The first time I ran a marathon I thought I completely failed. My goal was to run it in 4.5 hours. I ended up taking 5.5 hours and barely finishing.
After my disappointing finish, I had a few options. I could either try again, or decide that I wasn’t a very good runner. The second option was tempting, because running a marathon is hard, and in that moment, trying again seemed really hard, but here’s what happened next.
I wrote down everything that went wrong and I sought out expert advice to fix it. The results? I finished a marathon in under 4 hours only months after having my daughter. Wow.
Now, I’m not a natural born athlete. Growing up, I thrived in music and academics…but not exactly on the playing field. As an adult, I realized how much I loved running, but I wasn’t naturally a rabbit. Slow and steady wins the race was definitely me… but each time I practiced, I improved. I even failed a failed a few times (you just read about one of them) and those were key learning experiences for my success.
This all relates to online marketing in a very important way. Let’s say you are trying out new packaging for a product. The textbooks say that in this situation, you should send out a survey or run several focus groups to decide on just the right package design. This is because after all that (expensive) research, you can hope that the package design will work decently well…but you never REALLY know.
In online marketing, everything changes, and in my opinion, that’s a welcome opportunity. Instead of doing all that market research, you could simply choose to post an example or two of a prototype for the packaging. Then, based on the feedback you get, improve it and post a new prototype, and so on and so forth. Where it gets tricky, is that the first prototype might not get as much positive feedback as the third, and of course, that would happen in public rather than private surveys or focus groups. A lot of marketers and business owners then see that as failure… but it’s just the opposite.
Each time you put something out in the online marketing world, you get information that you can use to make your marketing better and you get a decent amount of visibility and reach that you wouldn’t have otherwise had as well. You also make your ideal customers feel like they are trusted friends and confidants (and trust leads to conversions). And the bonus? If you are open to trying again and again, your marketing will be stronger than it ever has been. I mean, how did we really know everyone liked the new package that the survey told you they would like anyway? Before online marketing, we just didn’t have as many tools to hear feedback (but it was still there in our ideal customers’ heads).
So my message to you today is that in online marketing, perceived failure is actually the first step to ultimate success. I can guarantee you that if I’d never run that 5.5 hour marathon, I’d certainly have never known what to do to run a four hour marathon…and I may have called it a success if I’d made my 4.5 hour goal the first time… never realizing what really could be.
If you’d like to hear me dive a little deeper into how to reframe “failure” as it relates to online marketing, please watch today’s video. And then, go forth and make some online marketing “mistakes”… because I don’t want your marketing just to be good…I want it to be amazing.
