Marketing is trying things — Kelford Labs Daily

“All creative thinking about the future starts with experiments, feeling our way through a changing landscape, finding boundaries and contours. ...

All of this work shows us where we are, but still requires resilience because the route itself is uneven.”

— Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted

I was talking with a friend the other day about my approach to LinkedIn.

Over the past year or so, I’ve written quite a bit about my experiments over there. Like my attempts with new types of content to see what the algorithm rewards and what people respond to.

His question, in essence, was, “If the platform is deteriorating, why bother posting there at all?”

And I get it. It’s frustrating. It’s by times quite unfulfilling.

But, at least for me, LinkedIn still has value. Just this week I had an incredible phone conversation with someone I was introduced to in a comments thread on one of my posts. Those opportunities and experiences are not something I’m eager to give up.

My answer was, basically, “My job is to help people know what to say to attract their ideal clients, wherever they might be. If they’re on LinkedIn, it’s my responsibility to know how LinkedIn works.”

“But it’s so frustrating,” he said. “What about people who post and post and nothing happens?”

My point was simple: “Then you’ve got to keep trying new things.”

If you want to put in the work to make it work, the key is to see it as an experiment. A test. A trial.

Because that’s all marketing is. 

Marketing is merely demonstrating our value at a distance, but it takes experimentation, testing, and iteration to find the ways to do that well.

If we see marketing as something that’s only worthwhile when it actually works, we’ll never experiment with it long enough to discover what does.

We’ll give up before we get the chance to see what performs, what pays off.

The route is uneven, as Heffernan wrote, which means the path is unpredictable. The only thing we can know for sure is that if we stop trying, we’ll never get where we want to go.

But if we stick with it, and keep paying attention to what works and what doesn’t, we’ll eventually make progress.

We’ll “feel our way” through the landscape of the market, and find the customers who are looking for us.

Reply to this email to tell me what you think, or ask any questions!

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