Marketing is something you do — Kelford Labs Weekly

“If you’re impatient because the future is uncertain, increasing your confidence in future outcomes will make them worth the wait.”

— Ayelet Fishbach, Get It Done

Part of the problem entrepreneurs face with their marketing is seeing it as a project, or as a policy.

They see it as either something you do once, or something you always do the same way.

But marketing isn’t a project because it’s not something you can ever really complete. 

When we see it as a task to be finished, we tend to see it as a burden. Something in the way of our other work.

And, look, one way or another, a marketing project will end. But that doesn’t mean it will work. We actually have to build in the time, the energy, the effort, and the resources to keep working at our marketing, so that it has time to work.

The root of the problem, and what keeps marketing from being a project, is that all marketing is uncertain. Because people are, at least to some meaningful degree, unpredictable. We can never know for sure that something will work on the first try.

We can only be prepared to keep trying, to keep making adjustments and making sure we’re trying things that can work.

“Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest.”

— Annie Duke, Quit

But marketing is also not a policy: It’s not a command or a commitment to “Post 3x a week on LinkedIn.”

Let’s face it, that’s a schedule, not a strategy.

When we see it as a policy, we fixate on following the letter of the law, not the spirit, and we lose focus on what actually matters.

Consistency is key to great marketing, but rote repetition or random rambling just to meet a content commitment is not that. We need more than a consistent schedule, we need a clear position, one refined over time based on what works and what doesn’t.

Which means marketing isn’t a project, it’s not a policy. Marketing is persistence.

We want to think about our marketing as a habit, as a way of continually looking at how we do our business and how we demonstrate it. Making sure that every marketing decision we make reinforces, rather than detracts or distracts from our marketing position.

That’s not something you can just get through, or get over.

It’s something you’re always doing, habitually, perpetually, persistently.

“One way to cope with an unpredictable world is to build an enormous amount of flexibility into your organization. As change comes sweeping through your category, you have to be willing to change and change quickly if you are to survive in the long term.”

— Ries & Trout, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

By treating our marketing as persistent and perpetual, we can avoid rushing things just to meet a self-imposed deadline or to simply be done with it.

And we can avoid panicking about changing algorithms or changing trends, because we intend to always change, over time and as needed.

But if marketing is about persistence that means it’s also about patience.

We need to take our time to build toward the habit, instead of burning out on too much of it, because we tried to flip on our marketing like a switch.

And we have to be patient with ourselves, recognizing that we’ll get frustrated, we’ll get confused, we’ll get tired. And we have to be patient with our actions, because they won’t work immediately and they won’t keep working forever.

There will always be some delay between making our marketing and reaping its rewards, which means marketing will always involve working even while we wait for it to work.

Which takes a measure of persistence, a measure of patience.

“What I've come to love about patience is that, ultimately, it's the truest test of merit: Are you willing to do the work, despite no guaranteed outcome?”

— Dorie Clark, The Long Game

But persistence is worth it, because it’s the only thing that works.

Sadly, we can never do our marketing so well or so hard that we never have to do it again. Eventually, inevitably, we have to do more marketing.

So we might as well plan to keep doing it.

Perpetually. Patiently.

Persistently.

Starting... now.

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