with that strategy is as important as sticking to your chosen path if you want to achieve your goals as quickly as possible. Here’s why.
Obstacles Happen
Whether you’re traveling across the country or expanding your business’s online presence as part of your growth strategies, you’re bound to run into obstacles. If there were not obstacles, you wouldn’t have to make plans in the first place—things would just happen perfectly.
When you’re in the thick of those obstacles, though (e.g. your email list hasn’t grown at all or nobody has bought your newly priced packages or your interested prospects aren’t following through), it can be hard to get perspective. And it can be very tempting to blame your strategy, quit where you are, and start over.
If and when you get to such a place of frustration, take a time to remind yourself of the following.
You’ve Already Invested Your Resources
Your time and money are what have made your current marketing strategy possible. If you change gears in the middle, you’ll have to re-invest all that time and money. No shortcuts.
You Chose This Path for a Reason!
Do you trust yourself to make decisions in the best interest of your business? Then take a deep breath and do the following…
- Review the process you went through to develop your current marketing strategy. If the reasoning looks solid, take another deep breath and keep following through with your plans.
- Adjust your expectations. If you aren’t seeing results at the rate you projected, revisit your plan and tweak your expected outcomes. This will help keep you from feeling overwhelmed about under-performing.
- Evaluate the pieces. Do you have the right people on your email lists ? Are you optimizing and tagging blog posts correctly? Are you crystal clear about your target audience? Does your copy need work? It’s possible to have a stellar marketing plan that’s being held back by one piece of the puzzle. Look at the nitty-gritty to find out if and where you’re going wrong.
- Be patient. Marketing strategies don’t work overnight. That’s why they’re not called marketing miracles. Give results some time.
As you plan for the future, think of your marketing strategy like an exclusive relationship: you don’t want to enter it lightly, you need to work to maintain it, and you don’t want to throw it all away on a whim.
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