As a business owner, you will most likely try hundreds if not thousands of marketing ideas to help grow your business. Due to one reason or another, the majority of them won’t pan out the way you intend, and some will fail entirely. It would be easy to see those disappointing or failed strategies as completely wasted time and resources, but doing so would be a mistake. As any truly successful person will tell you, there is value in failure.
You Have to Try to Fail
The first benefit of failure is that it indicates you were trying in the first place. Rarely will a business grow without some marketing being attempted, and never will it grow as fast or as large. Even failed marketing techniques will generate some awareness and garner you business. Don’t be afraid to try new things just because they’re unfamiliar.
Maybe you are a casual user of social media, but you’ve read about an interesting Twitter campaign that someone in your industry used that intrigues you. Try it! It’s necessary to attempt many different methods to find some that will work for you and your business. Don’t think you can do enough research to create the perfect marketing strategy; there are no perfect, universal strategies or columns like this one wouldn’t exist!
The only way to find what works for you is to try, try again, and be aware that even after you find something, it may eventually stop being effective. So fail, fail and fail some more, but at least be out there plugging away!
Don’t Stagnate, Evaluate
Failure provides an opportunity to evaluate the problems so that they can be avoided in future attempts. It does no good to fail if you are unwilling to learn from that failure. You should be breaking down every step of the process you used to determine what went wrong. Sometimes a strategy that failed today will work tomorrow. Don’t throw out the entire concept if only one aspect is broken.
For example: perhaps that twitter campaign we talked about earlier went nowhere. Potential problems could be that you were not offering your twitter followers something interesting enough to garner their participation. Perhaps you chose a poor time of year to try it, or maybe it coincided with a local event that overshadowed yours. Maybe you didn’t have enough Twitter followers to mount an effective campaign. Each of those issues are fixable, and once addressed there’s no reason not to try again.
Find out why your project failed. Don’t stagnate, evaluate your way to success!
Don’t allow yourself to miss the opportunities which lie in those past failures to help you build success in the future. Keep at it, and don’t give up! Work your failure, and you’ll be seeing success in no time!
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