Marketing procrastination through perfection

in today’s Musings on Marketing and Magic I’m talking about business success being an inside job, and focusing on the topic of procrastination and perfection.

When we look at our procrastination, we can often identify an underlying sense of fear. It might be the fear of failure, the fear of being seen, the fear of judgment by others, the fear of not being good enough… and the list goes on. And perfection oftentimes is just a different form of procrastination – I only release this content when it is absolutely perfect – which usually means never, because our underlying fear kicks in…

The art of marketing: fail fast

But when we shift from a commitment of perfection to one of excellence, it frees us up to give our own personal best and to “fail fast” where needed, so that we can try something else. Trial and error is part of the “art of marketing” and a place of ongoing creation.

I have a background in high-tech marketing and one of the principles in the high-tech industry is to “fail fast”. Failing fast means that we try something, we see if it works and if it does we keep doing it; if it doesn’t work, we try something else.

This is also a big rule in marketing in general. Because even though more and more of marketing is driven by consumer data, when we are starting out we don’t have much data to rely on about our prospective clients. As you continue to do marketing, you will generate that data and it will give you some idea of what works for you and what doesn’t. But in order to get there, we first need to try different marketing techniques and tools and see if they work for us: do they generate a response from our audience and do they fit our own personal style so we can maintain it?

Shift from marketing perfection to excellence

There is a beautiful song, Anthem, that perfectly describes excellence and how it moves us forward:

Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

One area of marketing that I applied the “fail fast” approach to was trying out different niches and see what was a good fit for me. I failed with several of them before I found the one that resonates with me – supporting empath, highly sensitive, and introvert entrepreneurs to get comfortable creating business visibility, to be their brand, and to define a marketing approach that works for them. But in each attempt, light was able to come through the cracks and clarify further what didn’t work for me and what I wanted more of.

Making the mind shift to excellence helps moving us out of the cycle of procrastination and perfection. But in order to truly embrace marketing and to sustain it so you can see positive results, I would go even a step further and say that happens when we come from a place of joy.

What marketing activities do you enjoy?

Until next time – be magical!