Marketing With Measured Steps

Marketing Measured Steps

(Photo by Steve Harris)

It seems that everyone is telling you that you need to upgrade to the latest and greatest. A new hosting server. New contact manager software. New business cards. New flyers. An updated website. Tweeting around the clock. If you don’t keep moving (your business) forward, you’re likely dying. But is it true?

Since I don’t believe in giving advice without first-hand knowledge, I recently decided to change how I send out my monthly newsletter. I looked at a number of options, and decided to try MailChimp. It looks great and priced right. Since I’ve helped some clients tweak their MailChimp newsletters, I thought it would be a good experiment to try out. I copied over my text, my graphics, created new newsletter templates, imported contact lists, etc. After many hours, I was pleased with my results. And just before I was about to send out latest newsletter, I remembered to test it. I emailed it to a number of different email accounts and was surprised to see that the newsletter was labelled “spam” by my main email account! I dug deeper and figured out the links in the newsletter that MailChimp creates look spam-ish. So I tossed all my work away. A failed experiment? Hardly – I deeply learned the abilities of some new software and can speak in-depth about its abilities and even figured a way to use some of the features to my benefit.

The latest “thing” is simply that – the newest version. Jumping to use the new thing has a higher risk/reward. The “leading edge” is often called the “bleeding edge”, since you’re blazing new trails and learning new solutions and problems.

Definitely continue to innovate your business and marketing. But measure the results of the actions before you fully commit to ensure your steps are taking to your desired outcome.

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