If you are planning on running a marathon, why would you only train to run a 100 yard dash?

If you wanted to fall in love and marry someone would you go on just one date, ask them to spend the rest of their life with you and then dump them if they didn’t say yes before the date was over?

Is there anyway to shorten a 9 month pregnancy down to a couple of months and still have a healthy human baby?

 

3 seemingly unrelated questions that every business owner, manager and marketer should know the answer to.

Because these are questions that apply to your overall business and your business advertising/marketing.

Let’s tie them all together.

Starting a business that will last longer than a few months is like a marathon.  It takes time to build.  Prepare for a long journey.  A sprinter who has never run long distances will burn out and collapse very quickly. You don’t want that for your business, do you?

Plan your advertising and marketing budgets over the long haul instead of short, inconsistent bursts.  You need to invite people to spend their money with you all the time, not just when you have some extra money to advertise.

Which brings us to the whole relationship example I mentioned.  Each customer has their own timetable as to when they will be ready to buy from you.  No amount of persuasion will convince me to get my hair cut today if I just had it cut yesterday.  Oh maybe if you were to pay me 50 bucks to sit in your chair for a trim that I don’t need, but that’s stupid and not going to be the way to build long term success for your business.  Instead I (as a potential customer) need to hear about you for awhile and become familiar with who you are, what you do, and why I should spend my money with you instead of someone else.   In other words you need to court your customers instead of going for that one-night stand with them.   Long term advertising that is steady and consistent does that.

But isn’t there anyway to speed it up?  Tell that to the pregnant woman and see if it works.  I’m sure that one day science may come up with a way to shorten the 9 months, but it is going to be very expensive to cut corners and there are bound to be plenty of disastrous failures along the way.  So, no you can’t speed it up.

But I’ve seen plenty of folks make the disastrous mistake of being impatient with their advertising and marketing.  Expecting results too soon is like expecting the baby to be born after 9 weeks instead of 9 months.  It simply won’t work so don’t try and be the exception to the rule.

Here’s what you can do to be the exception.

Be different than the short sighted, poorly planned business and marketing people who waste their time and money  trying to cut corners and get rich quick by ignoring these principles.  That alone will make you one of the survivors, one of those who decided to build your business for long term success.

As always, I’m here to help.